Popular Poetry Books for Adults
Hundreds of books are added to the Library's collection each month. Here are the most popular Poetry books for adults.
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Above Ground: Poems
Clint Smith's vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions. There are poems that revel in the wonder of discovering the world anew through the eyes of your children, as they discover it for the first time. There are poems that meditate on what it means to raise a family in a world filled with constant social and political tumult. Above Ground wrestles with how we hold wonder and despair in the same hands, how we carry intimate moments of joy and a collective sense of mourning in the same body. Smith's lyrical, narrative poems bring the reader on a journey not only through the early years of his children's lives, but through the changing world in which they are growing up--through the changing world of which we are all a part.
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Why Fathers Cry at Night: A Memoir in Love Poems, Letters, Recipes, and Remembrances
Kwame Alexander shares snapshots of a man learning how to love. He takes us through stories of his parents: from being awkward newlyweds in the sticky Chicago summer of 1967, to the sometimes-confusing ways they showed their love to each other, and for him. Alexander attempts to deal with the unraveling of his marriage and the grief of his mother's recent passing while sharing the solace he found in learning how to perfect her famous fried chicken dish. With an open heart, Alexander weaves together memories to understand his greatest love for his daughters.
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The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes on
"Many have called our time dystopian. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples. With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time--from Korean comfort women during World War II, to the precipice of climate crisis, to children wandering a museum in the future. They explore narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal. Wrestling with the griefs and distances of this apocalyptic world, Choi also imagines what togetherness--between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest--could look like. Bringing together Choi's signature speculative imagination with even greater musicality than her previous work, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On ultimately charts new paths toward hope""--Front dust jacket flap.
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How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope
"How to Love the World invites readers to use poetry as part of their daily gratitude practice to uncover the simple gifts of abundance and joy to be found everywhere"-- Provided by publisher.
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The Hurting Kind: Poems
"An astonishing collection about interconnectedness-between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves-from National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist Ada Limu00f3n"-- Provided by publisher.
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Couplets: A Love Story
"A dazzling, genre-bending debut about one woman's coming-out, coming-of-age, and coming undone"-- Provided by publisher.
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Happily: A Personal History, With Fairy Tales
"The literary tradition of the fairy tale has long endured as the vehicle by which we interrogate the laws of reality. These fantastical stories, populated with wolves, kings, and wicked witches, have throughout history served as a template for understanding culture, society, and that muddy terrain we call our collective human psyche. In Happily, Sabrina Orah Mark reimagines the modern fairy tale, turning it inside out and searching it for the wisdom to better understand our contemporary moment in what Mark so incisively calls "this strange American weather." Set against the backdrop of political upheaval, viral plague, social protest, and climate change, Mark locates the magic in the mundane and illuminates the surreality of life as we know it today. In "Sorry Peter Pan, We're Over You," Mark grapples with a loss of innocence when her son decides he would rather dress up as Martin Luther King, Jr., than Peter Pan for Halloween; in "The Evil Stepmother" Mark finds unlikely communion with wicked wives and examines the roots of their bad reputation; and in "Rapunzel, Draft One Thousand," the hunt for a wig maker in a time of unprecedented civil unrest forces Mark to finally confront her sister's cancer diagnosis and the stories we tell ourselves to get by"-- Provided by publisher.
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Good Bones
"Poems written out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by the poet watching her own children trying to read the world like a book they've just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot"-- Provided by publisher.
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"From "one of the essential voices in American poetry" (New York Times) comes a rich new collection of expansive, light-footed, and cheerily morose poems oddly in tune with our strange and evolving present. The first new collection since Evolution from the prolific poet, activist, and writer Eileen Myles, a "Working Life" unerringly captures the measure of life. Whether alone or in a relationship, on city sidewalks or in the country, their lyrics always engage with permanence and mortality, danger and safety, fear and wonder. a "Working Life" is a book transfixed by the everyday: the "sweet accumulation" of birds outside a window, a cup of coffee and a slice of pizza, a lover's foot on the bed. These poems arise in the close quarters of air travel, the flashing of a landscape through a train window, or simply in a truck tooling around town, or on foot with a dog in all the places that held us during the pandemic lockdowns. Myles's lines unabashedly sing both the beauty and ridiculousness of love and sex, spill over with warnings about the not-so-future world threatened by climate change and capitalism, and also find transcendent wonder in the landscapes and animals around us, and in the solitary and collective act of caring for one another and our world. With intelligence, heart, and singular vision, a "Working Life" shows Eileen Myles working at a thrilling new pitch of their poetic and philosophical powers"-- Provided by publisher.
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Take Me With You
"For readers of Rupi Kaur (Milk and Honey) and Atticus (Love Her Wild), a book small enough to carry with you, with messages big enough to stay with you, from one of the most quotable and influential poets of our time. Andrea Gibson explores themes of love, gender, politics, sexuality, family, and forgiveness with stunning imagery and a fierce willingness to delve into the exploration of what it means to heal and to be different in this strange age. Take Me With You, illustrated throughout with evocative line drawings by Sarah J. Coleman, is small enough to fit in your bag, with messages that are big enough to wake even the sleepiest heart. Divided into three sections (love, the world, and becoming) of one liners, couplets, greatest hits phrases, and longer form poems, it has something for everyone, and will be placed in stockings, lockers, and the hands of anyone who could use its wisdom"-- Provided by publisher. (6/3/2023 2:11:09 PM)
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