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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Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
"Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away-- loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it -- that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard" -- publisher description.
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Bright Dead Things: Poems
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD A finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bright Dead Things examines the dangerous thrill of living in a world you must leave one day and the search to find something that is "disorderly, and marvelous, and ours." A book of bravado and introspection, of feminist swagger and harrowing loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact--tracing in intimate detail the ways the speaker's sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. Ada Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a "huge beating genius machine" striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. "I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying," the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón's work is consistently generous, accessible, and "effortlessly lyrical" (New York Times)--though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived. (syndetics)
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Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency
"In his highly anticipated second collection, Chen Chen continues his investigation of family, both blood and chosen, examining what one inherits and what one invents, as a queer Asian American living through an era of Trump, mass shootings, and the COVID-19 pandemic"-- Provided by publisher.
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Clarity & Connection
"find a partner who accepts you as you are but also inspires you to evolve because they take their own growth serioulsy. love will not seek to change you. it will embrace you so unconditionally that you will feel safe enough to heal the old and put effort into the new. the courage you both have to stay committed to the inner journey wil reflect brightly on your relationship."--back cover.
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Lord of the Butterflies
Andrea Gibson's latest collection is a masterful showcase from the poet whose writing and performances have captured the hearts of millions. With artful and nuanced looks at gender, romance, loss, and family, Lord of the Butterflies is a new peak in Gibson's career. Each emotion here is deft and delicate, resting inside of imagery heavy enough to sink the heart, while giving the body wings to soar. (syndetics)
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New and Selected Poems, 1962-2012
"It takes just one glimpse of Charles Simic's work to establish that he is a master, ruler of his own eccentric kingdom of jittery syntax and signature insight." -Los Angeles Times For over fifty years, Charles Simic has been widely celebrated for his brilliant and innovative poetic imagery, his sardonic wit, and a voice all his own. He has been awarded nearly every major literary prize for his poetry, including a Pulitzer and a MacArthur grant, in addition to serving as the poet laureate of the United States in 2007 and 2008. In this new volume, he distills his life's work, combining for the first time the best of his early poems with his later works--including nearly three dozen revisions--along with seventeen new, never-before-published poems. Simic's body of work draws inspiration from a range of topics, from the inscrutability of ordinary life to American blues, from folktales to marriage and war. Consistently exciting and unexpected, the nearly four hundred poems in this volume represent the best of one of America's most distinguished and original poets. (syndetics)
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Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020
"Carl Phillips has aptly described his work as an "ongoing quest"; Then the War is the next step in that meaningful process of self-discovery for both the poet and his reader. The new poems, written in a time of rising racial conflict in the United States, with its attendant violence and uncertainty, find Phillips entering deeper into the landscape he has made his own: a forest of intimacy, queerness, and moral inquiry, where the farther we go, the more difficult it is to remember why or where we started. Then the War includes a generous selection of Phillips's work from the previous thirteen years, as well as his recent lyric prose memoir, "Among the Trees," and his chapbook, Star Map with Action Figures. Ultimately, Phillips refuses pessimism, arguing for tenderness and human connection as profound forces for revolution and conjuring a spell against indifference and the easy escapes of nostalgia. Then the War is luminous testimony to the power of self-reckoning and to Carl Phillips as an ever-changing, necessary voice in contemporary poetry."--Amazon.com.
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How to Not Be Afraid of Everything
"Explores the vulnerable ways we articulate and reckon with fear: fear of intergenerational trauma and the silent, hidden histories of families. What does it mean to grow up in a take-out restaurant, surrounded by food, just a generation after the Great Leap Forward famine in 1958-62. Full of elegy and resilient joy, these poems speak across generations of survival. How much of the world do we fear? How can we find comfort and ancestral power in this fear?"-- Provided by publisher.
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Good Poems for Hard Times
Presents a collection of inspirational poems by such authors as Emily Dickinson, Billy Collins, Robert Frost, and Raymond Carver.
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To 2040
"Jorie Graham's fifteenth poetry collection, To 2040, opens in a question punctuated as fact: "Are we / extinct yet. Who owns / the map." In these visionary new poems, Graham is part historian, part cartographer as she plots an apocalyptic world where rain must be translated, silence sings louder than speech, and wired birds parrot recordings of their extinct ancestors. In one poem, the speaker is warned by a clairvoyant that "the American experiment will end in 2030." Graham shows us multiple potential futures--soundtracked by sirens among the ruins, contemplating the loss of those species who inhabited them and those who named them."-- Author's website.
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