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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I'm Always So Serious: Poems
Karisma Price's stunning debut collection is an extended meditation on Blackness, on family, on loss. Anchored in New Orleans and New York City, these poems braid personal and public histories into a cultural reckoning of past and present. James Booker speaks to Ringo Starr, a phone "Autocorrects 'Nigga' to Night'," If Beale Street Could Talk is recast with characters from The Odyssey. In these pages there is grief, there is absence, there is violence--"We know that mostly everything around us / is measured in blood."--but there is also immense love and truth.--Publisher.
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Ledger: Poems
"Ledger's pages hold the most important and masterly work yet by Jane Hirshfield, one of our most celebrated contemporary poets. From the already much-quoted opening lines of despair and defiance ("Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw"), Hirshfield's poems inscribe a registry, both personal and communal, of our present-day predicaments. They call us to deepened dimensions of thought, feeling, and action. They summon our responsibility to sustain one another and the earth while pondering, acutely and tenderly, the crises of refugees, justice, and climate. They consider "the minimum mass for a whale, for a language, an ice cap," recognize the intimacies of connection, and meditate upon doubt and contentment, a library book with previously dog-eared corners, the hunger for surprise, and the debt we owe this world's continuing beauty. Hirshfield's signature alloy of fact and imagination, clarity and mystery, inquiry, observation, and embodied emotion has created a book of indispensable poems, tuned toward issues of consequence to all who share this world's current and future fate."--Amazon.com.
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Also A Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me
"When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O'Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started forty years earlier. As a lifelong O'Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun, but the deeper she dove, the more she had to face not just O'Hara's past, but also her father's, and her own. The result is a groundbreaking and kaleidoscopic memoir that weaves compelling literary history with a moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond. Also a Poet explores what happens when we want to do better than our parents, yet fear what that might cost us; when we seek their approval, yet mistrust it. In reckoning with her unique heritage, as well as providing new insights into the life of one of our most important poets, Calhoun offers a brave and hopeful meditation on parents and children, artistic ambition, and the complexities of what we leave behind." -- From publisher's description.
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Alive at the End of the World: Poems
"Like his mentors, Patricia Smith and Rigoberto Gonzalez, Saeed writes poems that are lyrical, playful, musical, and political. It troubles expectations and asks the reader to challenge their assumptions about Blackness, sexuality, and socioeconomics. Saeed is responding here to white supremacy, heteronormativity, respectability politics, and the murders of Black people. In the service of equity and peace, Saeed elevates the matters that keep him up at night. If Prelude was a jettisoning of the oppressive structures Saeed experienced during his upbringing, ALIVE is a reminder that the work goes on, that freedom and equity are inextricably linked. In fact, a character from Prelude, known as Boy, carries through into ALIVE, which continues his work in Prelude with a maturity of perspective and more weariness. This is a work that examines the nuances of grief--the grief over lost family members and lost loves; the grief of white supremacy and the myth of safety from homophobia, anti-blackness, gun violence; the grief of covid"-- Provided by publisher.
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This Afterlife: Selected Poems
"A selection of sharp, witty, and impeccably crafted poems from A. E. Stallings, the award-winning poet and translator"-- Provided by publisher.
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Skeletons
"A collection of poems by Deborah Landau"-- Provided by publisher.
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What the Living Do: Poems
Informed by the death of a beloved brother, here are the stories of childhood, its thicket of sex and sorrow and joy, boys and girls growing into men and women, stories of a brother who in his dying could teach how to be most alive. What the Living Do reflects "a new form of confessional poetry, one shared to some degree by other women poets such as Sharon Olds and Jane Kenyon. Unlike the earlier confessional poetry of Plath, Lowell, Sexton et al., Howe's writing is not so much a moan or a shriek as a song. It is a genuinely feminine form . . . a poetry of intimacy, witness, honesty, and relation" (Boston Globe). (syndetics)
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Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse
"A stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present."
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The Carrying: Poems
"Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility--"What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?"--and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: "Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal." And still Limu00f3n shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. "Fine then, / I'll take it," she writes. "I'll take it all."--Publisher's website.
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If They Come for Us: Poems
"A debut poetry collection showcasing both a fierce and tender new voice."-- Booklist "Elegant and playful . . . The poet invents new forms and updates classic ones."-- Elle "[Fatimah] Asghar interrogates divisions along lines of nationality, age, and gender, illuminating the forces by which identity is fixed or flexible."-- The New Yorker NAMED ONE OF THE TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY * FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD an aunt teaches me how to tell an edible flower from a poisonous one. just in case, I hear her say, just in case. From a co-creator of the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls comes an imaginative, soulful debut poetry that collection captures the experiences of being a young Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America. Orphaned as a child, Fatimah Asghar grapples with coming of age and navigating questions of sexuality and race without the guidance of a mother or father. These poems at once bear anguish, joy, vulnerability, and compassion, while also exploring the many facets of violence: how it persists within us, how it is inherited across generations, and how it manifests itself in our relationships. In experimental forms and language both lyrical and raw, Asghar seamlessly braids together marginalized people's histories with her own understanding of identity, place, and belonging. Praise for If They Come for Us "In forms both traditional . . . and unorthodox . . . Asghar interrogates divisions along lines of nationality, age, and gender, illuminating the forces by which identity is fixed or flexible. Most vivid and revelatory are pieces such as 'Boy,' whose perspicacious turns and irreverent idiom conjure the rich, jagged textures of a childhood shadowed by loss." -- The New Yorker "[Asghar's] debut poetry collection cemented her status as one of the city's greatest present-day poets. . . . A stunning work of art that tackles place, race, sexuality and violence. These poems--both personal and historical, both celebratory and aggrieved--are unquestionably powerful in a way that would doubtless make both Gwendolyn Brooks and Harriet Monroe proud." -- Chicago Review of Books "Taut lines, vivid language, and searing images range cover to cover. . . . Inventive, sad, gripping, and beautiful." -- Library Journal (starred review) (syndetics)
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