BIPOC Poetry Collection
Here are some suggestions for your Summer Book Bingo NW 2023 category: BIPOC Poetry Collection. Annotations from NoveList, unless otherwise attributed.
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And Then I Got Fired
Feel free to scream directly into this book if you need to. It won't judge you, promise! This book gets grief. The good, the bad and the snotty noses. Through a healthy mix of poems, personal testimony, bad jokes and choose-your-own-journey workbook style, "And Then I Got One Transqueer's Reflections on Grief, Unemployment & Inappropriate Jokes About Death", is an unexpected and lively conversation between the author and reader on grief, Black Trans survival and the arts. Whether you are currently moving through grief mode, love a good poem, or just want some tools to deal with painful experiences, this book is for you. More importantly, this book is for all of us who deserve a place to be honest when things get hard. (Publisher)
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Fugitive Atlas
In this sweeping, impassioned account of refugee crises, military occupations and ecological degradation, a chorus of speakers find moments of profound solace in searching for the lost.
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The Death of Sitting Bear
"One of the most important and unique voices in American letters, distinguished poet, novelist, artist, teacher, and storyteller N. Scott Momaday was born into the Kiowa tribe and grew up on Indian reservations in the Southwest. The customs and traditions that influenced his upbringing-most notably the Native American oral tradition-are the centerpiece of his work. This luminous collection demonstrates Momaday's mastery and love of language and the matters closest to his heart. To Momaday, words are sacred; language is power. Spanning nearly fifty years, the poems gathered here illuminate the human condition, Momaday's connection to his Kiowa roots, and his spiritual relationship to the American landscape. The title poem, "The Death of Sitting Bear" is acelebration of heritage and a memorial to the great Kiowa warrior and chief. "I feel his presence close by in my blood and imagination," Momaday writes, "and I sing him an honor song." Here, too, are meditations on mortality, love, and loss, as well as reflections on the incomparable and holy landscape of the Southwest. The Death of Sitting Bear evokes the essence of human experience and speaks to us all"--.
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Not Here
Not Here is a flight plan for escape and a map for navigating home; a queer Vietnamese American body in confrontation with whiteness, trauma, family, and nostalgia; and a big beating heart of a book. Nguyen’s poems ache with loneliness and desire and the giddy terrors of allowing yourself to hope for love, and revel in moments of connection achieved.
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Other People's Comfort Keeps Me up at Night
Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night is a powerful debut collection from a promising new and necessary voice. Parker’s collection is hyper-contemporary, drawing on what it means to be alive today when our phones autocorrect our texts and we’ve given into a kind of living that prioritizes work, money, and power over justice, equality, and happiness.
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Patriarchy Blues
"Rena Priest addresses those who crave 'the meat of beasts with beets and leeks.' And while she insists that 'Nature makes you pay, ' her poems tell us that through a 'wistful song of sighs.' The world is not always comfortable, but her poems never 'lose touch with the fluidity of the spirit.' Patriarchy Blues is an amazing collection."--James Bertolino, author of Ravenous New & Selected Love Poems
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Best Barbarian
"An incandescent collection that interrogates the personal and political nature of desire, freedom, and disaster. In his brilliant, expansive second volume, Whiting Award-winning poet Roger Reeves probes the apocalypses and raptures of humanity-climate change, anti-Black racism, familial and erotic love, ecstasy and loss. The poems in Best Barbarian roam across the literary and social landscape, from Beowulf's Grendel to the jazz musician Alice Coltrane, from reckoning with immigration at the U.S.-Mexicoborder to thinking through the fraught beauty of the moon on a summer night after the police have killed a Black man. Drawing on a history of poetry that ranges from the Aeneid to Walt Whitman to Drake, Best Barbarian offers moments of joy and intimacy amid catastrophe"--(NoveList)
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Lima : Limón
"In her striking second collection, Natalie Scenters-Zapico sets her unflinching gaze once again on the borders of things. Lima :: Limâon illuminates both the sweet and the sour of the immigrant experience, of life as a woman in the U.S. and Mexico, and of the politics of the present day. Drawing inspiration from the music of her childhood, her lyrical poems focus on the often-tested resilience of women. Scenters-Zapico writes heartbreakingly about domestic violence and its toxic duality of macho versus hembra, of masculinity versus femininity, and throws into harsh relief the all-too-normalized pain that women endure. Her sharp verse and intense anecdotes brand her poems into the reader; images like the Virgin Mary crying glass tears and a border fence that leaves never-healing scars intertwine as she stares down femicide and gang violence alike. Unflinching, Scenters-Zapico highlights the hardships and stigma immigrants face on both sides of the border, her desire to create change shining through in every line. Lima :: Limâon is grounding and urgent, a collection that speaks out against violence and works toward healing"--.
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That Was Now, This Is Then
No one blends ironic intelligence, emotional frankness, radical self-awareness, and complex humor the way Vijay Seshadri does. In this collection, he affirms his place as one of America’s greatest living poets. That Was Now, This Is Then takes on the planar paradoxes of time and space, destabilizing highly tuned lyrics and elegies with dizzying turns in poems of unrequitable longing, of longing for longing, of longing to be found, of grief.
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Bless the Daughter Raised by A Voice in Her Head
With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a young girl, who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own stumbling way towards womanhood. Drawing from her own life and the lives of loved ones, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women, and teenage girls. In Shire's hands, lives spring into fullness. This is noisy life: full of music and weeping andsurahs and sirens and birds. This is fragrant life: full of blood and perfume and shisha smoke and jasmine and incense. This is polychrome life: full of henna and moonlight and lipstick and turmeric and kohl.
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