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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Homie
Rooted in the loss of one of Smith's close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family--blood and chosen--arrives with just the right food and some redemption.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Such Color
Celebrated for its extraordinary intelligence and exhilarating range, the poetry of Tracy K. Smith opens up vast questions. Such Color: New and Selected Poems, her first career-spanning volume, traces an increasingly audacious commitment to exploring the unknowable, the immense mysteries of existence. Such Color collects the best poems from Smith’s previous books and culminates in thirty pages of brilliant, excoriating new poems. These new works confront America’s historical and contemporary racism and injustices, while they also rise toward the registers of the ecstatic, the rapturous, and the sacred—urging us toward love as a resistance to everything that impedes it.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Poūkahangatus
"The American debut of an acclaimed New Zealand poet as she explores her identity as a 21st-century indigenous woman"--(NoveList)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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All the Flowers Kneeling
A collection of poetry from an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in The New Yorker that celebrates rediscovering and reconfiguring one’s self after suffering great trauma and showcases the human capacity for resilience, endurance and love.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Time Is A Mother
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, Vuong contends with personal loss and the meaning of family. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, Vuong’s poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Full-metal Indigiqueer
Using binary code and texts from classics of the English language such as Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Joshua Whitehead unravels the coded "I" to trace the formation of a colonized self and reclaim representations of Indigenous texts.
Format: Book
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The Rupture Tense
Shaped around moments of puncture and release, The Rupture Tense registers what leaks across the breached borders between past and future, background and foreground, silence and utterance. Across these poems, memory—historical, collective, personal—stains and erodes. Xie voices what remains irreducible in our complex entanglements with familial ties, language, capitalism, and the histories in which we find ourselves lodged.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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My Name Will Grow Wide Like A Tree
Over the span of her revolutionary career, Yi Lei became one of the most influential figures in contemporary Chinese poetry. Passionate, rigorous, and inimitable, these poems celebrate the joys of the body, ponder the miracle of compassion, and proclaim an abiding reverence for the natural world. Presented in the original Chinese alongside English translations by Changtai Bi and Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith, this collection introduces American readers to a boundless spirit—one “composing an explosion.”.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Unaccompanied
Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that's been left behind. (NoveList)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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My Baby First Birthday
A radiant and tender poetry collection that examines innocence, existence and non-existence, and being born--without consent. The poems explore the obscenity of patriarchy, whiteness, and capitalism, but also seek tenderness, beauty, and loving oneself.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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