Poetry That Changes the World
We have a carefully curated collection of the best contemporary poetry. Looking for a recommendation? Ask!
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A book of bravado and introspection, of 21st century feminist swagger and harrowing terror and loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,” the poet writes. $16
Solmaz Sharif's astonishing first book, Look, asks us to see the ongoing costs of war. The collection uses words and phrases lifted from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms; in their seamless inclusion, Sharif exposes the devastating euphemisms deployed to sterilize the language. $16
"Lessons on Expulsion marks the arrival of a vital new voice in American poetry. Erika L. Sánchez makes visible the violence striking down Mexican women living on the border and interrogates the historical and the familial origins of misogyny. Her gaze is unflinching and feminist; it marvels and questions and testifies. $16
This limited-edition box set of ten African poets is gorgeous. Not only does it introduce readers to the best poetry by contemporary poets of the African and the African diaspora, it showcases the art of Eritrean painter Ficre Ghebreyesus. . .As Abani says in his preface, no body has been more commoditized and dehumanized than the black body, the African body. The collection provides space for these reclamations. The poets write about religion, political issues, memory and forgetting, immigrant experiences and relationships. $29.95
When Emily Dickinson wrote the line 'After great pain, a formal feeling comes' I think she was referring to poems. Spare, unflinching, and powerful, the poems in Slamming Open the Door move me to the bone. How does one say I love this book, which I wish never had to be written? Only one way: I love this book. I wish it did not have to be written. $15.95
Gay's praise is Whitmanesque, full of manure, mulberry-stained purple bird poop, dirty clothes and hangovers, but also the pleasure of bare feet, of pruning a peach tree, of feeding a neighbor. . . . Whether you're feeling like you have a whole brass band of gratitude or if you're feeling like you only have a rusty horn, read this book. Gay even thanks you for reading it, saying I can't stop my gratitude, which includes dear reader, you for staying here with me, for moving your lips just so as I speak. $15.95
WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. $16
god’s breath hovering across the waters begins with the story of Arthur Penzias’s discovery of the echo of the big bang through a cryogenic microwave receiver and from there explodes into a meditation on the author’s mother’s untimely and tragic death. Memories, history, war, science, horror movies, space exploration, and the RCA dog are just some of the subjects that expand and contract, intersect and repel, throughout the arc of the collection. $15.95
Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. This hybrid genre collection of poetry and prose tells the story of one Philadelphia neighborhood, Germantown—a historic, beloved place, wrestling with legacies of colonialism, racism, and capitalism. A Poetry is Not a Luxury Book Club favorite! $16.95
WINNER OF 2017 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY Part fact, part fiction, Tyehimba Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them. $25
Skin, jail, butterfly, hospital, street, mother, father, blood, war: such words come alive as survivor, witness, and guide Judy Grahn uses the tried and true heart of the ballad to explore the socially unsaid and unsayable. Animated by the heroism and mythology of the everyday, and armed with attention and wisdom, she is a fierce warrior for the clarity of the human story. $18.95
Parker stayed woke to black suffering, violence against black bodies especially those of black women to the suffering engendered by multiple, egregious oppressions. With THE COMPLETE WORKS OF PAT PARKER, we are allowed an opportunity to historicize Pat Parker's significance to black women's literary traditions, lesbian erotics, to black queer struggles and black feminism, and to global social justice movements. She was in her time. Now, with this important text, she will be in all time to come. $22.95