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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The Hurting Kind: Poems
"An astonishing collection about interconnectedness-between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves-from National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist Ada Limu00f3n"--
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Musical Tables: Poems
""America's favorite poet" (the Wall Street Journal) has found a new form for his unique poetic style: the small poem. Here Collins writes about his trademark themes of nature, animals, poetry, mortality, absurdity, and love--all in a handful of lines. Neither Haiku nor limmerick, and certainly not a gimmick, the small poem pushes to an extreme poetry's famed power to condense emotional and conceptual content into small spaces. Taken together the more than 125 new poems of Musical Chairs show one of our greatest poets channeling his unique voice into a new phase of his luminous career"--
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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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Balladz
"A new poetry collection from Pulitzer and T. S. Eliot Prize winner Sharon Olds. "At the time of have-not, I look at myself in this mirror," writes Olds in this self-scouring, exhilarating volume, which opens with a section of quarantine poems, and at its center boasts what she calls Amherst Balladz (whose syntax honors Emily Dickinson: "she was our Girl - our Woman - / Man enough - for me") and many more in her own contemporary, long-flowing-sentence rhythm, in which she sings of her childhood, young womanhood, and old age all mixed up together, seeing an early lover in the one who is about to buried; seeing her white privilege without apology; seeing her mother, whom readers of Olds will recognize, "flushed and exalted at punishment time"; seeing how we've spoiled the earth but carrying a stray indoor spider carefully back out to the garden. It is Sharon's gift to us that in her richly detailed exposure of her sorrows she can still elegize songbirds, her true kin, and write that heaven comes here in life, not after it"--
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Late Summer Ode
"A collection of poems by Olena Kalytiak Davis"--
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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." --
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How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope
"How to Love the World invites readers to use poetry as part of their daily gratitude practice to uncover the simple gifts of abundance and joy to be found everywhere"--
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The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes on
"Many have called our time dystopian. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples. With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time--from Korean comfort women during World War II, to the precipice of climate crisis, to children wandering a museum in the future. They explore narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal. Wrestling with the griefs and distances of this apocalyptic world, Choi also imagines what togetherness--between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest--could look like. Bringing together Choi's signature speculative imagination with even greater musicality than her previous work, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On ultimately charts new paths toward hope""--Front dust jacket flap.
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Punks: New & Selected Poems
"A landmark collection of poetry by acclaimed fiction writer, translator, and MacArthur Fellow John Keene, Punks: New & Selected Poems is a generous treasury in seven sections that spans decades and includes previously unpublished and brand new work. With depth and breadth, Punks weaves together historic narratives of loss, lust, and love. The many voices that emerge in these poems--from historic Black personalities, both familial and famous, to the poet's friends and lovers in gay bars and bedrooms--form a cast of characters capable of addressing desire, oppression, AIDS, and grief through sorrowful songs that "we sing as hard as we live." At home in countless poetic forms, Punks reconfirms John Keene as one of the most important voices in contemporary poetry."--Publisher's webpage.
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Muscle Memory
"In Muscle Memory, Washington-based poet Jenny Liou grapples with violence and identity, beginning with the chain-link enclosure of the prizefighter's cage and radiating outward into the diasporic sweep of Chinese American history. Liou writes with spare, stunning lyricism about how cage fighting offered relief from the trauma inflicted by diaspora's vanishing ghosts; how, in the cage, an elbow splits an eyebrow, or an armbar snaps a limb, and, even when you lose a fight, you've won something: pain. Liou places the physical manifestation of violence in her sport alongside the deeper traumas of immigration and her own complicated search for identity, exploring what she inherited from her Chinese immigrant father-who was also obsessed with poetry and martial arts. When she finally steps away from the cage to raise children of her own, Liou begins to question how violence and history pass from one generation to the next, and whether healing is possible without forgetting"-- Provided by publisher. (12/10/2022 1:22:58 AM)
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