New Poetry Books for Adults
Hundreds of books are added to the Library's collection each month. Here are the most recent Poetry books for adults.
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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.
Format: Book - 2020
Holds: 4 on 6 copies
View Ledger: Poems -
Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod
"Written during the trial for a close friend's murder, Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod exposes that the whimsical, horrible, and absurd all sit together. In this ambitious third collection, Traci Brimhall corresponds with the urges of life and death within herself as she lives through a series of impossibilities: the sentencing of her friend's murderers, the birth of her child, the death of her mother, divorce, a trip sailing through the Arctic. In lullaby, lyric essay, and always with brutal sincerity, Brimhall examines how beauty and terror live right alongside each other--much like how Nod is both a fictional dreamscape and the place where Cain is exiled for murdering Abel. By plucking at the tensions between life and death, love and hate, truth and obscurity, Brimhall finds what it is that ties opposing themes together; how love and loss are married in grief. Like Eve thrust from Eden, Brimhall is tasked with finding meaning in a world defined by its cruelty. Unrelenting, incisive, and tender, these poems expose beauty in the grotesque and argue that the effort to be good always outweighs the desire to succumb to what is easy"--
Format: Book - 2020
Holds: 0 on 3 copies
View Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod -
Dub: Finding Ceremony
"In DUB Alexis Pauline Gumbs continues with the third book in her poetry series, the first two books being Spill, inspired by Hortense Spillers, and M Archive, inspired by Jacqui Alexander. Whereas Spill deals with the contemporary afterlives of slavery and M Archive describes the post-dated evidence of our imminent apocalypse, DUB destroys Gumbs' own origin story, as she questions the assumptions and histories she has held onto most of her life. This text, through engagement with Sylvia Wynter's rigor, reinvents language outside of personal histories. DUB is organized into topical sections, where spacious prose poems animate the voice of an underwater chorus in ceremonies that flow into one another. Beginning a daily writing practice, Gumbs wrote DUB based on moments of emphasis in Sylvia Wynter's essays (and one interview over several decades). This book is influenced by the promiscuity and prolificity of dub music, the confrontational home-grown intimacy of dub poetry, and the descendants of this work. Dub uses the impact of repetition and the incantatory power of the spoken broken word. Gumbs uses dub to emphasize that Sylvia Wynter learned every colonial language and came to the conclusion that the ways of thinking that made colonialism and slavery imaginable were constructed over time and heretical to the ways of thinking that came before them; and so it must be possible to construct ways to understand life and place differently now as well. Gumbs goes back to the origin stories that precede her and turns the blood into paint, emphasizing that "then" is also "now" through the broken and intense voices of ancestors. Inspired by Wynter's heretical poetic action against our deepest beliefs, DUB is an artifact and tool for breath retraining and interspecies ancestral listening. Throughout the text, listening includes speakers who have never been considered human: whales and algae. Gumbs is attentive to kindred beyond taxonomy, questioning kinship loyalty, and suggests that our perceived survival needs are responses to a story we made up and told ourselves was written by our genes, a story that can be changed. This book will be of interest to scholars of African-American studies, diaspora studies, feminism, queer theory, English, creative writing and poetry"--
Format: Book - 2020
Holds: 1 on 4 copies
View Dub: Finding Ceremony -
To Make Room for the Sea
"To Make Room for the Sea is a collection of reflective poems about personal and environmental loss, and hope for the future"--Provided by publisher.
Format: Book - 2020
Holds: 0 on 3 copies
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A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems
"A selection of poems from the celebrated poet and lawyer"--
Format: Book - 2020
Holds: 0 on 4 copies
View A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems -
Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems
Praise Song for My Children celebrates twenty-one years of poetry by one of the most significant African poets of this century. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley guides us through the complex and intertwined highs and lows of motherhood and all the roles that it encompasses: parent, woman, wife, sister, friend. Her work is deeply personal, drawing from her own life and surroundings to convey grief, the bleakness of war, humor, deep devotion, and the hope of possibility. These poems lend an international voice to the tales of motherhood, as Wesley speaks both to the African and to the Western experience of motherhood, particularly black motherhood. She pulls from African motifs and proverbs, utilizing the poetics of both the West and Africa to enrich her striking emotional range. Leading us to the depths of mourning and the heights of tender love, she responds to American police brutality, writing "To be a black woman is to be a woman, / ready to mourn," and remembers a dear friend who is at once "mother and wife and friend and pillar / and warrior woman all in one." Wesley writes poetry that moves with her through life, land, and love, seeing with eyes that have witnessed both national and personal tragedy and redemption. Born in Tugbakeh, Liberia and raised in Monrovia, Wesley immigrated to the United States in 1991 to escape the Liberian civil war. In this moving collection, she invites us to join her as she buries loved ones, explores long-distance connections through social media, and sings bittersweet praises of the women around her, of mothers, and of Africa. (syndetics)
Format: Book - 2020
Holds: 0 on 3 copies
View Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems -
The Blue Absolute
"The Blue Absolute's prose poems are hot boxes of lyrical language combusting with daily life. People move and think amidst a flurry of dots and dashes in a constant shift of perspective and action--urban and pastoral, highly figured and fragmented, grieving and dreaming--each poem a compressed but fluid zone of almost psychedelic intensity. The book closes with "Shiver," an American epic, at once a lament for and vision of a great city on the edge: San Francisco past, present, and future"--
Format: Book - 2020
Holds: 1 on 3 copies
View The Blue Absolute -
Pale Colors in A Tall Field
"A powerful, inventive collection from one of America's most critically acclaimed poets"--
Format: Book - 2020
Holds: 2 on 4 copies
View Pale Colors in A Tall Field -
For the Ride
"Alice Notley has become one of the most highly regarded figures in American poetry, a master of the visionary mode acclaimed for genre-bending, book-length poems of great ambition and adventurousness. Her newest book, For the Ride, is another such work. The protagonist, "One," is suddenly within the glyph, whose walls project scenes One can enter, and One does so. Other beings begin to materialize, and it seems like they (and One) are all survivors of a global disaster. They board a ship to flee to another dimension; they decide what they must save on this Ark are words, and they gather together as many as are deemed fit to save. They "sail" and meanwhile begin to change the language they are speaking, before disembarking at an abandoned future city"--
Format: Book - 2020
Holds: 3 on 4 copies
View For the Ride -
Many Restless Concerns: The Victims of Countess Báthory Speak in Chorus (a Testimony) / !c Gayle Brandeis
Poetry. Women's Studies. "Although MANY RESTLESS CONCERNS illuminates the horror of absolute control over others, it also shines a beacon on the strength of women sharing their truths one by one, of spirits joining together to topple the seemingly untouchable. This work speaks to our own times, to our #metoo reckoning, to our power as survivors to take back our stories and reclaim the darkness. Oppression of any kind never holds, even if it takes the dead to bring it down. This book is a haunting, essential read for all uneasy souls."--Laraine Herring "'Just know we all have stories worth your time. Just know we're just starting to understand our own worth.' This is how Gayle Brandeis opens MANY RESTLESS CONCERNS. Countess Bathory of Hungary allegedly killed up to 650 girls and women between the years 1585 and 1609, in a variety of cruel, heartless ways. Brandeis brings these words to our attention--stab, strangle, pummel, hack, burn, drown, freeze, scald. 'Your body remembers even when you no longer have a body, some tender part of you still flinches; some immaterial nerves still flare,' she writes. 'We want you to bear witness,' voices the chorus. I urge you, the reader, to bear witness to these centuries of silent voices rising up clearly, often beautifully, more often tragically. Bear witness."--Alma Luz Villanueva "Feels like a terrifying and gorgeously lyric fairy tale but never once does the author let us forget that the pain is real and the point is empathy, understanding and protecting the ones who come after. Ethereal and beautiful as its ghostly chorus, but with 'muscle and scent,' 'meat' and 'bone,' MANY RESTLESS CONCERNS is quickened with the blood of the victims, the essential, and ultimately healing, blood of story."--Francesca Lia Block "If all the women and girls who have been murdered, tortured, abused and disappeared were to raise their voices, they would create a song that would drown the world. In Gayle Brandeis' haunting and haunted novel-in-poems, MANY RESTLESS CONCERNS, she invokes such a chorus, the true story of hundreds of young women tortured to death by the Countess Bathory. Brandeis presents their gifts, their dreams, as well as the ways they died, and demonstrates that it is through collective action that they ultimately find justice. You will never un-hear their mournful, defiant and triumphal song."--Terry Wolverton "Gayle Brandeis is a miracle. From the forgotten memories of murdered women, she's created a monument of hope, pain, and demands for the justice of recognition. This is a startling, glorious, gorgeous book. What a vision. Read this book and be transformed."--Rene Denfeld (syndetics) (8/13/2020 8:22:09 AM)
Format: Book - 2020
Holds: 1 on 3 copies
View Many Restless Concerns: The Victims of Countess Báthory Speak in Chorus (a Testimony) / !c Gayle Brandeis