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.
-
Now Do You Know Where You Are
"A collection of poems by Dana Levin"--
Format: Book
View Now Do You Know Where You Are -
Nobody
"In Memorial, her unforgettable transformation of the Iliad, Alice Oswald breathed new life into myth. In Nobody, she returns to Homer, this time fixing her gaze on a minor character in the Odyssey--a poet abandoned on a stony island--and the sea that surrounds him. Familiar voices drift in and out of the poem; though there are no proper names, we recognize Helios, Icarus, Alcyone, Philoctetes, Calypso, Clytemnestra, Orpheus, Poseidon, Hermes, and the presiding spirit of Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god. As with all of Oswald's work, this is poetry that is made for the human voice, but here the language takes...
Format: Book
View Nobody -
What Flies Want
"In What Flies Want, disaster looms in domesticity: a family grapples with its members' mental health, a marriage falters, and a child experiments with self-harm. With its backdrop of school lockdown drills, #MeToo, and increasing political polarization, the collection asks how these private and public tensions are interconnected. The speaker, who grew up in a bi-cultural family on the US/Mexico border, once felt she "need[ed] nothing but my own fine fire." She soon learns she must play a role in a culture that prizes whiteness, patriarchy, and chauvinism. As an adult she oscillates between performed confidence--"skating by in my glittery...
Format: Book
View What Flies Want -
Yi Sang
"A selection of poems, essays, and stories by Yi Sang (1910-1937), translated by Jack Jung, Sawako Nakayasu, Don Mee Choi, and Joyelle McSweeney"--
Format: Book
View Yi Sang -
Horsepower
"Priest's debut collection, Horsepower, is a cinematic escape narrative that radically envisions a daughter's waywardness as aspirational. Across the book's three sequences, we find the black-girl speaker in the midst of a self-imposed exile, going back in memory to explore her younger self--a mixed-race child being raised by her white supremacist grandfather in the shadow of Churchill Downs, Kentucky's world-famous horseracing track--before arriving in a state of self-awareness to confront the personal and political landscape of a harshly segregated Louisville. Out of a space that is at once southern and urban, violent and beautiful, racially-charged and working-class, she attempts to...
Format: Book
View Horsepower -
It Must Be A Misunderstanding
"It Must Be a Misunderstanding is the acclaimed Mexican poet Coral Bracho's most personal and emotive collection to date, dedicated to her mother who died of complications from Alzheimer's. Remarkably, Bracho, author and daughter, seems to disappear into her own empathic observations as her mother comes clear to us not as a tragic figure, but as a fiery and independent personality. The chemistry between them is vivid, poignant, and unforgettable. As the translator Forrest Gander explains in his introduction, the book's force "builds as the poems cycle through their sequences"- from early to late Alzheimer's-"with non-judgmental affection and compassionate watchfulness.""--
Format: Book
View It Must Be A Misunderstanding -
The Drunken Boat
"Poet, prodigy, precursor, punk: the short, precocious, uncompromisingly rebellious career of the poet Arthur Rimbaud is one of the legends of modern literature. By the time he was twenty, Rimbaud had written a series of poems that are not only masterpieces in themselves but that forever transformed the idea of what poetry is. Without him, surrealism is inconceivable, and his influence is palpable in artists as diverse as Henry Miller, John Ashbery, Bob Dylan, and Patti Smith. In this essential volume, renowned translator Mark Polizzotti offers authoritative and inspired new versions of Rimbaud's major poems and letters, including generous selection...
Format: Book
View The Drunken Boat -
The Wet Hex
"Personal and environmental violations form the backdrop against which Sun Yung Shin examines questions of grievability, violence, and responsibility in The Wet Hex. Incorporating sources such as her own archival immigration documents, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Christopher Columbus' journals, and traditional Korean burial rituals, Shin explores the ways that lives are weighed and bartered. Smashing the hierarchies of god and humanity, heaven and hell, in favor of indigenous Korean shamanism and animism, The Wet Hex layers an apocalyptic revision of nineteenth-century imagery of the sublime over the present, conjuring a reality at once beautiful and terrible"--
Format: Book
View The Wet Hex -
After
"After is a collection of poems inspired by Valmiki's Ramayana, one of Asia's foundational epic poems and a story-cycle of formative historical importance all across South and Southeast Asia. On the Indian subcontinent, the Ramayana is not only central toreligion and folklore but to the conduct of life. People take its characters as models of vice and virtue, courage and devotion, and politicians have been known to take advantage of the veneration in which the book is held. In the West, too, the Ramayanahas long been recognized as one of the essential classics of world literature, on par with the...
Format: Book
View After -
Song of My Softening
"A profound and intersectional text, Song of My Softening is a queer, fat, love song of the interior. Poems study the ever-changing relationship with oneself, while also investigating the relationship that the world and nation has with Black queerness. This book is a window into what perseverance looks like, ungilded, a mirror for anyone born into a culture outside of their identity, who has survived alienation, violation, depression, and systematized oppression. Unspoken truths about the body and soul are mused with openness, candor, and tenderness"--
Format: Book
View Song of My Softening