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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How to Say Babylon: A Memoir
This stunning story of the author's struggle to break free of her strict Rastafarian upbringing ruled by a father whose rigid beliefs, rage and paranoia led to violence shows how found her own power and provides a unique glimpse into a rarefied world we know little about.
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The Way Forward
"In this third and final installment of his poetic trilogy, Yung Pueblo expands upon favorite themes while guiding readers further, toward a life lived authentically, intuitively, and in harmony with others. In these rapidly changing times, it is more important than ever to know ourselves well and fully, even and especially in the face of turmoil. The Way Forward encourages readers to connect more deeply to their intuition, using it to remain focused and grounded amidst a world in constant flux. In his latest collection of poetry and short prose, Yung Pueblo offers clear strategies for managing the unknown, inhabiting your personal power, and bringing your truest, healthiest self to relationships. Progressing naturally from both Inward and Clarity & Connection, The Way Forward is exactly thatu01afu01af--an inspired beginning."--Publisher.
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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"-- Provided by publisher.
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Falling Back in Love With Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls
"Kai Cheng Thom grew up a Chinese Canadian transgender girl in a hostile world. As an activist, psychotherapist, conflict mediator, spiritual healer, and celebrated writer, she's always pursued the same deeply personal mission: to embrace the revolutionary belief that every human being, no matter how hateful or horrible, is intrinsically sacred. But then Kai Cheng found herself in a crisis of faith, overwhelmed by the viciousness with which people treated each other, and barely clinging on to the values and ideals she'd built her life around: justice, hope, love, and healing. Rather than succumb to despair and cynicism, she gathered all her rage and grief and took one last leap of faith. Kai Cheng began writing letters to everyone she has trouble holding in her heart-those seemingly beyond saving. She wrote to dead people, exes, prositutes, johns, monsters, transphobes, and racists; to the fantasy man she still longs for, to the ones who hurt her, and to the ones who watched. In writing these love letters, Kai Cheng found herself not only rediscovering and deepening her faith in humanity, but falling back in love with being human"-- Provided by publisher.
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The Asking: New and Selected Poems
"The Asking opens with new and urgent poems by Jane Hirshfield, in which she faces again the contradictions that have shaped her work: "Some take/ in witnessed suffering, pleasure," she writes. "Some make, of witnessed suffering, beauty." The volume then returns to the beginning, carrying us from her earliest volumes (including Of Gravity and Angels; Given Sugar, Given Salt; and After), up through the important recent work (Come, Thief; The Beauty; Ledger). We find poems of the smallest ant and the vastness of time, of hunger and bounty, of science and war and love in its myriad forms. Whether it is Hirshfield's insistence on the lessons of the natural world-"The lake scarlets / the same instant as the maple. / Let others try to say this is not passion"-or her facing squarely the depredations of climate and the harm to fellow human beings by our own hands; whether she is assessing what language does for us ("Words are loyal. / Whatever they name they take the side of") or interrogating poetry itself as a vibrant, living medium through which her own debt to creation's splendors must be paid, this poet sets our shared truths in black ink. The Asking, in poems of delicacy and ringing clarity, demands our attention to beauty and injustice equally, enlarging our awareness of breakage as well as the possibility for repair"-- Provided by publisher.
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Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse
"A stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present."
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Bluets
Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color . . . A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets , Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists. Maggie Nelson is the author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007). She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. (syndetics)
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The Lights: Poems
"An inventive, acutely political, and deeply personal new collection by the celebrated author of 10:04 and The Topeka School"-- Provided by publisher.
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Information Desk: An Epic
"From an acclaimed and wildly imaginative poet, a book-length poem set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that is a work of art history and a coming-of-age story. Robyn Schiff's fourth collection is an ambitious book-length poem in three parts set at The Metropolitan Museum of Art's information desk, where Schiff long ago held a staff position. Elaborately mapping an interconnected route in and out of the museum through history, material, and memory, Information Desk: An Epic takes us on an anguished soul-quest and ecstatic intellectual query to confront the violent forces that inform the museum's encyclopedic collection and the spiritual powers of art. Novelistic in its sweep, frantically informative, and deeply intimate in its private recollections, Information Desk: An Epic wayfares with riveting lyric intensity through an epic array of topics and concerns, including illusion, deception, self-deception, complicity, lecherous coworkers, the composition of pigment, the scattering of seeds, ideas, and capital, and insect infestations spreading within artwork. Along the way, Schiff pauses to invoke three terrifying muses-parasitic wasps-in desperate awe of their powers of precision and generative energy. Information Desk: An Epic undertakes a hemorrhaging ekphrastic journey through artifice and the natural world"-- Provided by publisher.
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Crush
Finalist for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry--an erotic, powerful collection "One of the best books of contemporary poetry."--Victoria Chang, Huffington Post "Vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope."-- Library Journal (Best Poetry of 2005) Selected by Nobel Prize laureate and competition judge Louise Glück as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, Richard Siken's Crush is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession and love. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. In the world of American poetry, Siken's voice is striking. In her introduction to the book, Glück hails the "cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness" of Siken's poems. She notes, "Books of this kind dream big. . . . They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form." (syndetics) (4/19/2024 4:04:42 AM)
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