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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Fever of Unknown Origin
"A collection of profound and piercing poems from a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, about navigating the modern world in search of beauty that will endure. The Radiance Archive opens at a remote crossroads, where the speaker considers the intersection of history, beauty, and destruction: "the past / is paper / and the present, a match . . ." What follows is a feverish tour of landscapes-environmental, political, and personal-that reframes our perception of modern America and leads the reader into "An empire of rags and photons" where we must look to the past to clarify our futures. With sublime wit and a Whitmanian eye, McGrath delivers a stunning collection of warnings, love letters, and praise songs for all that manages to weather the perennial pressures of time: frog ponds, stadium rubble, and the endless cycle of seasons, which usher us deeper into an era we cannot yet know"-- Provided by publisher.
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Excuse Me as I Kiss the Sky
Excuse Me As I Kiss The Sky is the third instalment of the Rudy Francisco poetry collection. With every book, the author utilises various tools and methods to excavate his experiences and find poetry in everyday things. Rudy believes that poetry can be found in our immediate surroundings at any given moment and poignantly includes this idea as the foundation of his work. In this book, Rudy Francisco bravely explores poetic forms such as the contrapuntal, golden shovel and the ode, while offering explanations and his approach to using the aforementioned. Excuse Me As I Kiss The Sky is meant to inspire its readers, expose them to different avenues of approaching the act of writing poetry and invites them to try it for themselves. Francisco takes the nuances of the craft that feel esoteric and breaks them down so the average person can engage and enjoy poetry in ways that feel familiar. The author uses this book to further explore subjects such as love, heartbreak, identity and healing. (syndetics)
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Deaf Republic: Poems
Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear--they all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence. At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea, these poems confronts our time's vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.
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How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir
Haunted and haunting, Jones's memoir tells the story of a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence--into tumultuous relationships with his mother and grandmother, into passing flings with lovers, friends and strangers. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another--and to one another--as we fight to become ourselves.
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Turn Around Time: A Walking Poem for the Pacific Northwest
Most outdoor enthusiasts understand the phrase "turn around time" as that point in an adventure when you must cease heading out in order to have enough time to safely return to camp or home--regardless of whether you have reached your destination. For award-winning novelist David Guterson, it is also a metaphor for where we find ourselves in the middle of our lives, and his new narrative poem explores this idea through a lyrical journey along a trail, much like those in Washington's mountain ranges he hiked while growing up. Even outdoor-lovers who are not normally readers of poetry will relate to the physicality of hiking represented here, from endless trail switchbacks to foot and ankle pains. There is a fast-moving, propulsive quality to David's writing, with lush language, vivid imagery, and pacing that resonates as a journey on foot. His words are brought further to life by the delicate yet mythical illustrations by award-winning artist Justin Gibbens. (syndetics)
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Ceremony: Poetry & Prose
Ceremony is a collection for those on the cusp of becoming. It is a reminder that we were not meant to fit into this world perfectly, but to live in such a way that might forge a path all our own. It is a reminder that we are one with each other and nature itself. It is a reminder that we contain within us the latent potential of every future possibility we can conceive of. It is a reminder that we often must release what is not ours in order to receive what is, that we are all born with a unique imprint to leave upon the world, and that self-love is not an infatuation, but a homecoming. Ceremony is a book written around the idea that the most unlikely moments are often the very ones offering us a chance to meet ourselves more deeply; it is a book for the ones who are ready to stop waiting and wondering, and dive all the way into who they were meant to be.
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Call Us What We Carry: Poems
The presidential inaugural poet--and unforgettable new voice in American poetry--presents a collection of poems that includes the stirring poem read at the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States.
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How to Not Be Afraid of Everything
"Explores the vulnerable ways we articulate and reckon with fear: fear of intergenerational trauma and the silent, hidden histories of families. What does it mean to grow up in a take-out restaurant, surrounded by food, just a generation after the Great Leap Forward famine in 1958-62. Full of elegy and resilient joy, these poems speak across generations of survival. How much of the world do we fear? How can we find comfort and ancestral power in this fear?"-- Provided by publisher.
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Best Barbarian: Poems
"An incandescent collection that interrogates the personal and political nature of desire, freedom, and disaster. In his brilliant, expansive second volume, Whiting Award-winning poet Roger Reeves probes the apocalypses and raptures of humanity-climate change, anti-Black racism, familial and erotic love, ecstasy and loss. The poems in Best Barbarian roam across the literary and social landscape, from Beowulf's Grendel to the jazz musician Alice Coltrane, from reckoning with immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border to thinking through the fraught beauty of the moon on a summer night after the police have killed a Black man. Drawing on a history of poetry that ranges from the Aeneid to Walt Whitman to Drake, Best Barbarian offers moments of joy and intimacy amid catastrophe"-- Provided by publisher.
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Love Poems in Quarantine
"A collection of poems written by Sarah Ruhl"-- Provided by publisher.
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