Grief Poetry

The Perseverance is the remarkable debut book by British-Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus. Ranging across history and continents, these poems operate in the spaces in between, their haunting lyrics creating new, hybrid territories. The Perseverance is a book of loss, contested language and praise, where elegies for the poet's father sit alongside meditations on the d/Deaf experience.

Joseph Luzzi's harrowing story of his wife's sudden death in a car accident and how Dante's The Divine Comedy helped him to endure his grief, raise their infant daughter, and rediscover love. Where do we turn when we lose everything? In 2007 Joseph Luzzi's wife Katherine was eight and a half months pregnant when she was involved in a fatal car accident. Their daughter, Isabel, was delivered by emergency C-section and somehow survived, even while her mother could not.

This book is an attempt to create something beautiful from this chaos; to make sense of the things we dare not breathe to life. Focusing on loss, heartbreak, mental health, and the impact of isolation on a tired mind, these poems are the starlings that gather above the water. This book is the hope that we can learn to heal; that the future can survive the past.

On Being Human is a compilation of original poems by Ghazala Alam. Written in modern Urdu and English, each poem is introduced by an English preamble detailing her inspirations and insights. Accompanied by English transliteration, her poetry is informed by her experiences as an immigrant, woman, and a person of color.

Temp jobs, conspiracy theories, squatters, talk therapy, urban gardening, the robot revolution: this collection fixes its eye on the strangeness of labor, through poems that are searching, keen, and wry. The virtuosic central sequence explores the untimely death of the poet’s estranged father, a handyman and addict, and the brothers left to sort through the detritus of a life long lost to them. Through lyrical, darkly humorous vignettes, Kunz asks what it costs to build a home and a love that not only lasts but sustains.

The Back of Your Pickup: Poems of Love, Loss, and the Roads That Never Led Home. I remember the summer heat sticking to my skin, the radio humming a song we half-knew, and your hand tapping the steering wheel like you had nowhere to be but everywhere to go. The back of your pickup wasn’t just a truck bed—it was a church, a confessional, a place where love was whispered under a sky too big for the things we couldn’t say. The Back of Your Pickup is a collection of poetry that lingers in the spaces between love and loss, between leaving and staying, between who we were and who we became.

What if grief could become a wild invitation into a practice of radical open-heartedness and intimacy with the world and all of life? That is the question bestselling author and licensed psychotherapist, Annalise Oatman, explores in this collection of poetic diary entries. Unpretentious and characteristically confessional, this collection continually finds the universal within the personal, and finds that the essence of eroticism is a tender reaching towards all that is "outside" oneself.

A stunning collection of poems that John Updike wrote during the last seven years of his life. The opening sequence, "Endpoint", is made up of a series of connected poems written on the occasions of his recent birthdays and culminates in his confrontation with his final illness. He looks back on the boy that he was, on the family, the small town, the people, and the circumstances that fed his love of writing, and he finds endless delight and solace in "turning the oddities of life into words".

Drum-Taps is a collection of poetry written by Walt Whitman during the American Civil War and first published in 1865. Drum-Taps contains poems that bear witness to the violence of war.

In these poems of holding and letting go, Mapother isn't afraid to plumb the depths. Just when you think you can't breathe, she breaks the surface, with you in her gentle hands. In her own words, each line is an homage to the scars that form us.

In these poems, Kleber-Diggs names delight in the same breath as loss. Moments suffused with love—teaching his daughter how to drive; watching his grandmother bake a cake; waking beside his beloved to ponder trumpet mechanics—couple with moments of wrenching grief—a father’s life ended by a gun; mourning children draped around their mother’s waist; Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. Even in the refuge-space of dreams, a man calls the police on his Black neighbor.

Clara Jean Beaman Walker was the third of seven children born to Cora and Clarence Beaman in Knoxville, TN, in 1910. Considered to be “Little Mother” by her siblings, she always gave her best to her birth family and to the family she created with her husband, John Albert Walker. Three sons came from this union: Johnny, Clarence, and Henry. A teacher at heart, Jean saw each child before her and helped them navigate home economics, English, and realizing their potential.

This is a story from the Chilling Ghost Stories collection. The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe, tells of a talking raven's mysterious visit to a distraught lover, tracing the man's slow fall into madness. First published in January 1845, the poem is often noted for its musicality, stylized language, and supernatural atmosphere.

If you've ever experienced heartbreak, Diana Townsend's I Thought I Missed Him is a poetry collection you won't want to miss. With brutal honesty and unflinching emotion, Townsend delves into the toxic and often destructive emotions that arise when a relationship comes to an end. But this isn't just a collection of poems about pain and heartache. I Thought I Missed Him is a journey of self-discovery and self-reflection, as Townsend grapples with the complexities of moving on from someone she once loved. In these pages, you'll find moments of clarity and vulnerability, as well as a rawness ...

I often think about our youth. It was indeed a strangely shaped toy, with a short body dragging a very long tail, spreading like wings, refusing to leave. A lamp is still on, but a song has been sung. A play has not ended, a love has reached the end of the road. We salute you. And the new curtain is about to be drawn. Maybe that's what human life is like, ending, starting, starting again, then ending. No matter what, we have to shoulder our suffering and happiness, moving forward, don't turn around.

To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die. In recent years non-religious funerals have become more common, but without an established canon of texts to fall back on, it can be difficult to plan an appropriate service for a loved one who had no religious belief or connections. Texts recommended by secular humanists, especially modern texts, can sometimes sound trite or overly informal.

Brooks Haxton has been writing for years about the connections between human beings and the creatures we find fascinating. Mister Toebones, his new collection, draws its title from a nickname Haxton gives to a daddy longlegs he sees at his father's grave. In another poem, the poet and his mother, in search of a swimming hole, find a copperhead rearing to strike, about to birth its live young. Elsewhere, waist-deep in the Mississippi River, under the Atlantic Ocean, on the cracked ice of a frozen pond, even in outer space, the poet explores forces that seem past endurance.

If Ollie Schminkey’s Dead Dad Jokes asks the question, “What was it like to watch my father die?”, Where I Dry the Flowers asks “How did watching someone die teach me how to live?” This unrestrained and raw sophomore collection explores themes of grief, healing, and forgiveness while refusing to sacrifice the hard truths that come with addiction, caretaking, and the death of a loved one. Ollie opens their heart to listeners and tells them that these emotions are okay, no matter how conflicting and confusing they may be.

From the author's leather-bound book kept locked at the base of his bed, we journey through New York City, chilled farmlands and isolated cabins in the woods. Calloway's solid masculine approach is refreshingly original. We have all felt the warmth of the world around us and we have all felt the cold. This author holds our hand as he leads us down rich passageways of the psyche.

Our quoted authority is not the people in white coats but those with a quill, a heart and a soul that can take these feelings of love and loss and with the ink of words put to verse feelings and emotions that can be re-lived and shared by all. As they venture through depression, war, slavery to heartache and the loss of loved ones our eyes may mist and tears gently fall at what collectively we have done, have experienced, have witnessed and lost.