Grief Poetry

Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful - the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.

T.S. Eliot was a towering figure in 20th-century literature, a renowned poet, playwright, and critic whose work - including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), The Waste Land (1922), Four Quartets (1943), and Murder in the Cathedral (1935) - continues to be among the most-read and influential in the canon of American literature. The Essential T.S. Eliot collects Eliot’s most lasting and important poetry in one career-spanning audiobook, with an introduction from Vijay Seshadri, one of our foremost poets.

The witch: supernaturally powerful, inscrutably independent, and now - indestructible. These moving, relatable poems encourage resilience and embolden women to take control of their own stories. Enemies try to judge, oppress, and marginalize her, but the witch doesn't burn in this one.

In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother's death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave and propulsive, Vuong's poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicentre of the break.

Celebrating James Tate’s work as it transcends convention, time, and everything that tells us, “No, you can’t do that,” Hell, I Love Everybody gives us the poet at his best, his most intimate, hopeful, inventive, and brilliant. John Ashbery called Tate the “poet of possibilities,” and this collection records forays into possibilities for American poetry’s future. With a foreword by Terrance Hayes, it is sure to give listeners new and old a lasting collection of favorites.

With work that ranges from the laugh-out-loud funny to the silence and rage of loss, Forgive Yourself These Tiny Acts of Self-Destruction is a must read. This is a collection of work that asks itself for forgiveness while becoming an instruction manual on how listeners can follow suit. These complex and passionate poems make space for a narrative about the self in the wake of destruction. It explores American culture and examines how Singer's identity as a Jewish American underpins daily life.

The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls. — Edgar Allan Poe Shadows Amongst the Threads is a haunting collection of gothic poetry that delves into the dark side of human nature. J.A. Santana masterfully crafts horror poems that explore our deepest fears and most primitive instincts, creating a mesmerizing tapestry of darkness and shadow. This compilation of dark poetry taps into the primal emotions hardwired into our psyche, surfacing when we face the unknown lurking in the shadows or confront the horrors standing before us. Each gothic poem serves as a mirror to the ...

A young Latinx poet grappling with loneliness and heartache decides one day to bring Tejano pop star Selena Quintanilla back to life. The séance kicks off an uncanny trip narrated by a Greek chorus of gossiping spirits as she journeys through a dead celebrity prom, encounters her shadow self, and performs karaoke in hell.

Whether it's the fireflies of a Louisiana summer caught in a mason jar (doomed by their collection), or his grandmother, Mama Annie, who latches the screen door when someone steps out for just a moment, all that makes up our flickering precarious joy, all that we want to protect, is lifted into the light in this moving book. Stones becomes an ode to Young's home places and his dear departed, and to what of them - of us - poetry can save.

With My Back to the World engages with the paintings and writings of Agnes Martin, the celebrated abstract artist, in ways that open up new modes of expression, expanding the scope of what art, poetry, and the human mind can do. Filled with surprise and insight, wit and profundity, the book explores the nature of the self, of existence, life and death, grief and depression, time and space. Strikingly original, fluidly strange, Victoria Chang's new collection is a book that speaks to how we see and are seen.

Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics - of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience.

Library of Small Catastrophes, Alison Rollins's ambitious debut collection, interrogates the body and nation as storehouses of countless tragedies. Drawing from Jorge Luis Borges's fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to offer a lyric history of the ways in which we process loss. "Memory is about the future, not the past", she writes, and rather than shying away from the anger, anxiety, and mourning of her narrators, Rollins's poetry seeks to challenge the status quo.

Immerse Yourself in the Raw and Transformative Verses of "Poetic Contemplation II" Dive into the immersive world of "Poetic Contemplation II," the much-anticipated sequel that transcends poetry, offering a profound journey through the author's own struggles and triumphs. This collection of free verse poetry is not just words on a page; it's a testament to resilience and a beacon for those seeking inspiration. Author Topher Pike bares his soul, sharing the real and raw experiences that have shaped his journey. As you delve into each poem, you'll be drawn into a world where every verse is a ...

La misteriosa visita de un cuervo parlante a la casa de un amante afligido, y del lento descenso hacia la locura de este último. El amante, que a menudo se ha identificado como un estudiante, llora la pérdida de su amada, Leonora. El cuervo negro, posado sobre un busto de Palas Atenea, parece azuzar su sufrimiento con la constante repetición de las palabras «Nunca más».

Butcher is a book about love & loss—about being unapologetic and transparent in grief. Natasha finds an unexpected solace in the kitchen after losing her best friend and brother, Marcus. Here, using the cuts of the cow as a metaphor Miller explores addiction, family & tragedy.

Over four decades, Carolyn Forché's visionary work has reinvigorated poetry's power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to each other. Her first new collection in 17 years, In the Lateness of the World is a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death.

A Sand Book is a poetry collection in 12 parts, a travel guide that migrates from wildfires to hurricanes, tweety bird to the president, lust to aridity, desertification to prophecy, and mother to daughter. It explores the negative space of what is happening to language and to consciousness in our strange and desperate times.

Heartbreak and grief touch every soul at least once in a lifetime, and Ranata Suzuki translates those raw emotions into words. The Longest Night combines strikingly poignant quotations, powerfully emotive poetry, and captivating silhouette imagery to form a mournful lover's journal that explores a side of love that is deep, dark, and hauntingly beautiful.

In the searing poems of his new collection, Twice Alive, the Pulitzer Prize-winner Forrest Gander addresses the exigencies of our historical moment and the intimacies, personal and environmental, that bind us to others and to the world. Drawing from his training in geology and his immersion in Sangam literary traditions, Gander invests these poems with an emotional intensity that illuminates our deep-tangled interrelations.

I Had A Brother Once is a brilliant, genre-defying work - both memoir and epic poem - about the struggle for wisdom, grace, and ritual in the face of unspeakable loss. Adam is forced to re-remember a brother he thought he knew and to reckon with a ghost, confronting his unsettled family history, his distant relationship with tradition and faith, and his desperate need to understand an event that always slides just out of his grasp.