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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Here I Throw Down My Heart
The poems in Here I Throw Down My Heart prompt readers to see beyond the surface of images, whether that surface is a uniform, a prescribed setting, a familiar geography, or the surface that evokes the most social commentary, skin--the body itself. The modern world moves at a greater speed than the world of a few generations ago, so we look for ways to sort our likes and dislikes, to set our comfort zones. These poems say: "don't believe everything you see, look again." The poems look at how borders between countries, or between genders and class have deepened the lines between the haves and have-nots. While everyone is on a collision course for lack of food and water, those dividing lines seem more impenetrable than ever, underscoring the disparity between gender, race, and class. (syndetics)
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Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
"Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Identified as "far and away, this country's best selling poet" by Dwight Garner, she now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years. Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver's work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015."-- Provided by publisher.
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Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency
"In his highly anticipated second collection, Chen Chen continues his investigation of family, both blood and chosen, examining what one inherits and what one invents, as a queer Asian American living through an era of Trump, mass shootings, and the COVID-19 pandemic"-- Provided by publisher.
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Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow
"In this defiant and urgent collection, Palestinian American poet Noor Hindi explores Arab womanhood, migration, colonialism, and queerness with evocative lyricism."--Back cover.
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It Was Never Going to Be Okay
"it was never going to be okay is a collection of poetry and prose exploring the intimacies of understanding intergenerational trauma, Indigeneity and queerness, while addressing Urban Indigenous Diaspora and breaking down the limitations of sexual understanding as a trans woman. As a way to move from the linear timeline of healing and coming to terms with how trauma does not exist in subsequent happenings, it was never going to be okay tries to breakdown years of silence in their debut collection of poetry: i am five my sisters are saying boy i do not know what the word means but-- i am bruised into knowing it: the blunt b, the hollowness of the o, the blade of y."-- Provided by publisher.
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How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons): Poetry
In her second poetry collection, Barbara Kingsolver offers reflections on the practical, the spiritual, and the wild. She begins with "how to" poems addressing everyday matters such as being hopeful, married, divorced; shearing a sheep; praying to unreliable gods; doing nothing at all; and of course, flying. Next come rafts of poems about making peace (or not) with the complicated bonds of friendship and family, and making peace (or not) with death, in the many ways it finds us. Some poems reflect on the redemptive powers of art and poetry itself; others consider where everything begins. Closing the book are poems that celebrate natural wonders--birdsong and ghost-flowers, ruthless ants, clever shellfish, coral reefs, deadly deserts, and thousand-year-old beech trees--all speaking to the daring project of belonging to an untamed world beyond ourselves.
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To 2040
"Jorie Graham's fifteenth poetry collection, To 2040, opens in a question punctuated as fact: "Are we / extinct yet. Who owns / the map." In these visionary new poems, Graham is part historian, part cartographer as she plots an apocalyptic world where rain must be translated, silence sings louder than speech, and wired birds parrot recordings of their extinct ancestors. In one poem, the speaker is warned by a clairvoyant that "the American experiment will end in 2030." Graham shows us multiple potential futures--soundtracked by sirens among the ruins, contemplating the loss of those species who inhabited them and those who named them."-- Author's website.
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The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes on
"Many have called our time dystopian. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples. With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time--from Korean comfort women during World War II, to the precipice of climate crisis, to children wandering a museum in the future. They explore narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal. Wrestling with the griefs and distances of this apocalyptic world, Choi also imagines what togetherness--between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest--could look like. Bringing together Choi's signature speculative imagination with even greater musicality than her previous work, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On ultimately charts new paths toward hope""--Front dust jacket flap.
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Happily: A Personal History, With Fairy Tales
"The literary tradition of the fairy tale has long endured as the vehicle by which we interrogate the laws of reality. These fantastical stories, populated with wolves, kings, and wicked witches, have throughout history served as a template for understanding culture, society, and that muddy terrain we call our collective human psyche. In Happily, Sabrina Orah Mark reimagines the modern fairy tale, turning it inside out and searching it for the wisdom to better understand our contemporary moment in what Mark so incisively calls "this strange American weather." Set against the backdrop of political upheaval, viral plague, social protest, and climate change, Mark locates the magic in the mundane and illuminates the surreality of life as we know it today. In "Sorry Peter Pan, We're Over You," Mark grapples with a loss of innocence when her son decides he would rather dress up as Martin Luther King, Jr., than Peter Pan for Halloween; in "The Evil Stepmother" Mark finds unlikely communion with wicked wives and examines the roots of their bad reputation; and in "Rapunzel, Draft One Thousand," the hunt for a wig maker in a time of unprecedented civil unrest forces Mark to finally confront her sister's cancer diagnosis and the stories we tell ourselves to get by"-- Provided by publisher.
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You Are Only Just Beginning: Lessons for the Journey Ahead
This illustrated collection of poetry empowers you to embrace your next adventure with confidence and grace, drawing on valuable lessons from nature.
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