Poetry

NPR Best Books of 2019
Chicago Tribune Best Books of 2019
Chicago Review of Books Best Poetry Book of 2019
O Magazine Best Books by Women of Summer 2019
The Millions Must-Read Poetry of June 2019
LitHub Most Anticipated Reads of Summer 2019

The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots comprising the nation's Red Summer, has shaped the last century but is not widely discussed. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event--which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries--through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history, and illuminates the thin line between the past and the present.

The New York Times-bestselling collection of poems from celebrated poet Mary Oliver

In A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has come to define her life's work, transporting us to the marshland and coastline of her beloved home, Provincetown, Massachusetts. Whether studying the leaves of a tree or mourning her treasured dog Percy, Oliver is open to the teachings contained in the smallest of moments and explores with startling clarity, humor, and kindness the mysteries of our daily experience.

"There isn't a flaw or misstep or a lack of humility on a single page. . . . I invite you to turn to just one page, to any page, and to let what's there wash over you with its beauty, its clarity, its precision, and its delicately balanced emotional weight." --Ted Kooser

"Robert Hedin is one of the quietest, most spiritually sensate poets of our time." --Olga Broumas

"Every poem is a creation myth," writes poet Robert Hedin. This long overdue retrospective, spanning forty years of patient and painstaking work, highlights Hedin's original poems, translations of Norwegian poets, and includes the aphoristic essay "Field Notes." Hedin's poems--elegant, spare, and devoid of artifice--detail themes of Midwestern life, the natural world, ocean liners, and airships. A profound, essential volume.

Unable to Write, I Decide to Move Out with the Finches

This morning I'm going to drag my desk
Out into the backyard and set it down
By the birdbath, near the flowerbed
Overgrown with weeds. And the black
Leather armchair where I like to read
I'll lug out under the two young maples,
Along with the Persian rug, the tall
Goose-necked lamp, the books, the CDs,
Even the huge unruly fern in the corner.
I'm going to haul it all outside, out
Into the open air where it's quiet,
Where I won't be bothered . . .

Robert Hedin is the Founding Director of the Anderson Center for the Arts, and author of eight books of poetry and several translations from the Norwegian. He lives in Red Wing, Minnesota.

A best-selling volume of Pablo Neruda's poetry in an English-Spanish edition.

Pablo Neruda is one of the world's most popular poets, and in The Book of Questions, Neruda refuses to be corralled by the rational mind. Composed of 316 unanswerable questions, these poems integrate the wonder of a child with the experiences of an adult. By turns Orphic, comic, surreal, and poignant, Neruda's questions lead the reader beyond reason into realms of intuition and pure imagination.

This complete translation of Pablo Neruda's El libro de las preguntas (The Book of Questions) features Neruda's original Spanish-language poems alongside William O'Daly's English translations. In his introduction O'Daly, who has translated eight volumes of Pablo Neruda's poetry, writes, "These poems, more so than any of Neruda's other work, remind us that living in a state of visionary surrender to the elemental questions, free of the quiet desperation of clinging too tightly to answers, may be our greatest act of faith."

When Neruda died in 1973, The Book of Questions was one of eight unpublished poetry manuscripts that lay on his desk. In it, Neruda achieves a deeper vulnerability and vision than in his earlier work-and this unique book is a testament to everything that made Neruda an artist.

"Neruda's questions evoke pictures that make sense on a visual level before the reader can grasp them on a literal one. The effect is mildly dazzling [and] O'Daly's translations achieve a tone that is both meditative and spontaneous." --Publishers Weekly

Pablo Neruda, born in southern Chile, led a life charged with poetic and political activity. He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the International Peace Prize, and served as Chile's ambassador to several countries, including Burma, France, and Argentina. He died in 1973.

II.

Tell me, is the rose naked
or is that her only dress?

Why do trees conceal
the splendor of their roots?

Who hears the regrets
of the thieving automobile?

Is there anything in the world sadder
than a train standing in the rain?

XIV.

And what did the rubies say
standing before the juice of pomegranates?

Why doesn't Thursday talk itself
into coming after Friday?

Who shouted with glee
when the color blue was born?

Why does the earth grieve
when the violets appear?

Here, for the first time, is a complete collection of Langston Hughes's poetry - 860 poems that sound the heartbeat of black life in America during five turbulent decades, from the 1920s through the 1960s. The editors, Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, have aimed to recover all of the poems that Hughes published in his lifetime - in newspapers, magazines, and literary journals, and in his books of verse. They present the poems in the general order in which Hughes wrote them, and also provide illuminating notes and a chronology of the poet's life. Arnold Rampersad, the author of the esteemed two-volume biography of Langston Hughes, has written a perceptive and moving introduction that throws light on Langston Hughes's distinctive voice as a poet and the world in which he lived.

Illus. in black-and-white. This classic collection of poetry is available in
a handsome new gift edition that includes seven additional poems written after
"The Dream Keeper" was first published. In a larger format, featuring
Brian Pinkney's scratchboard art on every spread, Hughes's inspirational
message to young people is as relevant today as it was in 1932. "There's no
better way to show kids what poetry is about than to share this
collection."-- "Booklist."

"The Essential W.S. Merwin beautifully demonstrates why Merwin has been one of America's most decorated and important poets for more than 60 years."--The Washington Post

"Merwin is one of the great poets of our age."--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Merwin has become instantly recognizable on the page; he has made for himself that most difficult of all creations, an accomplished style."--Helen Vendler, New York Review of Books

"It is gratifying to read poetry that is this ambitious, that cares about vision and the possibilities of poetry, by a poet who is capable of so much change."--The Nation

The Essential W.S. Merwin traces a poetic legacy that has changed the landscape of American letters: seven decades of audacity, rigor, and candor distilled into one definite volume curated to represent the very best works from a vast oeuvre, from his 1952 debut, A Mask for Janus, to 2016's Garden Time. The Essential W.S. Merwin includes favorite poems from two Pulitzer Prize-winning volumes; a selection of iconic translations; and lesser-known prose narratives. As the formalism of Merwin's early work loosens into the open, unpunctuated style he developed later in his career--when urgent times demanded innovative modes of expression--readers can trace the evolution of one voice's commitment to moral, spiritual, and aesthetic inquiry. Across the decades, beyond headlines, policies, and trends, W.S. Merwin's poems point to the lessons that hide in the shadows of sentience.

"Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time."--W.S. Merwin

Noah's Raven

Why should I have returned?

My knowledge would not fit into theirs.

I found untouched the desert of the unknown,

Big enough for my feet. It is my home.

It is always beyond them. The future

Splits the present with the echo of my voice.

Hoarse with fulfillment. I never made promises.

Since launching his career by winning the Yale Younger Poets Award 1952, W. S. Merwin has authored dozens of books of poetry, prose, and translation. A beloved voice in American literature, Merwin is a former U.S. Poet Laureate and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Hawaii, within the palm forest where he wrote, "On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree."

Feed is the fourth book in the Teebs tetralogy. It's an epistolary recipe for the main character, a poem of nourishment, and a jaunty walk through New York's High Line park, with the lines, stanzas, paragraphs, dialogue, and registers approximating the park's cultivated gardens of wildness. Among its questions, Feed asks what's the difference between being alone and being lonely? Can you ever really be friends with an ex? How do you make perfect mac & cheese? Feed is an ode of reconciliation to the wild inconsistencies of a northeast spring, a frustrating season of back-and-forth, of thaw and blizzard, but with a faith that even amidst the mess, it knows where it's going.

"When an author's unmitigated brilliance shows up on every page, it's tempting to skip a description and just say, Read this! Such is the case with this breathlessly powerful, deceptively breezy book of poetry." --Booklist, Starred Review

In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It's a book about a mother's death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author's black friends wanted to listen to "Don't Stop Believin'." It's about wrestling with histories, personal and shared. Abdurraqib uses touchstones from the world outside--from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor's dogs--to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility.

Poetry. To hold on to what is in motion, or to persist at being in motion (not inert!): these are the twin goals of Ball's poems. HOLD SWAY reckons with the presence of menace or threat in daily life, even in moments when all seems well enough, or when things look beautiful. Climate anxiety, numbing corporate manipulations of our attention, crimes on both a personal and a grand scale (like being someone's knife-point hostage, or filming the police after they have killed a suspect, or the Paris attacks, or the pollution of the oceans...): all are tangled up with how to live one's American life (raising children, losing a marriage, watching tv--) as Ball seeks "a footing in hope, ... a stay."

Winner of the Coretta Scott King illustrator award, I, Too, Am America blends the poetic wisdom of Langston Hughes with visionary illustrations from Bryan Collier in this inspirational picture book that carries the promise of equality.

I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Langston Hughes was a courageous voice of his time, and his authentic call for equality still rings true today. Beautiful paintings from Barack Obama illustrator Bryan Collier accompany and reinvent the celebrated lines of the poem I, Too, creating a breathtaking reminder to all Americans that we are united despite our differences.

This picture book of Langston Hughes's celebrated poem, I, Too, Am America, is also a Common Core Text Exemplar for Poetry.

In Praise of Fragments is a collection of various and inter-related works, including a sequence of poems written about Venetian Jewish poet Sarra Copia Sulam (1592-1641), lyric essays about Venice, a suite of poems about Hyderabad, where Alexander lived for many years, and a series of brief sketches of memoir about her childhood in Kerala, the subject of her groundbreaking memoir Fault Lines. The writings are accompanied by a series of sumi ink drawings by Alexander and an afterword by Leah Suffrant.

"Kooser . . . must be the most accessible and enjoyable major poet in America. His lines are so clear and simple." --Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

"Nothing escapes him; everything is illuminated." --Library Journal

"Will one day rank alongside of Edgar Lee Masters, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams." --Minneapolis Tribune

"Kooser's ability to discover the smallest detail and render it remarkable is a rare gift." --The Bloomsbury Review

Four decades of poetry--and a generous selection of new work--make up this extraordinary collection by Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Kooser. Firmly rooted in the landscapes of the Midwest, Kooser's poetry succeeds in finding the emotional resonances within the ordinary. Kooser's language of quiet intensity trains itself on the intricacies of human relationships, as well as the animals and objects that make up our days. As Poetry magazine said of his work, "Kooser documents the dignities, habits, and small griefs of daily life, our hunger for connection, our struggle to find balance."

From "March 2"

Patchy clouds and windy.
All morning
our house has been flashing in and out of shade
like a signal, and far across the waves of grass
a neighbor's house has answered,
offering help.

Ted Kooser is the author of eleven collections of poetry, including Delights & Shadows, which won the Pulitzer Prize. He served as the Poet Laureate of the United States, and is a visiting professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

One of America's most celebrated poets challenges us with this powerful and deeply personal collection of verse that speaks to the injustices of society while illuminating the depths of her own heart.

For more than thirty years, Nikki Giovanni's poetry has inspired, enlightened, and dazzled readers. As sharp and outspoken as ever, this artist long hailed as a healer and a sage returns with this profound book of poetry in which she continues to call attention to injustice and give readers an unfiltered look into the most private parts of herself.

In Make Me Rain, she celebrates her loved ones and unapologetically declares her pride in her black heritage, while exploring the enduring impact of the twin sins of racism and white nationalism. Giovanni reaffirms her place as a uniquely vibrant and relevant American voice with poems such as "I Come from Athletes" and "Rainy Days"--calling out segregation and Donald Trump; as well as "Unloved (for Aunt Cleota)" and ""When I Could No Longer"--her personal elegy for the relatives who saved her from an abusive home life.

Stirring, provocative, and resonant, the poems in Make Me Rain pierce the heart and nourish the soul.

There is no better time to curl up in a comfortable chair and read than in wintertime. And winter has been a powerful muse for many of America's best loved poets. The elegant patterns of frost on a windowpane, a child on a sled, a lone fox foraging for food on a desolate landscape, the comic smile of a snowman, the sobering sight of an unkempt man huddled against the cold, or a pair of red slippers glimpsed in a shop window in a gray, windy sleet have all provided inspiration for poems that sustain and renew us.

A Mind of Winter collects thirty-two of the most moving poems on the experience of winter. Illustrated throughout with elegant period woodcuts by Thomas Nason, the poems range from the great classics-James Russell Lowell's The First Snow Fall and John Greenleaf Whittier's Snow-Bound-to the more contemporary, free form, and diverse-Rafael Campo's Begging for Change in Winter and Gertrude Schnackenberg's The Paperweight.

While all the poets focus on the experience of winter as their theme, each provides us with an illuminating glimpse of winter's subtle forms. Marge Piercy is grateful on New Year's Day for all she has been given; Mary Oliver observes the cruel Darwinian reality of nature; Peter Davison muses on the irony of a snowless New England; and Robert Frost is surprised by joy while out for a walk on a winter's day. Each reminds us, in the words of Wallace Stevens, that one must have a mind of winter/to regard the frost and the boughs/of the pine-trees crusted with snow . . .

Contributors include: Rosanna Warren, Emily Dickinson, Richard Wilbur, Angelina Weld Grimké, Amy Lowell, Charles Simic, Peter Davison, Mary Oliver, Sylvia Plath, Marge Piercy, James Merrill, and Maxine Kumin.

Following the Pulitzer prize-winning collection Stag's Leap, Sharon Olds gives us a stunning book of odes. Opening with the powerful and tender "Ode to the Hymen," Olds addresses and embodies, in this age-old poetic form, many aspects of love and gender and sexual politics in a collection that is centered on the body and its structures and pleasures. The poems extend parts of her narrative as a daughter, mother, wife, lover, friend, and poet of conscience that will be familiar from earlier collections, each episode and memory burnished by the wisdom and grace and humor of looking back. In such poems as "Ode to My Sister," "Ode of Broken Loyalty," "Ode to My Whiteness," "Blow Job Ode," and "Ode to the Last Thirty-Eight Trees in New York City Visible from This Window," Olds treats us to an intimate examination that, like all her work, is universal, by turns searing and charming in its honesty. From the bodily joys and sorrows of childhood to the deaths of those dearest to us, Olds shapes the world in language that is startlingly fresh, profound in its conclusions, and life-giving for the reader.

Robert Burns (1759 - 1796) called himself "an Aeolian harp strung to every wind of heaven." His first volume of poems, entitled Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, was published in 1786. An immediate success, it established Burns's poetic reputation, which has grown over two centuries to the point where he is not only the Scottish national poet but the object of a cult unique in British poetry.
The present volume contains 43 of his finest poems and songs, reprinted unabridged from an authoritative tenth-century edition. Included are "The Twa Dogs," a deft satire of the Scottish upper classes; "To a Mouse," one of the poet's best known, most charming works; "Address to the Unco Guid," an attack on Puritan hypocrisy; "Holy Willie's Prayer," one of the great verse-satires of all times; as well as such favorites as "The Cotter's Saturday Night," "To a Mountain Daisy," "The Holy Fair," "Address to the Deil," "The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie," and many more.
In addition to his poetic undertakings, Burns almost single-handedly preserved and revived the traditional Scottish song, and this volume includes a rich selection of these works: "A Red, Red Rose," "Auld Lang Syne," "Comin' thro' the Rye," "My Heart's in the Highlands," "My Love, She's But a Lassie Yet," and a host of others.

"The hard-won achievement of a lifetime." -- Wall Street Journal

"When I was twelve I wrote my first poem, and by fourteen I decided that's what I'd do my whole life. I don't regret it." -- from the afterword by Donald Hall

Donald Hall was an American master, one of the nation's most beloved and accomplished poets. Here, in his eighties, having taken stock of the body of his work--rigorous, gorgeous verse that is the result of seventy years of "ambition and pleasure"--he strips it down.

The Selected Poems of Donald Hall reflects the poet's handpicked, concise selection, showcasing work rich with humor and Eros and "a kind of simplicity that succeeds in engaging the reader in the first few lines" (Billy Collins).

From the enduring "My Son My Executioner" to "Names of Horses" to "Without," Donald Hall's best poems deliver "a banquet in the mouth" (Charles Simic) and an "aching elegance" (Baltimore Sun). For the first-time reader or an old friend, these are, above all others, the poems to read, reread, and remember.

Self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, and one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. This essential reader showcases her indelible contributions to intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies in twelve landmark essays and more than sixty poems--selected and introduced by one of our most powerful contemporary voices on race and gender, Roxane Gay.

Among the essays included here are:

"The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action"

"The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House"

"I Am Your Sister"

Excerpts from the American Book Award-winning A Burst of Light

The poems are drawn from Lorde's nine volumes, including The Black Unicorn and National Book Award finalist From a Land Where Other People Live. Among them are:

"Martha"

"A Litany for Survival"

"Sister Outsider"

"Making Love to Concrete"

#1 on the Poetry Foundation Bestseller List; a Michigan Notable Book; a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist.

"A beautifully mysterious inquiry."--Booklist

"Songs of Unreason, Harrison's latest collection of poetry, is a wonderful defense of the possibilities of living."--The Industrial Worker Book Review

"As in all good poetry, Harrison's lines linger to be ruminated upon a third or fourth time, with each new reading revealing more substance and raising more questions."--Library Journal

Jim Harrison's compelling and provocative Songs of Unreason explores what it means to inhabit the world in atavistic, primitive, and totemistic ways. "This can be disturbing to the learned," Harrison admits. Using interconnected suites, brief lyrics, and rollicking narratives, Harrison's passions and concerns--creeks, thickets, time's effervescence, familiar love--emerge by turns painful and celebratory, localized and exiled.

From "Suite to Unreason":

Where's my medicine bag? It's either hiddenor doesn't exist. Inside are memories of earth: corn pollen, a bear claw, an umbilical cord. If they exist they help me ride the darkheavens of this life. Such fragile wings.

Jim Harrison is the author of thirty books, including Legends of the Fall and River Swimmer, and has served as the food columnist for Esquire. Harrison divides his time between Montana and southern Arizona.

"Ted Kooser must be the most accessible and enjoyable major poet in America. His lines are so clear and simple." --Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

"Readers [of Splitting an Order] will find 'characters' both strange and wonderful, animal or human. There is a sense that time is passing quickly and that everything worthy must be captured and savored." --Library Journal, starred review

"Kooser's ability to discover the smallest detail and render it remarkable is a rare gift." --Bloomsbury Review

Hailed by Library Journal as "a master of the single-metaphor poem," Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling poet Ted Kooser calls attention to the intimacies of life through commonplace objects and occurrences. This collection--ten years in the making--is rich with quiet and profound magnificence.

I like to watch an old man cutting a sandwich in half
. . . and then to see him lift half
onto the extra plate that he asked the server to bring,
and then to wait, offering the plate to his wife
while she slowly unrolls her napkin and places her spoon,
her knife and her fork in their proper places,
then smoothes the starched white napkin over her knees
and meets his eyes and holds out both old hands to him.

Ted Kooser is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including Delights and Shadows (Copper Canyon), which won the Pulitzer Prize. A former US Poet Laureate, Kooser serves as editor for "American Life in Poetry," a nationally syndicated weekly newspaper column.

A major collection of entirely new poems from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of Time and Materials and The Apple Trees at Olema

A new volume of poetry from Robert Hass is always an event. In Summer Snow, his first collection of poems since 2010, Hass further affirms his position as one of our most highly regarded living poets. Hass's trademark careful attention to the natural world, his subtle humor, and the delicate but wide-ranging eye he casts on the human experience are fully on display in his masterful collection. Touching on subjects including the poignancy of loss, the serene and resonant beauty of nature, and the mutability of desire, Hass exhibits his virtuosic abilities, expansive intellect, and tremendous readability in one of his most ambitious and formally brilliant collections to date.

"Mead ... wrote clean, spare, often elegiac lines"--The New York Times

This massive collection houses Mead's life's work: seven books spanning twenty-seven years. Follow chronologically through decades and become captivated by heartfelt muses on loss, madness, danger, grief, isolation, and self-identity. Her poems explore spaces we often try to ignore and finds a comfortable middleground. Mead candidly and openly weaves together pain and joy until it meshes into glimpses of humanity.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Cleo Wade's second anthology of heartfelt poetry and prose builds on the wisdom of her bestselling book Heart Talk, encouraging you to remain hopeful and harness your personal power to bring positive change into our world.

Where to Begin is perfect for those who are ready to be a part of building a society rooted in love, acceptance, justice, and equality.

From Cleo Wade:

Where to Begin is a collection of the ideas, mantras, and poems I turn to when I feel like I am losing it. I wrote this so that I could put them all in one place when I felt overwhelmed by worry, fear, anxiety, or helplessness.

The words in this book are what stop me from walking away from the problems of the world during tough times. They also help me stay connected to hope during difficult moments and remind me that even on the days that feel the most daunting, I still have the power to show up and do something, somewhere, in some way.

Change-making comes in all sizes. It doesn't always have to be one big gesture or nothing. As my friend Jenna often says, "The big stuff is the small stuff." Your big life is made up of a collection of all of your small moments. Our big world is a made up of a collection of all of our small actions. This book is about where to begin.