Category
Poetry / Poems
82nd Division 2025
The poems in *82nd Division*, written in various forms including the villanelle, sonnet, blues poem, duplex, ode, and dramatic monologue, among many others, are collectively a love song to the author’s native Nigeria—a former British colony.
In the book, whose title poem chronicles the lives of...
Above Ground 2026
Clint Smith’s vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions....
The Cinnamon Peeler 1997
The Cinnamon Peeler brings together poems written between 1963 and 1990, including work from his most recent collection, Secular Love. These poems bear witness to the extraordinary gifts that have won high praise for this truly original poet and novelist.
Citizen 2014
Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the...
Counting Descent 2016
In the intricate tapestry of Counting Descent, Clint Smith expertly navigates the nuances of belonging and dissonance. Through his poetic lens, he guides us through the labyrinthine experience of being part of a community that fiercely and unapologetically celebrates the richness of black humanity....
This luminous collection demonstrates Momaday’s mastery and love of language and the matters closest to his heart. To Momaday, words are sacred; language is power. Spanning nearly fifty years, the poems gathered here illuminate the human condition, Momaday’s connection to his Kiowa roots, and his...
Through poems that grow out of his profound understanding of the subtle complexities of life and relationships, of how we lose and find ourselves, Michael Ondaatje navigates his own past, beginning with memories of distant landscapes, remembrances of his childhood in Sri Lanka and his eccentric...
In this widely celebrated debut collection of poems, Natasha Trethewey draws moving domestic portraits of families, past and present, caught in the act of earning a living and managing their households. Small moments taken from a labor-filled day--and rendered here in graceful and readable...
Claudia Rankine’s second poetry collection, The End of the Alphabet, is an inquiry into despair and recovery, selfhood and alienation. Centered on a heroine named Jane, these poems—obsessive, intrepid, erotic—speak in the aftermath of a life-altering tragedy, attempting to make peace with loss and...
Although highly regarded as a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and drama, N. Scott Momaday considers himself primarily a poet. This first book of his poems to be published in over a decade, Again the Far Morning comprises a varied selection of new work along with the best from his four earlier books...
Gay Girl Prayers 2024
A collection of poetry reclaiming Catholic prayers and biblical passages to empower girls, women, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.
The extreme level of sass in Emily Austin's Gay Girl Prayers does not mean that this collection is irreverent. On the contrary, in rewriting Bible verses to...
Handwriting 2000
Handwriting is Michael Ondaatje's first new book of poetry since The Cinnamon Peeler. The exquisite poems collected here draw on history, mythology, landscape, and personal memories to weave a rich tapestry of images that reveal the longing for--and expose the anguish over--lost loves, homes, and...
Here to Stay 2024
A lush tapestry of poetry and prose, Here to Stay is an invitation to engage with a new field of contemporary American poetry. “I cannot separate my work from my undocumented identity.” —Aline Mello
From the indomitable writers and activists Janine Joseph, Esther Lin, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo...
At age fifteen, Barbara Fant tragically lost her mother, and her world was suddenly upended. “I became an angry teenager. I was mad at the world,” she recalls. “I even stopped praying, but I began to write. Poetry became my way of communication, my way of processing ... it became my way to pray.”...
Monument 2019
Layering joy and urgent defiance―against physical and cultural erasure, against white supremacy whether intangible or graven in stone―Trethewey’s work gives pedestal and witness to unsung icons. Monument, Trethewey’s first retrospective, draws together verse that delineates the stories of working...
A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection—a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and houses hold archival material for one another, tracing paths between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Boundaries and borders blur between space and time and poetic form—small banal moments of daily life...
Native Guard 2007
Through elegaic verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South—where one of the first black regiments, The Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War.
The title of the collection...
Characterized by “a radical simplicity and seriousness of purpose, along with a fearless interest in autobiography and its tragedies and redemptions” (Matthew Zapruder, New York Times Magazine), Marie Howe’s poetry transforms penetrating observations of everyday life into sacred, humane...
The New Testament 2014
In the world of Jericho Brown's second book, disease runs through the body, violence runs through the neighborhood, memories run through the mind, trauma runs through generations. Almost eerily quiet in even the bluntest of poems, Brown gives us the ache of a throat that has yet to say the hardest...
Appalachian Elegy 2012
Author, activist, feminist, teacher, and artist bell hooks is celebrated as one of the nation's leading intellectuals. Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, hooks drew her unique pseudonym from the name of her grandmother, an intelligent and strong-willed African American woman who inspired her to stand...
With echoes of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, an extraordinary debut collection from a prize-winning poet that chronicles a Black woman’s journey through disability, the byzantine healthcare system, life-giving, taking, and sacrifice.
With breathtaking...
Stolen Flower 2025
From a trailblazing poet, a trilingual narrative in verse that bears witness to a devastating crime and testifies to the power of collective defiance.
In 2007, Mexican soldiers raped and left for dead a seventy-three-year-old Indigenous Nahua woman, Ernestina Ascencio Rosario, as she worked in her...
Thrall 2015
Natasha Trethewey’s poems are at once deeply personal and historical―exploring her own interracial and complicated roots―and utterly American, connecting them to ours. The daughter of a black mother and white father, a student of history and of the Deep South, she is inspired by everything from...
The Tradition 2019
Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation?...
Two Minds 2025
Does loss define us, or do we define loss? Tracing the duality of grief as it reverberates through a family, Callie Siskel wrestles with questions of identity and inheritance in precise, lucid poetry.
Two Minds indulges and therefore exposes the vanity of turning private pain into art and the...
Written from the heart, When Angels Speak of Love is a book of fifty love poems by bell hooks, one our most beloved public intellectuals, and author of over twenty books, including the bestselling All About Love. Poem after poem, hooks challenges our views and experiences with love—tracing the links...
Wild 2024
Freedom is the most precious commodity in the world. In this powerful collection, the celebrated novelist, essayist, dramatist, and poet Ben Okri explores the beauty contained in each one of us—the freedom of our spirit, the child within. He recalls the death of his father, the sacrifices of his...
Following several of his internationally acclaimed novels, A Year of Last Things is Michael Ondaatje’s long-awaited return to poetry. In pieces that are sometimes witty, sometimes moving, and always wise, we journey back through time by way of alchemical leaps, unearthing writings by revered...
Azucena 2025
M. de Gracia Concepcion explores the affective landscape of the Philippine diaspora in this classic collection, which was the first book of poetry to be published by a Filipino writer in the United States.
Azucena established Concepcion's national reputation in the 1920s, but it has remained out of...
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Above Ground March 10, 2026
Clint Smith’s vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions....
The Distance of a Shout February 24, 2026
Through poems that grow out of his profound understanding of the subtle complexities of life and relationships, of how we lose and find ourselves, Michael Ondaatje navigates his own past, beginning with memories of distant landscapes, remembrances of his childhood in Sri Lanka and his eccentric...
Two Minds December 9, 2025
Does loss define us, or do we define loss? Tracing the duality of grief as it reverberates through a family, Callie Siskel wrestles with questions of identity and inheritance in precise, lucid poetry.
Two Minds indulges and therefore exposes the vanity of turning private pain into art and the...
Azucena December 9, 2025
M. de Gracia Concepcion explores the affective landscape of the Philippine diaspora in this classic collection, which was the first book of poetry to be published by a Filipino writer in the United States.
Azucena established Concepcion's national reputation in the 1920s, but it has remained out of...
82nd Division December 2, 2025
The poems in *82nd Division*, written in various forms including the villanelle, sonnet, blues poem, duplex, ode, and dramatic monologue, among many others, are collectively a love song to the author’s native Nigeria—a former British colony.
In the book, whose title poem chronicles the lives of...
New and Selected Poems November 18, 2025
Characterized by “a radical simplicity and seriousness of purpose, along with a fearless interest in autobiography and its tragedies and redemptions” (Matthew Zapruder, New York Times Magazine), Marie Howe’s poetry transforms penetrating observations of everyday life into sacred, humane...
Stolen Flower November 18, 2025
From a trailblazing poet, a trilingual narrative in verse that bears witness to a devastating crime and testifies to the power of collective defiance.
In 2007, Mexican soldiers raped and left for dead a seventy-three-year-old Indigenous Nahua woman, Ernestina Ascencio Rosario, as she worked in her...
Joy in the Belly of a Riot September 2, 2025
At age fifteen, Barbara Fant tragically lost her mother, and her world was suddenly upended. “I became an angry teenager. I was mad at the world,” she recalls. “I even stopped praying, but I began to write. Poetry became my way of communication, my way of processing ... it became my way to pray.”...
Wild October 22, 2024
Freedom is the most precious commodity in the world. In this powerful collection, the celebrated novelist, essayist, dramatist, and poet Ben Okri explores the beauty contained in each one of us—the freedom of our spirit, the child within. He recalls the death of his father, the sacrifices of his...
Here to Stay September 3, 2024
A lush tapestry of poetry and prose, Here to Stay is an invitation to engage with a new field of contemporary American poetry. “I cannot separate my work from my undocumented identity.” —Aline Mello
From the indomitable writers and activists Janine Joseph, Esther Lin, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo...
The Span of a Small Forever April 2, 2024
With echoes of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, an extraordinary debut collection from a prize-winning poet that chronicles a Black woman’s journey through disability, the byzantine healthcare system, life-giving, taking, and sacrifice.
With breathtaking...
A Year of Last Things March 19, 2024
Following several of his internationally acclaimed novels, A Year of Last Things is Michael Ondaatje’s long-awaited return to poetry. In pieces that are sometimes witty, sometimes moving, and always wise, we journey back through time by way of alchemical leaps, unearthing writings by revered...
The Moon That Turns You Back March 12, 2024
A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection—a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and houses hold archival material for one another, tracing paths between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Boundaries and borders blur between space and time and poetic form—small banal moments of daily life...
Gay Girl Prayers March 1, 2024
A collection of poetry reclaiming Catholic prayers and biblical passages to empower girls, women, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.
The extreme level of sass in Emily Austin's Gay Girl Prayers does not mean that this collection is irreverent. On the contrary, in rewriting Bible verses to...
The Death of Sitting Bear October 25, 2022
This luminous collection demonstrates Momaday’s mastery and love of language and the matters closest to his heart. To Momaday, words are sacred; language is power. Spanning nearly fifty years, the poems gathered here illuminate the human condition, Momaday’s connection to his Kiowa roots, and his...
Monument November 5, 2019
Layering joy and urgent defiance―against physical and cultural erasure, against white supremacy whether intangible or graven in stone―Trethewey’s work gives pedestal and witness to unsung icons. Monument, Trethewey’s first retrospective, draws together verse that delineates the stories of working...
The Tradition April 2, 2019
Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation?...
Counting Descent September 20, 2016
In the intricate tapestry of Counting Descent, Clint Smith expertly navigates the nuances of belonging and dissonance. Through his poetic lens, he guides us through the labyrinthine experience of being part of a community that fiercely and unapologetically celebrates the richness of black humanity....
Thrall September 22, 2015
Natasha Trethewey’s poems are at once deeply personal and historical―exploring her own interracial and complicated roots―and utterly American, connecting them to ours. The daughter of a black mother and white father, a student of history and of the Deep South, she is inspired by everything from...
The End of the Alphabet July 14, 2015
Claudia Rankine’s second poetry collection, The End of the Alphabet, is an inquiry into despair and recovery, selfhood and alienation. Centered on a heroine named Jane, these poems—obsessive, intrepid, erotic—speak in the aftermath of a life-altering tragedy, attempting to make peace with loss and...
Citizen October 7, 2014
Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the...
The New Testament September 16, 2014
In the world of Jericho Brown's second book, disease runs through the body, violence runs through the neighborhood, memories run through the mind, trauma runs through generations. Almost eerily quiet in even the bluntest of poems, Brown gives us the ache of a throat that has yet to say the hardest...
Again the Far Morning July 1, 2013
Although highly regarded as a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and drama, N. Scott Momaday considers himself primarily a poet. This first book of his poems to be published in over a decade, Again the Far Morning comprises a varied selection of new work along with the best from his four earlier books...
Appalachian Elegy September 28, 2012
Author, activist, feminist, teacher, and artist bell hooks is celebrated as one of the nation's leading intellectuals. Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, hooks drew her unique pseudonym from the name of her grandmother, an intelligent and strong-willed African American woman who inspired her to stand...
When Angels Speak of Love February 5, 2011
Written from the heart, When Angels Speak of Love is a book of fifty love poems by bell hooks, one our most beloved public intellectuals, and author of over twenty books, including the bestselling All About Love. Poem after poem, hooks challenges our views and experiences with love—tracing the links...
Native Guard April 3, 2007
Through elegaic verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South—where one of the first black regiments, The Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War.
The title of the collection...
Handwriting March 14, 2000
Handwriting is Michael Ondaatje's first new book of poetry since The Cinnamon Peeler. The exquisite poems collected here draw on history, mythology, landscape, and personal memories to weave a rich tapestry of images that reveal the longing for--and expose the anguish over--lost loves, homes, and...
The Cinnamon Peeler January 28, 1997
The Cinnamon Peeler brings together poems written between 1963 and 1990, including work from his most recent collection, Secular Love. These poems bear witness to the extraordinary gifts that have won high praise for this truly original poet and novelist.