poetry
10/10 poetry books i recommend to everyone, whether they’re poetry lovers and readers or want to start getting into poetry.
Items in this hypelist
LGBT
Time Is a Mother
Ocean Vuong · 2023
"Take your time with these poems, and return to them often.” —The Washington Post<br/><br/>The New York Times-bestselling collection of poems from the award-winning writer Ocean Vuong<br/><br/>How else do we return to ourselves but to fold<br/>The page so it points to the good part<br/><br/>In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of personal and social loss, embodying the paradox of sitting in 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 the meaning of family and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, these poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.<br/><br/>The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize, and a 2019 MacArthur fellowship, Vuong writes directly to our humanity without losing sight of the current moment. These poems represent a more innovative and daring experimentation with language and form, illuminating how the themes we perennially live in and question are truly inexhaustible. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time Is a Mother is a return and a forging forth all at once.
The Backwater Sermons
Jay Hulme · 2021
Don't Call Us Dead
Danez Smith · 2017
Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality--the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood--and a diagnosis of HIV positive. Some of us are killed / in pieces, Smith writes, some of us all at once. Don't Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America--Dear White America--where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.
Content Warning: Everything
Akwaeke Emezi · 2022
War of the Foxes
Richard Siken · 2015
West Wind
Mary Oliver · 1997
Homie
Danez Smith · 2020
Mules of Love
Ellen Bass · 2002
Balancing heart-intelligent intimacy and surprising humor, the poems in Ellen Bass's Mules of Love illuminate the essential dynamics of our lives: family, community, sexual love, joy, loss, religion and death. The poems also explore the darker aspects of humanity--personal, cultural, historical and environmental violence--all of which are handled with compassion and grace. Bass's poetic gift is her ability to commiserate with others afflicted by similar hungers and grief. Her poem "Insomnia" concludes: "may something/ comfort you--a mockingbird, a breeze, rain/ on the roof, Chopin's Nocturnes, the thought/ of your child's birth, a kiss,/ or even me--in my chilly kitchen/ with my coat on--thinking of you."
Howl, and Other Poems
Allen Ginsberg · 1956
Night sky with exit wounds
Ocean Vuong · 2016
BIPOC
Time Is a Mother
Ocean Vuong · 2023
"Take your time with these poems, and return to them often.” —The Washington Post<br/><br/>The New York Times-bestselling collection of poems from the award-winning writer Ocean Vuong<br/><br/>How else do we return to ourselves but to fold<br/>The page so it points to the good part<br/><br/>In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of personal and social loss, embodying the paradox of sitting in 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 the meaning of family and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, these poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.<br/><br/>The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize, and a 2019 MacArthur fellowship, Vuong writes directly to our humanity without losing sight of the current moment. These poems represent a more innovative and daring experimentation with language and form, illuminating how the themes we perennially live in and question are truly inexhaustible. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time Is a Mother is a return and a forging forth all at once.
The Poetry of Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda · 2005
The Poetry of Pablo Neruda offers the most comprehensive English-language collection ever by "the greatest poet of the twentieth century--in any language" (Gabriel García Márquez).<br/><br/>"In his work a continent awakens to consciousness." So wrote the Swedish Academy in awarding the Nobel Prize to Pablo Neruda, the author of more than thirty-five books of poetry and one of Latin America's most revered writers, lionized during his lifetime as "the people's poet."<br/><br/>This selection of Neruda's poetry, the most comprehensive single volume available in English, presents nearly six hundred poems, scores of them in new and sometimes multiple translations, and many accompanied by the Spanish original. In his introduction, Ilan Stavans situates Neruda in his native milieu as well as in a contemporary English-language one, and a group of new translations by leading poets testifies to Neruda's enduring, vibrant legacy among English-speaking writers and readers today.
The Cinnamon Peeler
Michael Ondaatje · 2011
All the Blood Involved in Love
Maya Marshall · 2022
<p>Marshall’s poems traverse familial mythography to investigate contemporary politics, Blackness, reproductive justice, and the stakes of race and interracial partnership, queerness, and love. With an unflinching seriousness she interrogates womanhood, meditates on race and queerness, and considers the monetary, mental, and physical costs of adopting or birthing a Black child.<br></p>
This Way to the Sugar
Hieu Minh Nguyen · 2014
Content Warning: Everything
Akwaeke Emezi · 2022
Homie
Danez Smith · 2020
Night sky with exit wounds
Ocean Vuong · 2016
Blessing The Boats
Lucille Clifton · 2000
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head
Warsan Shire · 2021
Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear
Mosab Abu Toha · 2022
Whereas
Layli Long Soldier · 2017
Don't Call Us Dead
Danez Smith · 2017
Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality--the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood--and a diagnosis of HIV positive. Some of us are killed / in pieces, Smith writes, some of us all at once. Don't Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America--Dear White America--where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.
Soft Science
Franny Choi · 2019
The Weary Blues
Langston Hughes · 1926
Water
Rumi · 2025
Reading
The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde · 2000
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Fady Joudah · 2024
Forest of Noise
Mosab Abu Toha · 2024
women
Goblin Market
Christina Rossetti · 1997
Soft Science
Franny Choi · 2019
Whereas
Layli Long Soldier · 2017
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head
Warsan Shire · 2021
Blessing The Boats
Lucille Clifton · 2000
All the Blood Involved in Love
Maya Marshall · 2022
<p>Marshall’s poems traverse familial mythography to investigate contemporary politics, Blackness, reproductive justice, and the stakes of race and interracial partnership, queerness, and love. With an unflinching seriousness she interrogates womanhood, meditates on race and queerness, and considers the monetary, mental, and physical costs of adopting or birthing a Black child.<br></p>
Mules of Love
Ellen Bass · 2002
Balancing heart-intelligent intimacy and surprising humor, the poems in Ellen Bass's Mules of Love illuminate the essential dynamics of our lives: family, community, sexual love, joy, loss, religion and death. The poems also explore the darker aspects of humanity--personal, cultural, historical and environmental violence--all of which are handled with compassion and grace. Bass's poetic gift is her ability to commiserate with others afflicted by similar hungers and grief. Her poem "Insomnia" concludes: "may something/ comfort you--a mockingbird, a breeze, rain/ on the roof, Chopin's Nocturnes, the thought/ of your child's birth, a kiss,/ or even me--in my chilly kitchen/ with my coat on--thinking of you."
West Wind
Mary Oliver · 1997
The Wild Iris
Louise Glück · 1992
Useless Magic
Florence Welch · 2018
Goldenrod
Maggie Smith · 2021
Uncategorized
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge · 1836
