National Poetry Month is an annual celebration of poets and their craft, and this week we’re featuring some of our favorite recent poetry titles available at Collins Library. These collections showcase the unique and powerful ways that poetry has been used to explore a multitude of human experience and respond to pressing social issues. Search for these titles and many more in Primo to discover a new favorite verse!
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song edited by Kevin Young
An ambitious anthology of Black poetry, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the present. This volume also features biographies of each poet and notes that illuminate cultural references and allusions to historical events.
HULL by Xandria Phillips
Phillips’ debut collection explores emotional impacts of colonialism and racism on the Black queer body and the present-day emotional impacts of enslavement in urban, rural, and international settings. Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry.
New Poets of Native Nations edited by Heid E. Erdrich
This anthology gathers poets of diverse ages, styles, languages, and tribal affiliations to present the extraordinary range and power of new Native poetry. Heid E. Erdrich has selected twenty-one poets whose first books were published after the year 2000 to highlight the exciting works coming up after Joy Harjo and Sherman Alexie. Collected here are long narratives, political outcries, experimental works, and traditional lyrics.
Homie: poems by Danez Smith
From the publisher: Danez Smith’s third poetry collection is a “magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer…. Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez’s friends and for you and for yours.”
Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
In her fourth collection of poetry, Nezhukumatathil writes a love song to the earth and its inhabitants. Oceanic is both a title and an ethos of radical inclusion, studying forms of love as diverse and abundant as the ocean itself and speaking to the reader as a cooperative part of the earth, an extraordinary neighborhood to which we all belong.
Eye Level: poems by Jenny Xie
Xie’s award-winning debut takes us far and near, to Phnom Penh, Corfu, Hanoi, New York, and elsewhere, as we travel closer and closer to the acutely felt solitude that centers this searching, moving collection. Animated by a restless inner questioning, these poems meditate on the forces that moor the self and set it in motion, from immigration to travel to estranging losses and departures.