The Number One Guide for Poetry Beginners
Celebrate National Poetry Month!
Do you have an admiration for poetry but are intimidated on where to start? Don’t be! Need a little extra push to discovering poetry and book recommendations? Let April's National Poetry Month be the perfect excuse. We have assembled a jumping off point, a guide for poetry beginners.
From classics to modern day poets, you'll dive deeper and deeper into the styles of writing you prefer. From nostalgic poetry authors like T.S. Eliot to creative and moving rhythmic expressions from Rupi Kaur. Enjoy your journey!
Let your poetry literary awakening commence!
Crush
by Richard Siken - Louise Glück
The 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition: a powerful, confessional, erotic collection
Finalist for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry
Richard Siken's Crush, selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession and love. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. In the world of American poetry, Siken's voice is striking.
Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems
by Camille Paglia
National Bestseller Book
America's most provocative intellectual brings her blazing powers of analysis to the most famous poems of the Western tradition--and unearths some previously obscure verses worthy of a place in our canon. Combining close reading with a panoramic breadth of learning, Camille Paglia sharpens our understanding of poems we thought we knew, from Shakespeare to Dickinson to Plath, and makes a case for including in the canon works by Paul Blackburn, Wanda Coleman, Chuck Wachtel, Rochelle Kraut--and even Joni Mitchell. Daring, riveting, and beautifully written, Break, Blow, Burn is a modern classic that excites even seasoned poetry lovers--and continues to create generations of new ones.
Don't Call Us Dead: Poems
by Danez Smith
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection
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."
The Last Night of the Earth Poems
by Charles Bukowski
"The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles."--Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author
In The Last Night of the Earth Poems, Charles Bukowski's gritty poems deal with writing, death and immortality, literature, city life, illness, war, and the past.
Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman - Billy Collins - Peter Davison
Ralph Waldo Emerson issued a call for a great poet to capture and immortalize the unique American experience. In 1855, an answer came with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
Today, this masterful collection remains not only a seminal event in American literature but also the incomparable achievement of one of America's greatest poets--an exuberant, passionate man who loved his country and wrote of it as no other has ever done. Walt Whitman was a singer, thinker, visionary, and citizen extraordinaire. Thoreau called Whitman "probably the greatest democrat that ever lived," and Emerson judged Leaves of Grass as “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed.”
Life on Mars
by Tracy K Smith
Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize
* Poet Laureate of the United States *
* A New York Times Notable Book of 2011 and New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice *
* A New Yorker, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year *
With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence.
The Odyssey
by Homer Homer - Emily Wilson
Composed at the rosy-fingered dawn of world literature almost three millennia ago, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty and power; about marriage and family; about travelers, hospitality, and the yearning for home.
This fresh, authoritative translation captures the beauty of this ancient poem as well as the drama of its narrative. Its characters are unforgettable, none more so than the "complicated" hero himself, a man of many disguises, many tricks, and many moods, who emerges in this version as a more fully rounded human being than ever before.
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
by T S Eliot - Edward Gorey
T.S. Eliot pays tribute to "Mr. Mistoffelees, " "The Run Tum Tugger, " "Macavity: The Mystery Cat, " and a variety of other cats in this engaging collection of humorous poems. Originally composed to amuse Mr. Eliot's intimate friends, to whom they were sent anonymously, these verses have proven irresistible to cat lovers, lovers of nonsense, and admirers of T.S. Eliot throughout the English-speaking world.
Milk and Honey
by Rupi Kaur
#1 New York Times bestseller milk and honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. About the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity.
The book is divided into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose. Deals with a different pain. Heals a different heartache. milk and honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.
Where the Sidewalk Ends: Poems and Drawings
by Shel Silverstein - Shel Silverstein
If you are a dreamer, come in, If you are a dreamer, A wisher, a liarA hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer...Come in... for where the sidewalk ends, Shel Silverstein's world begins. You'll meet a boy who turns into a TV set, and a girl who eats a whale. The Unicorn and the Bloath live there, and so does Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout who will not take the garbage out. It is a place where you wash your shadow and plant diamond gardens, a place where shoes fly, sisters are auctioned off, and crocodiles go to the dentist.
Shel Silverstein's masterful collection of poems and drawings is at once outrageously funny and profound.
Beginner's Guide to Japanese Haiku: Major Works by Japan's Best-Loved Poets - From Basho and Issa to Ryokan and Santoka, with Works by Six Women Poets
by William Scott Wilson - Steven Heine
This comprehensive introduction to Japan's best-loved haiku poets is the perfect book for anyone wanting to learn about haiku. Compiled and with commentary by renowned author and translator William Scott Wilson, the book features 26 poets and 550 haiku, exquisitely translated. Wilson takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the works of the major Japanese poets from the fifteenth century up to the present.