This month, we’re shining a light on the wide range of poetry books we have in our collection. If your first impulse is to mutter something negative, consider that many of your favorite vocal songs are poetry. I’ve learned to control the Pavlovian response caused by my high school English teachers who chose verse by long-dead poets writing in an arcane language about unrelatable subjects.
Poetry, like music, is personal and our collection at the Library has something for everyone.
For adults, we have some new titles from distinguished poets, that range from a deep love of nature, to a call for reconciliation and healing.
Publisher’s Summary: In Oceanic, Aimee Nezhukumatathil hums a bright blue note—a sensuous love song to the Earth and its inhabitants. Oceanic is both a title and an ethos of radical inclusion, inviting in the grief of an elephant, the icy eyes of a scallop, “the ribs / of a silver silo,” and the bright flash of painted fingernails. With unmatched sincerity, Oceanic speaks to each reader as a cooperative part of the natural world—the extraordinary neighborhood to which we all belong. This is a poet ecstatically, emphatically, naming what it means to love a world in peril.
The Fix by Lisa Wells, Iowa Poetry Prize winner. Publisher’s Summary: Poems about a woman’s reckoning with her violent past, with her sexuality, and with a future unmoored from the trappings of domestic life. These poems of unflinching candor negotiate the terrain of contradictory desire often to darkly comedic effect. In encounters with strangers in dive bars and on highway shoulders, and through ekphrastic engagement with visionaries like William Blake, Još Clemente Orozco, and the Talking Heads, this book seeks the real beneath the dissembling surface. Here, nothing is fixed, but grace arrives by diving into the complicated past in order to find a way to live, now.
In his volume, Indecency, by Justin Phillip Reed “experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice, and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, violent, daring, and insightful, the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex, and unmask the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.” (Publisher’s Summary)
planting gardens in graves volume one by the Instagram star, r. h. sin, is “a collection of poems about relationships, love, pain, perseverance, self-care and self-love. Documenting unhealthy relationships and why the heart ends up in the hands of those deemed unworthy, this collection speaks to the heart’s ability to hold on to relationships that no longer deserve our energy, as well as what happens when we are ready to let go.” (Publisher’s Summary)
Here’s a small sampling of other new titles in our adult collection. Just click on each book to learn more about them.
Adolescents have a wide variety of titles and topics to choose from as well.
Time You Let Me In 25 Poets Under 25 – poems by selected by Naomi Shihab Nye
Time You Let Me In 25 Poets Under 25 – poems by selected by Naomi Shihab Nye
Publisher’s Summary: They are inspiring talented stunning remarkable wise
They are also fearless depressed hilarious impatient in love out of love pissed off
And they want you to let them in.
Here are some other titles for Young Adults:
And of course, there are so many children’s titles from Nikki Grimes, Shel Silverstein to classics such as Edgar Allen Poe and Emily Dickinson. And the topics are infinite: animals, family, plants, planets, and presidents just to name a few. Here are just a few:
If these titles don’t hook you, then come in and browse the non-fiction section for titles starting with 811 in the adult, young adult, or children’s shelves.
Whether you are are hoping to find a verse to reflect your affection, an aching loss, a need for humor, or express your stand against oppression, you’ll find it here.
Happy Reading! Susan C.
The O'Fallon Public Library News 