Grief Poetry

In the early 1990s, eight people living in a small conservative Florida town alleged that Dr. David Acer, their dentist, infected them with HIV. David's gayness, along with his sickly appearance from his own AIDS-related illness, made him the perfect scapegoat and victim of mob mentality. In these early years of the AIDS epidemic, when transmission was little understood, and homophobia rampant, people like David were villainized. Accuser Kimberly Bergalis landed a People magazine cover story, while others went on talk shows and made front page news.

The Perseverance is the remarkable debut book by British-Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus. Ranging across history and continents, these poems operate in the spaces in between, their haunting lyrics creating new, hybrid territories. The Perseverance is a book of loss, contested language and praise, where elegies for the poet's father sit alongside meditations on the d/Deaf experience.

This book is an attempt to create something beautiful from this chaos; to make sense of the things we dare not breathe to life. Focusing on loss, heartbreak, mental health, and the impact of isolation on a tired mind, these poems are the starlings that gather above the water. This book is the hope that we can learn to heal; that the future can survive the past.

There are many facets to love. It can be all-embracing, passionate, fulfilling, platonic. And when this love is shattered, it gives rise to anguish, hate, anger, jealously, and melancholy. There are times when such powerful emotions must be expressed, for to keep them bottled up inside can render one senseless and unbalanced. What better way to find release than through the age-old medium of poetry? It is the author’s sincere hope that her poetry will bring solace to others who have endured the same tumultuous experiences with love and heartache. Perhaps the sharing of her words will ...

I often think about our youth. It was indeed a strangely shaped toy, with a short body dragging a very long tail, spreading like wings, refusing to leave. A lamp is still on, but a song has been sung. A play has not ended, a love has reached the end of the road. We salute you. And the new curtain is about to be drawn. Maybe that's what human life is like, ending, starting, starting again, then ending. No matter what, we have to shoulder our suffering and happiness, moving forward, don't turn around.

On Being Human is a compilation of original poems by Ghazala Alam. Written in modern Urdu and English, each poem is introduced by an English preamble detailing her inspirations and insights. Accompanied by English transliteration, her poetry is informed by her experiences as an immigrant, woman, and a person of color.

Temp jobs, conspiracy theories, squatters, talk therapy, urban gardening, the robot revolution: this collection fixes its eye on the strangeness of labor, through poems that are searching, keen, and wry. The virtuosic central sequence explores the untimely death of the poet’s estranged father, a handyman and addict, and the brothers left to sort through the detritus of a life long lost to them. Through lyrical, darkly humorous vignettes, Kunz asks what it costs to build a home and a love that not only lasts but sustains.

Smoke is a collection of poems written over the course of two years. It is portrait of grief and the courage it takes to sit with it. It is an account of what it feels like to be intimate with sadness and loneliness. It is a portrait of healing. Smoke is documentation of growth and its grueling processes. It begins in grief and ends in joy. It is a book where the black girl rescues herself.

What if grief could become a wild invitation into a practice of radical open-heartedness and intimacy with the world and all of life? That is the question bestselling author and licensed psychotherapist, Annalise Oatman, explores in this collection of poetic diary entries. Unpretentious and characteristically confessional, this collection continually finds the universal within the personal, and finds that the essence of eroticism is a tender reaching towards all that is "outside" oneself.

Widely known as the master of horror, Edgar Allan Poe has held the world enraptured for more than 150 years with his dark and powerful works. This collection will sweep you away into a world of literary brilliance.

Drum-Taps is a collection of poetry written by Walt Whitman during the American Civil War and first published in 1865. Drum-Taps contains poems that bear witness to the violence of war.

The Back of Your Pickup: Poems of Love, Loss, and the Roads That Never Led Home. I remember the summer heat sticking to my skin, the radio humming a song we half-knew, and your hand tapping the steering wheel like you had nowhere to be but everywhere to go. The back of your pickup wasn’t just a truck bed—it was a church, a confessional, a place where love was whispered under a sky too big for the things we couldn’t say. The Back of Your Pickup is a collection of poetry that lingers in the spaces between love and loss, between leaving and staying, between who we were and who we became.

Stephen C. Pollock's poetry collection Exits explores the beauty and frailty of life, the cycles of nature, and the promise of renewal. Musical and multilayered, the poems in Exits have drawn comparisons to the poetry of Seamus Heaney and the sonnets of William Shakespeare.

In these poems, Kleber-Diggs names delight in the same breath as loss. Moments suffused with love—teaching his daughter how to drive; watching his grandmother bake a cake; waking beside his beloved to ponder trumpet mechanics—couple with moments of wrenching grief—a father’s life ended by a gun; mourning children draped around their mother’s waist; Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. Even in the refuge-space of dreams, a man calls the police on his Black neighbor.

Clara Jean Beaman Walker was the third of seven children born to Cora and Clarence Beaman in Knoxville, TN, in 1910. Considered to be “Little Mother” by her siblings, she always gave her best to her birth family and to the family she created with her husband, John Albert Walker. Three sons came from this union: Johnny, Clarence, and Henry. A teacher at heart, Jean saw each child before her and helped them navigate home economics, English, and realizing their potential.

If you've ever experienced heartbreak, Diana Townsend's I Thought I Missed Him is a poetry collection you won't want to miss. With brutal honesty and unflinching emotion, Townsend delves into the toxic and often destructive emotions that arise when a relationship comes to an end. But this isn't just a collection of poems about pain and heartache. I Thought I Missed Him is a journey of self-discovery and self-reflection, as Townsend grapples with the complexities of moving on from someone she once loved. In these pages, you'll find moments of clarity and vulnerability, as well as a rawness ...

In these poems of holding and letting go, Mapother isn't afraid to plumb the depths. Just when you think you can't breathe, she breaks the surface, with you in her gentle hands. In her own words, each line is an homage to the scars that form us.

Brooks Haxton has been writing for years about the connections between human beings and the creatures we find fascinating. Mister Toebones, his new collection, draws its title from a nickname Haxton gives to a daddy longlegs he sees at his father's grave. In another poem, the poet and his mother, in search of a swimming hole, find a copperhead rearing to strike, about to birth its live young. Elsewhere, waist-deep in the Mississippi River, under the Atlantic Ocean, on the cracked ice of a frozen pond, even in outer space, the poet explores forces that seem past endurance.

If Ollie Schminkey’s Dead Dad Jokes asks the question, “What was it like to watch my father die?”, Where I Dry the Flowers asks “How did watching someone die teach me how to live?” This unrestrained and raw sophomore collection explores themes of grief, healing, and forgiveness while refusing to sacrifice the hard truths that come with addiction, caretaking, and the death of a loved one. Ollie opens their heart to listeners and tells them that these emotions are okay, no matter how conflicting and confusing they may be.

From the author's leather-bound book kept locked at the base of his bed, we journey through New York City, chilled farmlands and isolated cabins in the woods. Calloway's solid masculine approach is refreshingly original. We have all felt the warmth of the world around us and we have all felt the cold. This author holds our hand as he leads us down rich passageways of the psyche.