Grief Poetry

Immerse yourself in this award-winning book, recognized with 14 prestigious awards.The Lilacs I Once Knew is a collection of poems by Friddie Stoleru, born in 1919 in Bucharest, Romania. At 18, Friddie married a charming, charismatic scientist named Freddy; but their union was tragically short. Just two weeks after the wedding, Freddy disappeared, and Friddie was unjustly accused of a crime she had never committed. She spent nine years in a Romanian prison, followed by four years in a communist labor camp. Despite the harsh and inhumane conditions, Friddie found solace in writing poetry. ...

Instagram superstar and poet Nikita Gill shares a collection of poems crafted as the world went into lockdown, tackling themes such as mental health and loneliness, and the precarity of hope. Through the life cycle of a star, she invites the listener to feel connected to the universe, taking us on a journey through the five stages of grief to the five stages of hope.

Celebrating James Tate’s work as it transcends convention, time, and everything that tells us, “No, you can’t do that,” Hell, I Love Everybody gives us the poet at his best, his most intimate, hopeful, inventive, and brilliant. John Ashbery called Tate the “poet of possibilities,” and this collection records forays into possibilities for American poetry’s future. With a foreword by Terrance Hayes, it is sure to give listeners new and old a lasting collection of favorites.

From Finnish saunas and soppy otters to grief, grandparents and Kellogg's anti-masturbation pants, Slug is a book which holds a mirror lovingly up to the world, past and present, through Hollie's driving, funny, hopeful poetry and prose. Slug is about the human condition: of birth and death and how we manage the possibilities in between.

A raw and unedited collection of essays, poems and letters to an alcoholic father. This book explores the evolving feelings of growing up in the shaddow of an addiction. Francisca's first published book is a glimpse of 3 decades of living, loving and understanding a man and grieving the loss of a father at different stages of her life. Sometimes an ode, sometimes a monologue, and many times an angry letter, the author seeks to navigate a life that cannot be changed, but that can certainly be understood and accepted. This book is an invitation to explore the unspoken, invisible turmoil that ...

Kae Tempest is one of the most exciting and innovative performers to have emerged in spoken-word poetry in many years; her dramatic poem "Brand New Ancients" won the prestigious Ted Hughes Prize for innovation in poetry. Tempest's wholly unique blend of street poetry, rap, and storytelling - combined with the spellbinding delivery of an open-air revivalist - has won her legions of followers all over the UK. Her remarkable stage presence is wholly audible in this poem, a spoken story written to be told with live music.

The witch: supernaturally powerful, inscrutably independent, and now - indestructible. These moving, relatable poems encourage resilience and embolden women to take control of their own stories. Enemies try to judge, oppress, and marginalize her, but the witch doesn't burn in this one.

Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics - of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience.

Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, 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, tender, daring, and insightful - the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.

Over four decades, Carolyn Forché's visionary work has reinvigorated poetry's power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to each other. Her first new collection in 17 years, In the Lateness of the World is a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death.

A poet often writes about the world around him/her or the world within. This is where the inspiration comes from, where his/her perspective and imagination are colored. When a dog or two, (or three or four), enters a poet’s life, either by choice or by accident, they tend to sneak into the poet’s poems, either as the subject or part of the landscape of the poem, like a bark in the distance or a low howl at your feet begging for a bone. For Ronald j Palmer, these are those poems. Dogged is a tender celebration of the bond between human and dog, an elegant lament to nature, time, and ...

Dive between the borders of ruined and radical love with this lyrical poetry collection that explores topics as expansive as divorce, the first Black Bachelorette, and the art world. Stanzas shift between reverence to irreverence as they take us on a journey through institutional and historical pains alongside sensuality and queer, Black joys.

Countee Cullen was already a prominent literary figure when he published Color, his auspicious debut collection of poetry. In deceptively simple verse, and in harmony with lyric tradition rather than rebellion against it, Cullen covered such complex terrain as race, faith, mortality, sexuality, and identity. Cullen may be less well known today than his contemporaries, but his emotional candor, creative ambition, and impudent humor retain an unforgettable spark.

Drawing inspiration from the art of Kintsugi, the Japanese technique of mending broken pottery with gold, Carol beautifully weaves together the shattered fragments of her heart, transforming them into a life worth living. Divided into three sections, "Shattered", "In Pieces", and "Making Broken Beautiful", this book of poems chronicles the full spectrum of the grieving experience. With raw honesty, Carol illuminates the pain and loneliness that accompany loss, the disorienting struggle to adapt to a changed world, and the gentle steps towards self-discovery.

Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes, in the first powerfully elegiac section, a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the US border with Mexico. The poems of the third section - a moving transcription of Gander’s efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer’s - rise like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation.

Renowned for his inventive mind, ambitious play with language, and dexterity with a wide range of tones and styles, John Ashbery has been a major artistic figure in the cultural life of our time. Parallel Movement of the Hands gathers unpublished, book-length projects and long poems written between 1993 and 2007, along with one (as yet) undated work, to showcase Ashbery’s diverse and multifaceted artistic obsessions and sources, such as children’s literature, cliff-hanger cinema reels, silent films, and classical music variations by Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny.

La misteriosa visita de un cuervo parlante a la casa de un amante afligido, y del lento descenso hacia la locura de este último. El amante, que a menudo se ha identificado como un estudiante, llora la pérdida de su amada, Leonora. El cuervo negro, posado sobre un busto de Palas Atenea, parece azuzar su sufrimiento con la constante repetición de las palabras «Nunca más».

A young Latinx poet grappling with loneliness and heartache decides one day to bring Tejano pop star Selena Quintanilla back to life. The séance kicks off an uncanny trip narrated by a Greek chorus of gossiping spirits as she journeys through a dead celebrity prom, encounters her shadow self, and performs karaoke in hell.

In Big Man Katie Kemple creates a portrait of fatherhood in the shadow of loss: the untimely death of partners, unresolved trauma as a veteran, and chronic pain. Kemple shows a father moving forward despite it all with the generosity and grace to love and be loved. He's the teacher who gives hitchhiking students a lift to the mall, the dad who chaperones Girl Scout fieldtrips, the husband who clings to the last flame of his wife's life. A man who stayed open to "rocks, sea glass, / shells and pinecones. Small things we / might have passed into his big hands."

The Life of a Wannabe Mogul: Mental Disarray, Bella Thorne’s collection of illuminating and inspiring poems chronicles her personal struggles, relationships, and wild-child lifestyle, all with her trademark wit and wisdom.