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.

With Love, Grief and Fury contains love poems, for people and the planet; grief poems brimming with compassion, sharing tears and mourning what was and contemplating what could be; and poems of fire and fury that will kick some ass, tell the truth and inspire change and hope. Over thirty years after she first stormed the UK poetry scene, the trailblazing and award-winning writer Salena Godden has produced her most audacious and definitive collection to date. Like a big sister’s arm around your shoulder, With Love, Grief and Fury is important and nourishing for the soul.

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.

From the bestselling author of Pillow Thoughts and Watering the Soul comes another deeply honest and moving collection of poetry and prose that explores the strength and resilience we embody in the face of hardship and change. Presented in six captivating sections—Reflecting, Repairing, Change, Awakening, Emerging, and Rebirth—Time Will Tell tells the story of a curious, lost soul who crashed down to Earth on the search for purpose.

Set in three sections, Robert Wood Lynn explores interior uncertainty, interpersonal uncertainty and uncertainty at a larger scale. These narrative poems, influenced by storytelling traditions, find themselves at the nexus of the intimate and the humorous, as well as the absurd and the tragic. These poems examine isolation and grief in their many forms—through heartbreak or the death of loved ones, or show us the world looking back at itself after it ends.

Our quoted authority is not the people in white coats but those with a quill, a heart and a soul that can take these feelings of love and loss and with the ink of words put to verse feelings and emotions that can be re-lived and shared by all. As they venture through depression, war, slavery to heartache and the loss of loved ones our eyes may mist and tears gently fall at what collectively we have done, have experienced, have witnessed and lost.

Afterwards is a book about the things that come after trauma. It encompasses the different kinds of grief–primarily the loss of a friend to suicide, but also the loss of an important relationship, and dealing with some loss related to family. There are frank discussions of mental illness and the spectrum of emotions that come with moving forward.

Joseph Luzzi's harrowing story of his wife's sudden death in a car accident and how Dante's The Divine Comedy helped him to endure his grief, raise their infant daughter, and rediscover love. Where do we turn when we lose everything? In 2007 Joseph Luzzi's wife Katherine was eight and a half months pregnant when she was involved in a fatal car accident. Their daughter, Isabel, was delivered by emergency C-section and somehow survived, even while her mother could not.

The powerful new collection of poetry and prose from social media’s answer to Carol Ann Duffy, Charly Cox. She Must Be Mad explores coming-of-age: the pain and beauty of love, the relief and the agony of turning from girl to woman, the isolation of an untethered mind and the power and subjugation of the body. Charly captures the formative experiences of today’s young women from the poignant to the prosaic in writing that is at once witty, wry and heartfelt.

Innermost is a collection of both free-verse and fixed-verse poetry written over a period of half a decade about every emotion felt inside the human heart. These poems will transport you to a whole other world within the innermost depths of the human soul.

Expressing love is the primary spiritual function of our being alive. Animals bring out the love we have inside, and provide a constant loving presence that is especially painful to lose. In poems and messages from "Oneness," Infinite Healing expresses words to aid in healing grief, and in knowing that our animal companions heal us in life, and then after physical life in timelessness.

From NPR correspondent and New York Times bestselling author, Kwame Alexander, comes a powerful and provocative collection of poems that cut to the heart of the entrenched racism and oppression in America and eloquently explores ongoing events.

A book of poetry and song lyrics by Joe Lyon. In "Poetry is Cool," the author invites listeners to explore a lifetime's worth of lyrics and poems, meticulously crafted over fifty years. This collection spans from 1979 to the present, touching on themes of living, aging, love, family, after-life, and reflecting on life's journey. Through heartfelt and authentic expressions, the author captures the real and imagined landscapes of their experiences, preserving these works as a testament to their existence. This compilation serves as a reminder that, once, there was a voice, a mind, and a heart that felt deeply and expressed those feelings through the timeless art of poetry.

Soul Speaking is a collection of emotional poetry straight from the soul. Every human emotion from love to hate, joy to grief, celebrating newfound friendships to healing from toxic people, is captured in these free verse poems. Whether these words haunt you or heal you, their beauty, depth, and power will certainly never leave you.

I am divine, sitting upon my throne, time’s pedestal, waiting — baiting. My venomous tales tear at life’s seams, desecrating freedom. Your illusions awaken. Your eyes grace my design. I am madness. Journey into the shadows of the soul, where darkness and light intertwine in a dance of raw emotion and profound revelation. Divine Madness: A Dark Poetry Collection beckons you into the depths of the human psyche, inviting you to explore the turbulent landscapes of the mind and embrace the haunting allure of poetic madness.

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."

A gorgeous collection of poems exploring womanhood, sisterhood, love, loss, and longing, for people who find catharsis in poems, or people who have always wanted to read or listen to poetry, but don’t know where to start.

To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die. In recent years non-religious funerals have become more common, but without an established canon of texts to fall back on, it can be difficult to plan an appropriate service for a loved one who had no religious belief or connections. Texts recommended by secular humanists, especially modern texts, can sometimes sound trite or overly informal.

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.

Written during the first nine months of the Covid-19 lockdowns, Wisps of Life is a work of heart. The lonely heart. The grieving heart. The hopeful heart. The joyful heart reunited. It is dreams. Dreams on hold. Dreams come true. Dreams reborn. It is the memory of dreams. It is a study in being human. We human thinkers have been around for thousands of generations. We are the products of infinite permutations of culture, religion, civilization, and perception. Yet, there have only ever been a handful of emotions to go around.