Resources
From Category: Poetry
State of Grass
By Janet MacFadyen. This poetry collection brings the topic of family trauma out of the merely confessional and into the mythic. On retreat in Ireland after her father's death, an older woman recovers her incest memories, the lineaments of her story emerging like a preserved bog body or the archaeological traces of a famine-destroyed village. The land's stark beauty and endurance create a space for her to hold her personal recovery in historical perspective, creating a fellowship with her wounded ancestors.
Not Akhmatova
By Noah Berlatsky. Playful and musical, yet weighty with paradox, this collection pairs freewheeling translations of Russian-Jewish poet Anna Akhmatova and original poems that respond to the fraught question of Jewish loyalties in the diaspora. Berlatsky shows that one doesn't have to believe in God to argue with Him. In these pages, Akhmatova is both present and absent, a figure who epitomizes her people's persecuted dead. The shape of that absence has sometimes seemed to bend Jewish identity around it like a black hole. Berlatsky recognizes that gravitational pull even as he resists it. This serious project is leavened by wry aphorisms about the ephemeral nature of poetry, and indeed life itself—a pessimistic, wisecracking sense of humor that situates Berlatsky firmly within the Judaism with which he wrestles.
Rhyheim
By Vikram Kolmannskog. Subtitled "A porn poem," this lyrical and erotic chapbook is a meditation on scenes from Black gay adult performer Rhyheim Shabazz's videos. Slow-motion, stream-of-consciousness descriptions of sexual encounters transform into moments of spiritual oneness with concepts from Hindu mysticism. As a queer man of color in predominantly white Norway, Kolmannskog finds inspiration and self-acceptance in Rhyheim's multi-racial intimate couplings. Publisher Broken Sleep Books is a small press in Wales with a working-class orientation and an interest in social justice.
Send $19.99 for Supplements and Freedom: The Chapbook
By Noah Berlatsky. This satirical chapbook of found-poetry and hybrid texts includes a pantoum based on Joe Rogan's right-wing talk radio rants, absurd diagrams and multiple-choice questions mashing up the Graduate Record Exam with The Artist's Way, and a Swinburne double sestina featuring Jordan Peterson's pronouncements about masculinity and lobsters. It's like scrolling social media while dropping acid.
Feed the Beast
By Pádraig Ó Tuama. Rage, survival, and the tentative beginning of self-love infuse this poetry chapbook about theological and sexual abuse in the Irish Catholic Church. The author was forced into "conversion therapy" for his homosexuality by a priest who molested him. Broken Sleep Books, the publisher of this collection, is a Welsh literary press with an interest in social justice and working-class themes.
Hail and Farewell
By Abby E. Murray. This incisive debut poetry collection from Perugia Press is narrated by a military wife who chafes against the isolation and patriarchal gender expectations of her role on the homefront. Combining plain-spoken heartache and biting humor, these poems explore the erasure of women's labor.
The Fight Journal
By John W. Evans. The Bible may say that love keeps no record of wrongs, but when love sours, every memory becomes an entry in a ledger of unpayable claims. This painfully honest chapbook depicts competing narratives and raw emotions in the wake of an unwanted divorce. When all the blame has been divided up, and everyone has switched sides as many times as possible, love's persistence and its failures are still both mysteries to be accepted rather than understood. Winner of the 2022 Rattle Chapbook Contest.
My First Book of Haiku Poems
Translated by Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen, illustrated by Tracy Gallup. This artistically designed, bilingual picture book features 20 poems by Japanese haiku masters such as Issa and Basho. Each poem has breathing room in its own two-page spread featuring the original Japanese verse (in script and Romaji), Ramirez-Christensen's translation, a dreamy painting reminiscent of Magritte's surreal images, and a prompt for imaginative reflection on the pairing of art and text.
Mayweed
By Frannie Lindsay. Winner of the 2009 Word Works Washington Prize, this spare and radiant poetry collection centers on acceptance of loss. Its key figures are a beloved sister who died of cancer, and their late father, a perpetrator of incest.
The Malevolent Volume
By Justin Phillip Reed. This award-winning Black queer poet's sophomore collection gives a furious and brilliant voice to the shadow side of literary classics from Homer to Plath. The syntax of this poetry collection is thorny and twisted, and the word choice demands slow re-reading to discern the full meaning and appreciate the muscular rhythm. Reed is fond of using words that could be either nouns or verbs, placing them in such a way that you would mistake one for the other until the context becomes clear. One could see this style as a political choice in keeping with the book's passionate reclaiming of Blackness as an aesthetic. Reed is asserting that he deserves the reader's close attention. He is as important, and as intellectually accomplished, as the writers in the white literary canon that these poems deconstruct with wicked cleverness.
Break Every String
By Joshua Michael Stewart. This poetic autobiography is a blues song for the dead-end economy of Midwestern towns and the family wreckage they harbor. His characters crackle with energy that could find its outlet in verses or fists, parenting your own children or stealing someone else's, a guitar or a bottle. As the one who escaped, Stewart plays through all the octaves of emotion, from gratitude to judgmental pride, to survivor guilt, to wary compassion: "of loving/the lost with raucous praise, of letting the gone go."
How to Paint a Dead Man
By Harry Bauld. With mordant wit and erudition, the poems in this chapbook dissect artistic masterpieces from Rembrandt to Basquiat, to analyze the nature of fame, genius, and mortality. Several pieces are from the perspective of cogs in the commercial art machine—docents, consumers, or anonymous assistants to the famous painter (who are actually doing most of the work). Others remix words from news stories, textbooks, and artists' monographs, as if to warn that no body of work is immune to being decomposed.
Unmonstrous
By John Allen Taylor. Bold, tender poetry chapbook depicts a Southern childhood marked by sexual abuse from his Sunday school teacher, and the grace and gratitude he finds in reclaiming his body as part of the natural world.
Position Papers
By Andrea Lawlor. This chapbook of prose-poems is a playful and uplifting manifesto for a future society where resources are shared and identities and property are held lightly. Published by Factory Hollow Press in 2016 and now out of print, it is free to download as a PDF from their website.
13th Balloon
By Mark Bibbins. This multi-layered yet accessible book-length poem is an elegy for the author's late partner, Mark Crast, one of the many casualties of the AIDS crisis at its height in the 1980s and early 90s. From the vantage point of 2020, a middle-aged gay man looks back on the ghosts of his community and surveys a youth culture that knows of the mass devastation only as history, if at all. Brief unpunctuated lines give the poem the contemporary immediacy of a social media newsfeed, while the everyday embodiments of grief have a timeless relevance.
My Dim Aviary
By Gillian Cummings. This collection of sensual prose-poems is an imagined autobiography of the model Fernande, the subject of French photographer Jean Agélou's erotic postcards in the early 20th century. Slipping gracefully between English and French, her wordplay is as elusive as a woman desired by all, understood by none.
sad boy/detective
By Sam Sax. In this innovative, sensual chapbook about a possibly-neurodivergent queer boy's coming of age, the central metaphor of "the boy detective" expresses the protagonist's separateness from, and scandalous curiosity about, human bodies and the social world they inhabit. Phenomena that everyone around him take for granted are a fascinating mystery to him. The sadness comes from the paradox that as he tries to get under the world's skin and see what it's made of, he pushes it farther away, because his probing has violated social conventions. Winner of the Spring 2014 Black River Chapbook Competition from Black Lawrence Press.
Shadow Black
By Naima Yael Tokunow. Winner of the 2019 Frontier Poetry Digital Chapbook Contest, this powerful, image-rich collection is free to read online. Tokunow combines body horror, sensual pleasure, and political urgency in these poems that rebel against the violent erasure of black female bodies.
The Cloud That Contained the Lightning
By Cynthia Lowen. Elegant and unforgiving as equations, these poems hold us accountable for living in the nuclear age. Persona poems in the voice of J. Robert Oppenheimer, "the father of the atomic bomb", reveal self-serving rationalizations and belated remorse, while other poems give voice to the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This collection is notable for exposing the emotional logic of scientific imperialism, rather than revisiting familiar scenes of the bomb's devastating effects. Winner of the National Poetry Series, selected by Nikky Finney.
Slingshot
By Cyrée Jarelle Johnson. The title of this ambitious debut collection by a black genderqueer poet-activist refers to the bikini costume they wore as a strip-club dancer, but also calls to mind the legendary weapon that young David employed against the giant Goliath. Like the Biblical youth, the narrator of these poems fights back, with brilliant style and ferocity, against seemingly insurmountable forces like racism, transphobic violence, familial abuse, and the floods that Hurricane Sandy unleashed on New York City. The propulsive force and fragmented and recombined syntax of these poems command so much attention that only at the end will you reflect, "Damn, was that a crown of sonnets?" and read it all over again.
London Undercurrents
By Joolz Sparkes and Hilaire. This collaborative collection by two British poets creates a people's history of London spanning five centuries, through persona poems in the voices of women from diverse backgrounds. Notable athletes, activists, and literary figures share these pages with imagined characters who represent factory workers, strikers, and working-class girls enjoying a hard-earned holiday. This book would be a good resource for junior high and high school history classrooms.
20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry
Edited by Safia Elhillo and Gbenga Adesina. Published as an online PDF anthology by Brittle Paper, this diverse and emotionally affecting anthology features emerging African and African-diaspora poets aged 20-35.
Divining Bones
By Charlie Bondhus. This third collection from an award-winning poet stakes its territory in the liminal spaces between male and female, fairy-tale and horror, the archetypal struggle in the psyche and the mundane (but no less dangerous) conflicts of domestic life. The presiding deity of this shadow realm is Baba Yaga, the child-eating forest witch of Eastern European folklore, who guides the narrator to embrace traits rejected by mainstream gay culture. Aging, emasculation, and the grotesque lose their stigma and become sources of transgressive power.
The Houses Along the Wall: A Pembrokeshire Poetry Cycle
By Karen Hayes. With stately cadence and tender attention to detail, this poetry chapbook imagines personal histories for a row of old houses in a Welsh seaside village, where a dwindling community depends on tourism to replace the fishing economy. The style and setting have the flavor of T.S. Eliot's "The Dry Salvages", without the philosophical pomposity.
Writing Resources for Veterans at the Iowa Review
The Iowa Review, a prestigious literary journal, has compiled a list of writing resources for military veterans. These include articles on how to run a veterans' writing workshop; journals and contests specializing in military-affiliated writers and themes; and links to workshops around the US.
House of McQueen
By Valerie Wallace. Winner of the Four Way Books Intro Prize, this poetry collection inspired by British fashion designer Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) captures the meticulousness and melancholy of his oeuvre, though lacking the messiness and horror that gave his work its raw energy. The standout quality of this book is Wallace's innovative use of erasure and recombination of found texts to produce beautifully coherent new poems, some of them in demanding forms like the sonnet sequence. Her collage aesthetic references McQueen's penchant for constructing clothes out of unlikely materials such as seashells, microscope slides, and dried flowers.
Stone. Bread. Salt.
By Norbert Hirschhorn. These wise, good-humored poems explore Jewish legends and mysticism, the blessings and pains of approaching one's ninth decade, and the author's experiences as both physician and patient.
Mosaic of the Dark
By Lisa Dordal. A Christian girl wondering where her emerging lesbian-feminist consciousness fits into her faith. A woman grappling with the legacy of her alcoholic, possibly closeted mother. In her debut collection from Black Lawrence Press, Dordal makes these "confessional" themes fresh and strange again by centering her poems on a tangential detail which, after careful rereading, telescopes out into a larger narrative. The technique is reminiscent of those close-up photo puzzles in science magazines, where you must guess the whole animal from an abstract shimmer of scales or feathers.
Saint X
By Caroline Cabrera. Winner of the Hudson Prize from Black Lawrence Press, this poetry collection creatively explores the traumas and strengths of emerging womanhood by "answering" questions from a science textbook in ambiguous and offbeat ways. Later poems about religion shed light on the initially cryptic title, positioning the book as a kind of talkback to the catechism format. The mystery of "X" is an experience to savor, not an equation to solve.
Girl Flying Kite
By Nancy Louise Lewis. The subjects of this visionary, God-haunted debut poetry collection could not be further from the innocent quotidian scene suggested by the title. In fact, the title itself is our first clue to the menace and mystery Lewis finds beneath the surface of daily life, as it refers to a child victim of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, the shadow of her last playful moments forever burned into the wall. Other poems draw inspiration from the author's Appalachian childhood, stories of father-daughter incest, and enigmatic encounters with a divinity whose presence we can neither completely discount nor rely on. Lewis is most at home in the liminal space between belief and doubt, like the constantly eroding and re-forming shoreline of the ocean that appears in many of these works.
Café Crazy
By Francine Witte. In this tough-minded, bluesy poetry collection, the narrator cuts her no-account alcoholic ex-husband down to size—and curbs her lingering desire for him—by contextualizing their relationship within nature's larger creative and destructive patterns, from forest fires to mass extinctions. "Charley" is just another predator, and not an apex one, at that. Witte's portmanteau words give the poems a distinctive voice and an improvisational quality: bees are "sticky with flowersex", and humans "go along futurestupid", like any other species unable to predict the meteor strike with their number on it.
Inside/Out
By Joseph Osmundson. This daring flash memoir, which can also be classified as a prose-poem collection, looks from multiple angles at the arc of an emotionally abusive relationship between the white author and his African-American ex-lover. Like a mosaic of broken mirror fragments, each sliver of memory reflects larger themes of exclusion, power exchange, personal and collective trauma, and the nature of intimacy, raising as many questions as it answers.
Don’t Call Us Dead
By Danez Smith. "Every day is a funeral & a miracle" in this award-winning poet and performance artist's second collection, a defiant record of life as a black gay man under the twin shadows of police violence and HIV. The pervasive image of blood links these poems and the boys, alive and dead, for whom Smith speaks: blood as kinship, as bearer of the memory of dangerous intimacy, as evidence of murders that white America wants to wipe away. Smith's honors include a Lambda Literary Award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.
3arabi Song
By Zeina Hashem Beck. Winner of the 2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize, this Lebanese poet in exile keeps her heritage alive through lyrical tributes to famous singers of the Arab world. These multi-lingual poems weave together phrases in English, French, Italian, Arabic, and the new hybrid language Arabizi, a creation of the younger generation to represent Arabic sounds in English-character text messages. These poems are hopeful elegies, political dance tunes, nostalgic manifestos.
Calling a Wolf a Wolf
By Kaveh Akbar. This fierce, dazzling debut poetry collection describes the difficult path out of alcoholism and into the disciplined joy of being present in the moment. Simultaneously self-lacerating and grandiose, the speaker leaps from one aphoristic observation to another, through the ecstasies of Islamic mysticism, his devouring relationships with lovers both male and female, and self-annihilation as the ultimate extreme of pleasure. Yet he discovers that sobriety has its own nearly unbearable intensity, the rupture of his isolation by genuine connection with others.
A Field Guide to Falling
By em jollie. This poetry collection is like a stained-glass cathedral window: even in scenes of suffering, the glorious colors give joy and uplift. Much of the book processes the aftermath of breaking up with a beloved woman, though at the end, the narrator seems to find a new beginning with another partner and a greater sense of herself as complete and sufficient. But this therapeutic summary can't do justice to the mystical meaning of her journey. The speaker bravely walks up to the edge of everything we consider permanent, looks into the clouds swirling above the bottomless gulf, and finds a way to praise their ever-changing shapes. These poems imply that the value of falling--in love, out of love, out of Eden into a world of loss--is in how it challenges us to keep our hearts open, to say Yes despite it all.
Tripping with the Top Down
By Ellaraine Lockie. Prolific poet Ellaraine Lockie has a gift for revealing the spirit of a place with a perfectly chosen character sketch or a quirky interaction that invites us to think twice about how we move through the world. In her work, travel produces enlightening friction between an unfamiliar environment and the unnoticed edges of ourselves. This collection, her 13th chapbook, takes us along on her tour of the American West, from her Montana birthplace to her native California and points between.
Water Street
By Naila Moreira. This poet and science journalist's second chapbook marries the majesty of High Modernist style with a humble attention to our nonhuman neighbors on the planet. Like Yeats and Eliot, she speaks with prophetic sureness about cosmic themes, but where they might have recoiled from nature's messiness into the cool chambers of intellect, Moreira shows us the fatal consequences of such detachment. She quickens our conscience to protect our fragile environment, then invites us to be awestruck by meteor showers and comforted by the cycle "of being and of killing, of eating and of rot", as our tiny breaths "fuse with the world's bedlam of respiration".
The Big Book of Exit Strategies
By Jamaal May. The award-winning poet's second collection from Alice James Books explores bereavement, masculinity, risk, tenderness, gun violence, and the unacknowledged vitality of his beloved Detroit, in verse that is both muscular and musical. Nominated for the 2017 NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry.
Odd Mercy
By Gail Thomas. This elegantly crafted, life-affirming chapbook won the 2016 Charlotte Muse Prize from Headmistress Press, a lesbian-feminist poetry publisher. Thomas' verse knits together several generations of women, from her once prim and proper suburban mother descending into Alzheimer's, to her young granddaughter surrounded by gender-bending friends and same-sex couples. She grounds their history in earthy details like the taste of asparagus, locks of hair from the dead, and old newspaper clippings of buildings raised and gardens planted by blue-collar forebears. The centerpiece of the collection, "The Little Mommy Sonnets", poignantly depicts a sort of reconciliation at the end of a thorny relationship, where differences in ideals of womanhood fall away, and what's left is the primal comfort of touching and feeding a loved one.
Requiem for David
By Patrick T. Reardon. Plain-spoken and poignant, this memoir in verse pays tribute to a brother who committed suicide, and ponders the unanswerable question of why some survive a loveless upbringing and others succumb. Pat and David were the eldest of 14 children born in the 1950s-60s to an Irish-Catholic family in Chicago. Immersion in the church trained the author to search for sacred beauty in times of suffering and mystery, yet the weight of parental and religious judgments overwhelmed his brother. The collection is illustrated with archival family photos that prompt the poet's hindsight search for clues to their fate.
How the Boy Might See It
By Charlie Bondhus. Finding one's identity is just the beginning of the struggle, in this updated and expanded version of an award-winning gay poet's debut collection. With lyricism and an empathetic imagination, Bondhus claims a place for himself within multiple traditions, daring to juxtapose a comic tryst with a resurrected Walt Whitman, a disciple's erotic memories of Jesus, and the lament of a post-Edenic Adam. New work in this edition includes the poem suite "Diane Rehm Hosts Jesus Christ on NPR", narrated by a very human messiah who "would speak about what God shares with humanity...I mean loneliness".
The Smoke of Dreams
By Reena Ribalow. This stately, melancholy collection of poems is steeped in sensual memories of bittersweet love, be it for a holy city or a forbidden affair. Her roots are planted in Jerusalem, sacred and war-torn, harsh and captivating. Her more personal poems show the same mix of pleasure and pain in romantic relationships. One way or another, history is inescapable.
Buck Studies
By Douglas Kearney. Read these energetic, challenging poems once quickly for their frantic virtuosity of sound and rhythm, and again slowly to tease out the allusions in each compressed line. "Buck" was a racial slur in post-Civil War America for a black man who was sexually powerful and defiant of white authority. By juxtaposing it with "Studies", Kearney mocks the pseudoscientific white gaze, and also demands a place for black subjectivity in the canon of high culture. This second theme emerges most strongly in the two poem cycles that bracket the collection. The first reworks the Labors of Hercules through the legend of 19th-century African-American pimp Stagger Lee (the subject of numerous murder ballads by artists as varied as Woody Guthrie, Duke Ellington, and The Clash). The second cycle replaces Jesus with Br'er Rabbit in the Stations of the Cross. As great satires do, these mash-ups make us ask serious questions: Who gets to go down in history as a hero instead of a thug? Would an oppressed people be better off worshipping a trickster escape artist, rather than a martyr?
Thief in the Interior
By Phillip B. Williams. This debut collection from Alice James Books is a formally innovative, visceral and intense collection of poems through which the American tradition of violence against gay and black male bodies runs like a blood-red thread. From concrete poetry collages to experimental sonnets, Williams makes us contemplate murder as a twisted outburst of intimacy across caste lines, and love as a battle cry. Winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.
Love Justice
By Bracha Nechama Bomze. This debut poetry book from 3Ring Press is simultaneously a book-length love poem, a family memoir, and an epic of social change. The title's multiple meanings encompass generations of Jewish labor activism, winning the right to marry her lesbian partner, and the heartbreak of a closed adoption system that stigmatized her birthmother. Through all these personal and political traumas, the poet continues to praise the natural world that feeds her soul, and the life partnership that comes as a fairy-tale happy ending to a lonely childhood. The book is an inspiration and a delight.
The Opposite of People
By Patrick Ryan Frank. Blank verse and loosely structured sonnets eloquently explore the yearnings we express through TV and movie archetypes. Sincerity and contrivance are not opposites here. The comedian, the stunt man, the late-night movie monster, and the bad-news blonde take their turns revealing the existential paradox of film: how it underscores the passage of time by freezing it on the screen, a fixed point against which we measure our real lives racing past like "a car with its brake lines cut". Frank's blend of wry conversational tone and formal meter harks back to W.H. Auden, but his aesthetic lineage is more Disney than Brueghel: "About violence they were never wrong,/the old cartoons."
The Taxidermist’s Cut
By Rajiv Mohabir. Taxidermy is the organizing metaphor for this ambitious, passionate debut poetry collection: a stripped and reconstituted skin as shapeshifting for survival, as forbidden gay intimacy that always carries the hint of violence, and as inescapable and often misread ethnic identities in a dominant white Christian culture. (Mohabir descends from Indian indentured laborers who were transported to British Guyana's sugar plantations, and grew up in Florida.) The poet is willing to lay his own veins bare in order to create an artifice that is painfully and beautifully true to life. This book won the 2014 Four Way Books Intro Prize.
i’m alive / it hurts / i love it
By Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. This poet's first full-length book transforms the raw material of emotions into visionary language without losing their sincerity and immediacy. The untitled short poems can be read as sections of a single long work, as journal entries, or as miniature worlds in their own right, composed of clouds and hormones and rain on the freeway and blood and mirrors. Each represents the daily choice to feel everything, though pain coexists with joy. Espinoza writes with honesty and wit about her life as a transgender woman who manages anxiety and depression.
Nameless Boy
By Douglas Goetsch (now Diana Goetsch). Like a Garrison Keillor monologue at the end of an evening, humorous riffs and tender anecdotes prove only partially effective at warding off a deep melancholy in this poet's third full-length collection. You can laugh at light verse such as "Pee on Your Foot", and a few pages later, be slain by the self-lacerating loneliness of "Forgiveness Poem". Sometimes the shift stuns you with surprise in the same poem, as when a tongue-in-cheek tribute to 1989's morning radio mix ends with the questioning of a worker's hopeless endurance, reminiscent of Philip Levine. In their unpretentious way, these narratives hope to heal the deepest wound of ordinary life: that of never really knowing the people close to us, or being known. Both this theme and the title seem to take on an additional significance from Goetsch's post-publication gender transition. The book closes with a delightful, multi-part fantasy about names and whether they determine our destiny, the poem itself a gift for a boy who is named at the end.
