A Little White Shadow

Author	Kaveh Akbar
ISBN	1938584678

"The struggle from late youth on, with and without God, agony, narcotics and love is a torment rarely recorded with such sustained eloquence and passion as you will find in this collection." —Fanny Howe

This highly-anticipated debut boldly confronts addiction and courses the strenuous...

Author	Emily Skaja
ISBN	1555978355

Selected by Joy Harjo as the winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets

Emily Skaja’s debut collection is a fiery, hypnotic book that confronts the dark questions and menacing silences around gender, sexuality, and violence. Brute arises, brave and furious, from...

Author	Danez Smith
ISBN	1555977855

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten...

Author

Tracy K. Smith

Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize
Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection

The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United States Even the men in black armor, the ones
Jangling handcuffs and keys, what elseAre they...

Author	Tracy K. Smith
ISBN	1555975844

You lie there kicking like a baby, waiting for God himself
To lift you past the rungs of your crib. What
Would your life say if it could talk? 
                                                           —from...

Author	Jen Bervin
ISBN	0972768432

Poetry. "Jen Bervin has reimagined Shakespeare as our true contemporary. Her little poems sing" Paul Auster. In NETS, poet and artist Jen Bervin strips Shakespeare's sonnets "bare to the nets," chiseling away at the familiar lines to reveal surprising new poems, while pointing obliquely at the unavoidably...

Author	Sam Sax
ISBN	0143131702

An "astounding" (Terrance Hayes) debut collection of poems - Winner of the 2016 National Poetry Series Competition

In this ---powerful debut collection, sam sax explores and explodes the linkages between desire, addiction, and the history of mental health. These brave, formally dexterous...

Author	Langston Hughes
ISBN	0679883479

This book first appeared in 1932. It is still a great read for all ages today. Langston Hughes made a huge impact on my life because he was anthologized often in my literature books.

Here is a famous one:

"Dreams"

Hold onto dreams
For if dreams die
Life is like a broken-winged...

Author	Eileen Myles
ISBN	0062389106

A collection of thrilling new and beloved past work from one of America's most celebrated poets, Eileen Myles, a cult icon and modern favorite

Eileen Myles's poetry and prose are known for their blend of reality and fiction, the sublime and the ephemeral, in which Myles not only lets her readers...

Author

Fatimah Asghar

Poet and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated web series "Brown Girls" captures the experience of being a Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America, while exploring identity, violence, and healing.

In this powerful and imaginative debut poetry collection, Fatimah Asghar nakedly captures...

Author	Sharon Creech
ISBN	0064409600

Bailey, who is usually so nice, Bailey, my neighbor, my friend, my buddy, my pal for my whole life, knowing me better than anybody, that Bailey, that Bailey I am so mad at right now, that Bailey, I hate him today.

Twelve-year-old Rosie and her best friend, Bailey, don't always get along, that's...

Author	Maggie Nelson
ISBN	1933368802

Maggie Nelson's fourth collection of poems combines a wanderer's attention to landscape with a deeply personal exploration of desire, heartbreak, resilience, accident, and flux. Something Bright, Then Holes explores the problem of losing then recovering sight and insight -- of feeling lost,...

Author	Simone Weil
ISBN	1590171454

War and the Iliad is a perfect introduction to the range of Homer’s art as well as a provocative and rewarding demonstration of the links between literature, philosophy, and questions of life and death.

Simone Weil’s The Iliad, or the Poem of Force is one of her most celebrated works—an...

Author	Matthea Harvey
ISBN	1934781819

Lamb and Mary were alike. Unbalanced. Flat-footed. High-strung. This is their story like you’ve never heard it—the tale of a loopy shepherdess and a depressive farm animal. In this version of the children's nursery rhyme, Lamb and Mary fall in love. They swoon, they are smitten. Then Mary has second...