Blood, Tin, Straw
10 best books like Blood, Tin, Straw (Sharon Olds): The Tradition, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Birds, Beasts and Relatives, When My Brother Was an Aztec, Selected Poems, Even this Page is White, Averno, The Wild Iris, In Mad Love and War, Mother Love
| Author | Jericho Brown |
| ISBN | 1556594860 |
Jericho Brown’s daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation?...
Night Sky with Exit Wounds
The most beautiful part of your body
is where it's headed, & remember
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.
To read Ocean Vuong's
Night Sky with Exit Wounds
is to be dazzled by gorgeous lyricism. I picked this up as part of my exploration of contemporary poetry I have...
Birds, Beasts and Relatives
| Author | Gerald Durrell |
| ISBN | 0140043853 |
"Gollys, Mrs Durrells,"
he said, his face red with wrath.
"Why don'ts yous lets Masters Leslies shoot the son of a bitch?"
In life, Gerald Durrell would light up a room. His books elicit that same warm feeling.
His affection for the natural world lives on in the minds of those of us, who...
"I write hungry sentences," Natalie Diaz once explained in an interview, "because they want more and more lyricism and imagery to satisfy them." This debut collection is a fast-paced tour of Mojave life and family narrative: A sister fights for or against a brother on meth, and everyone from Antigone,...
| Author | Marina Tsvetaeva |
| ISBN | 0140187596 |
Under normal circumstances with poetry I always like an in-depth read up on the writer prior to reading if it's somebody that I know nothing about, in the case of Marina Tsvetaeva my knowledge of her was non-existent, but hastily threw myself into the deep end instead of getting my feet wet first, so I had...
| Author | Vivek Shraya |
| ISBN | 1551526417 |
Amazingly, this is not the first book of poems by a transgender or gender fluid Canadian person-of-color that I've read in the last two weeks (the previous was A Place Called No Homeland, also highly recommended.) Another great read for National Poetry Month.
The subheadings of these poems...
| Author | Louise Glück |
| ISBN | 0374530742 |
Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Glück's tenth collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter, it is a gate or passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the...
| Author | Louise Glück |
| ISBN | 0880013346 |
I had a Creative Writing teacher who asked me once if I would like anyone other than myself to read my poetry. When I answered, “Yes,” she advised me to make the suffering in my poems more universal and less personal.
Poetry is obviously personal, but she explained to me that, if I had a husband...
Joy Harjo is a powerful voice for her Creek (Muscogee) tribe (“a stolen people in a stolen land”), for other oppressed people, and for herself. Her poems, both sacred and secular, are written with the passions of anger, grief, and love, at once tender and furious. They are rooted in the land; they...
| Author | Rita Dove |
| ISBN | 0393314448 |
Just pulled this collection off my shelves and dove into it, and by the third poem or so wondered what took me so long to find it and actually read it.
The poems in this volume are tough but delicate. Dove's use of imagery and voice are stunning; I'm drawn into the ways in which Dove weaves her personal...
| Author | Louise Glück |
| ISBN | 0060933496 |
The Seven Ages was written during a ten-week period in the summer of 1999.
The fierce, austerely beautiful, and visionary voice that has become Glück's
trademark speaks in these poems of a life lived in unflinching awareness.
Many of the poems in this collection bear the familiar features...
| Author | Dean Young |
| ISBN | 0822958724 |
In Elegy on Toy Piano, Dean Young's sixth book of poems, elegiac necessity finds itself next to goofy celebration. Daffy Duck enters the Valley of the Eternals. Faulkner and bell-bottoms cling to beauty's evanescence.
Even in single poems, Young's tone and style vary. No one feeling or idea...
| Author | Mary Oliver |
| ISBN | 0807068985 |
Never afraid to shed the pretense of academic poetry, never shy of letting the power of an image lie in unadorned language, Mary Oliver offers us poems of arresting beauty that reflect on the power of love and the great gifts of the natural world. Inspired by the familiar lines from William Wordsworth,...
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
| Author | Terrance Hayes |
| ISBN | 0143133187 |
In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country's past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares....
| Author | Ada Limon |
| ISBN | 1571315128 |
From National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Ada Limón comes The Carrying—her most powerful collection yet.
Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the...
