Engine Empire: Poems

10 best books like Engine Empire: Poems (Cathy Park Hong): Deaf Republic: Poems, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, Magical Negro, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, When My Brother Was an Aztec, Don't Call Us Dead, The Widening Spell of the Leaves, Space, in Chains, Sleeping it Off in Rapid City, Eye Level: Poems

Deaf Republic: Poems

Author	Ilya Kaminsky
ISBN	1555978312

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize
Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection

Ilya Kaminsky’s astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence?

Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political...

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

Author	Chen Chen
ISBN	1942683332

In this ferocious and tender debut, Chen Chen investigates inherited forms of love and family—the strained relationship between a mother and son, the cost of necessary goodbyes—all from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives. Holding all accountable, this collection fully embraces...

Magical Negro

Author	Morgan Parker
ISBN	1947793187

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. They...

Calling a Wolf a Wolf

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...

When My Brother Was an Aztec

Author

Natalie Díaz

"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,...

Don't Call Us Dead

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...

The Widening Spell of the Leaves

Author	Larry Levis
ISBN	0822954540

For my money, this is Levis' best book. I admit there are times when I fluctuate between it and Elegy, which seems to be most people's favorite. But the longer sequence in this book, "The Perfection of Solitude," is one of the most sincere, confounding, and ambitious explorations into the lyric Levis...

Space, in Chains

Author	Laura Kasischke
ISBN	1556593333

Laura Kasischke's poems have the same haunting qualities and truth as our most potent memories and dreams. Through ghostly voices, fragmented narratives, overheard conversations, songs, and prayers in language reminiscent of medieval lyrics converted into contemporary idiom, the poems in Space,...

Sleeping it Off in Rapid City

Author	August Kleinzahler
ISBN	0374265836

The first broad retrospective of August Kleinzahler’s career, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City gathers poems from his major works along with a rich portion of new poems that visit different voice registers, experiment with form and length, and confirm Kleinzahler as among the most inventive and brilliant...

Eye Level: Poems

Author	Jenny Xie
ISBN	1555978029

Jenny Xie’s award-winning debut, Eye Level, takes us far and near, to Phnom Penh, Corfu, Hanoi, New York, and elsewhere, as we travel closer and closer to the acutely felt solitude that centers this searching, moving collection. Animated by a restless inner questioning, these poems meditate on...

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....

The Carrying: Poems

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...

Whereas

Author	Layli Long Soldier
ISBN	1555977677

The astonishing, powerful debut by the winner of a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award

WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our...

Indecency

Author	Justin Phillip Reed
ISBN	1566895146

Intricate, Intimate, Difficult, and Confrontational Poems That Push at the Boundaries of Selfhood, Skin, Culture, Sexuality, and Blood.

Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity...

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

Author	Claudia Rankine
ISBN	1555974074

In this powerful sequence of TV images and essay, Claudia Rankine explores the personal and political unrest of our volatile new century.

I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the...

Hard Night

Author	Christian Wiman
ISBN	1556592205

Make no mistake: Christian Wiman’s poetic endeavors are ambitious. From the personal lyrics of solitude and loss to “Being Serious,” the long poem that concludes Hard Night, his poems examine emotions clearly, without sentimentality. A profound reverence for form and passion for poetry...