Fire to Fire

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	Terrance Hayes
ISBN	0143116967

Winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Poetry

In his fourth collection, Terrance Hayes investigates how we construct experience. With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant....

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	Ilya Kaminsky
ISBN	1932195122

Poetry. Winner of the 2002 Dorset Prize, and recipient of the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Ilya Kaminsky is a recent Russian immigrant and rising poetic star. Despite the fact that he is a non-native speaker, Kaminksy's sense of rhythm and lyic surpasses that of most contemporary poets in the English language....

Author

Patricia Smith

In minute-by-minute detail, Patricia Smith tracks Hurricane Katrina as it transforms into a full-blown mistress of destruction. From August 23, 2005, the day Tropical Depression Twelve developed, through August 28 when it became a Category Five storm with its “scarlet glare fixed on the trembling...

Author	Derek Walcott
ISBN	0374289298

A DAZZLING NEW COLLECTION FROM ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT POETS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

In White Egrets, Derek Walcott treats the characteristic subjects of his career--the Caribbean's complex colonial legacy, his love of the Western literary tradition, the wisdom that comes through the...

Author	Robert Hass
ISBN	0061923826

The Apple Trees at Olema includes work from Robert Hass's first five books--Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, Sun Under Wood, and Time and Materials--as well as a substantial gathering of new poems, including a suite of elegies, a series of poems in the form of notebook musings on the nature of storytelling,...

Author	Derek Walcott
ISBN	0374508607

On a Caribbean island, the morning after a full moon, Felix Hobain tears through the market in a drunken rage. Taken away to sober up in jail, all that night he is gripped by hallucinations: the impoverished hermit believes he has become a healer, walking from village to village, tending to the sick, waiting...

Author	Li-Young Lee
ISBN	0918526531

In this outstanding first book of poems, Lee is unafraid to show emotion, especially when writing about his father or his wife. "But there is wisdom/ in the hour in which a boy/ sits in his room listening," says the first poem, and Lee's silent willingness to step outside himself imbues Rose with a rare...

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...

Author

Danez Smith

Poetry. African American Studies. These harrowing poems make montage, make mirrors, make elegiac biopic, make "a dope ass trailer with a hundred black children/ smiling into the camera & the last shot is the wide mouth of a pistol." That's no spoiler alert, but rather, Smith's way saying &...

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...

Author

Hieu Minh Nguyen

My review, as well as my other thoughts on reading, also can be found on my blog.

Over the course of a few dozen poems, Nguyen confronts his relationship to space, memory, and pain as a queer Vietnamese-American man. The collection consists of a mix of long and short pieces, addressing everything...