Our Lady of the Ruins
10 best books like Our Lady of the Ruins (Traci Brimhall): I Know Your Kind: Poems, Deaf Republic: Poems, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Soft Science, Don't Call Us Dead, Bright Dead Things, Horoscopes for the Dead, Wade in the Water: Poems, The Wild Iris
| Author | William Brewer |
| ISBN | 1571314954 |
Selected for the National Poetry Series by Ada Limon, I Know Your Kind is a haunting, blistering debut collection about the American opioid epidemic and poverty in rural Appalachia.
In West Virginia, fatal overdoses on opioids have spiked to three times the national average. In these 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...
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...
| Author | Franny Choi |
| ISBN | 1938584996 |
Soft Science explores queer, Asian American femininity. A series of Turing Test-inspired poems grounds its exploration of questions not just of identity, but of consciousness―how to be tender and feeling and still survive a violent world filled with artificial intelligence and automation....
| 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 | Ada Limon |
| ISBN | 1571314717 |
Bright Dead Things examines the chaos that is life, the dangerous thrill of living in a world you know you have to leave one day, and the search to find something that is ultimately “disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.”
A book of bravado and introspection, of 21st century feminist swagger...
| Author | Billy Collins |
| ISBN | 1400064929 |
Billy Collins is widely acknowledged as a prominent player at the table of modern American poetry. And in this new collection, Horoscopes for the Dead, the verbal gifts that earned him the title “America’s most popular poet” are on full display. The poems here cover the usual but everlasting...
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 | 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...
| Author | Aimee Nezhukumatathil |
| ISBN | 1556595263 |
In her fourth collection, Aimee Nezhukumatathil hums a bright blue note—a sensuous love song to the Earth and its inhabitants. Oceanic is both a title and an ethos of radical inclusion, inviting in the grief of an elephant, the icy eyes of a scallop, “the ribs / of a silver silo,” and the bright flash...
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...
Holy Moly Carry Me (American Poets Continuum)
| Author | Erika Meitner |
| ISBN | 1942683626 |
Erika Meitner’s fifth collection of poetry plumbs human resilience and grit in the face of disaster, loss, and uncertainty. These narrative poems take readers into the heart of southern Appalachia—its highways and strip malls and gun culture, its fragility and danger—as the speaker wrestles...
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...
