Sand Opera

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...

Author	Solmaz Sharif
ISBN	1555977448

*Finalist for the 2017 PEN Open Book Award*
*Finalist for the 2016 National Book Award*Solmaz Sharif's astonishing first book, Look, asks us to see the ongoing costs of war as the unbearable loss of human lives and also the insidious abuses against our everyday speech. In this virtuosic array of...

Author

Anne Carson

The award-winning poet Anne Carson reinvents a genre in Autobiography of Red, a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present.

Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red...

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	Tarfia Faizullah
ISBN	0809333252

The poems in this captivating collection weave beauty with violence, the personal with the historic as they recount the harrowing experiences of the two hundred thousand female victims of rape and torture at the hands of the Pakistani army during the 1971 Liberation War. As the child of Bangladeshi...

Author	Robin Coste Lewis
ISBN	1101875437

A stunning poetry debut: this meditation on the black female figure through time introduces us to a brave and penetrating new voice.

Robin Coste Lewis's electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems meditating on the roles that desire and race play in the construction...

Author	Carolyn Forché
ISBN	0060909269

“Here is poetry of courage and passion, which manages to be tender and achingly sensual and what is often called ‘political’ at the same time. This is a major new voice.” — Margaret Atwood

The Country Between Us opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, where Carolyn Forché...

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	Philip Levine
ISBN	0679740589

Winner of the National Book Award in 1991
 
“This collection amounts to a hymn of praise for all the workers of America. These proletarian heroes, with names like Lonnie, Loo, Sweet Pea, and Packy, work the furnaces, forges, slag heaps, assembly lines, and loading docks at places with unglamorous...

Author	Ruth Stone
ISBN	1556592078

“Her poems startle us over and over with their shapeliness, their humor, their youthfulness, their wild aptness, their strangeness, their sudden familiarity, the authority of their insights, the moral gulps they prompt, their fierce exactness of language and memory.”—Galway Kinnell on...

Author	Zbigniew Herbert
ISBN	0880013818

Mr Cogito is a persona used by Zbigniew Herbert to cogitate about the world in unworldly ways. Not all poems in this thin book employ the good Cogito, but the thinking is surely the same--strange. I do feel that the earlier poems (and the shorter ones) are stronger than the later (and longer) ones.

As...

Author	Brian Turner
ISBN	1882295803

Brian Turner was a rifle team leader in Iraq, and he draws on his own experience as well as the literary and political history of Iraq in this excellent collection of his poetry.

His most famous poems from this collection, "Al-A'imma Bridge" and "The Mutanabbi Street Bombing" place specific...

Author	Diana Khoi Nguyen
ISBN	1632430525

Ghost Of is a mourning song, not an exorcism or un-haunting of that which haunts, but attuned attention, unidirectional reaching across time, space, and distance to reach loved ones, ancestors, and strangers. By working with, in, and around the photographs that her brother left behind (from which...

Author	Cathy Linh Che
ISBN	1938584058

“To be a daughter, a survivor, and a poet are all aligned in the need “to rewrite everything,” a need that [Cathy Linh Che] navigates with brutality and tenderness, devastation and irrepressible endurance.” —Publishers Weekly

"Split crosses borders, exposing truths and dreams,...

Author	Javier Zamora
ISBN	1556595115

This collection focuses author's personal experience as a child, fleeing the violence in his home, El Salvador (much of which violence was supported by the U.S.) and coming to the U.S. to reunite with his parents who left when he was even younger. There are poems that deal directly with the hardships...

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...

Author	Shara McCallum
ISBN	1938584287

"These wonderful poems open a world of sensation and memory. But it is a world revealed by language, never just controlled. The voice that guides the action here is openhearted and open-minded—a lyric presence that never deserts the subject or the reader. Syntax, craft and cadence add to the gathering...

Author	Belle Waring
ISBN	1889330086

Waring has worked as a neo-natal intensive care nurse and as Writer-in-Residence at Children's National Medical Center in Washington D.C. Her first collection of poetry, Refuge, won the Associated Writing Program's Award for Poetry in 1989, the Washington Prize in 1991, and was cited by Publishers...