Seam
10 best books like Seam (Tarfia Faizullah): There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, The Tradition, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Look, When My Brother Was an Aztec, Bright Dead Things, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Native Guard, Death of a Naturalist
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé
Author | Morgan Parker |
ISBN | 1941040535 |
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé uses political and pop-cultural references as a framework to explore 21st century black American womanhood and its complexities: performance, depression, isolation, exoticism, racism, femininity, and politics. The poems weave between personal...
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?...
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 | 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...
"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 | 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...
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
Author | Ross Gay |
ISBN | 0822963310 |
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away—loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it—that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard. That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all—death,...
Author | Natasha Trethewey |
ISBN | 0618872655 |
Through elegiac verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South -- where one of the first black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War. Trethewey's resonant and...
Author | Seamus Heaney |
ISBN | 0571202403 |
Some books are thin and light, yet they carry so much weight, like Heaney's Death of a Naturalist. Each poem in this collection is a work of art, a masterpiece. There is neither pretentiousness nor symbolism here. The collection is one of his most accessible and the best place to start with his work. Each...
Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems
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 | Joy Harjo |
ISBN | 0393325342 |
Over a quarter-century's work from the 2003 winner of the Arrell Gibson Award for Lifetime Achievement.
This collection gathers poems from throughout Joy Harjo's twenty-eight-year career, beginning in 1973 in the age marked by the takeover at Wounded Knee and the rejuvenation of indigenous...
Author | Jamaal May |
ISBN | 1938584023 |
I loved this.
It was so raw and emotional and everything I wanted in a poetry book.
I've never been the biggest poetry fan. A lot of times it takes someone sort of walking me through each reference, the extremely metaphorical writing, the significance of the form and structure of the poems,...
Author | Philip Metres |
ISBN | 1938584090 |
"Sand Opera is what political poetry must be like today in our age of seemingly permanent war."—Mark Nowak
Sand Opera emerges from the dizzying position of being named but unheard as an Arab American and out of the parallel sense of seeing Arabs named and silenced since 9/11. Polyvocal poems,...
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...