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Slow Lightning

10 best books like Slow Lightning (Eduardo C. Corral): The Tradition, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Look, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, When My Brother Was an Aztec, Don't Call Us Dead, Bright Dead Things, Stag's Leap: Poems, Lighthead

The Tradition
AuthorJericho Brown
ISBN1556594860
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
AuthorChen Chen
ISBN1942683332
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
AuthorOcean Vuong
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...
Look
AuthorSolmaz Sharif
ISBN1555977448
*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...
Calling a Wolf a Wolf
AuthorKaveh Akbar
ISBN1938584678
"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
AuthorNatalie 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
AuthorDanez Smith
ISBN1555977855
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...
Bright Dead Things
AuthorAda Limon
ISBN1571314717
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...
Stag's Leap: Poems
AuthorSharon Olds
ISBN0375712259
Stag’s Leap is stunningly poignant sequence of poems that tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom.

In this wise and intimate telling—which carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending—Sharon Olds opens her heart...
Lighthead
AuthorTerrance Hayes
ISBN0143116967
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....
Native Guard
AuthorNatasha Trethewey
ISBN0618872655
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...
Averno
AuthorLouise Glück
ISBN0374530742
Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Glück's tenth collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter, it is a gate or passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the...
The Wild Iris
AuthorLouise Glück
ISBN0880013346
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...
Bestiary: Poems
AuthorDonika Kelly
ISBN1555977588
Across this remarkable first book are encounters with animals, legendary beasts, and mythological monsters--half human and half something else. Donika Kelly's Bestiary is a catalogue of creatures--from the whale and ostrich to the pegasus and chimera to the centaur and griffin. Among them too...
[insert] boy
AuthorDanez Smith
The next time someone tells you spoken word poets can’t make poems come to life on the page, send them to Danez Smith’s [insert] boy, a remarkable debut collection that puts that tired notion to bed once and for all. In these poems, Smith opens the reader to a world of desire, longing, and deep mourning...
Book of My Nights
AuthorLi-Young Lee
ISBN1929918089
Book of My Nights is the first poetry collection in ten years by one of the world's most acclaimed young poets. In Book of My Nights, Li-Young Lee once again gives us lyrical poetry that fuses memory, family, culture and history. In language as simple and powerful as the human muscle, these poems work individually...
Head Off & Split
AuthorNikky Finney
ISBN0810152169
Winner of 2011 National Book Award for Poetry
Winner of 2012 GLCS Award for Poetry
Winner of 2012 SIBA Book Award for Poetry
Nominee for 2012 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry

The poems in Nikky Finney’s breathtaking new collection Head Off & Split...
Hum
AuthorJamaal May
ISBN1938584023
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,...
Lessons on Expulsion
AuthorErika L. Sánchez
ISBN1555977782
An award-winning and hard-hitting new voice in contemporary American poetry

The first time I ever came the light was weak and carnivorous.

I covered my eyes and the night cleared its dumb throat.

I heard my mother wringing her hands the next morning.

Of course I put...
Kingdom Animalia
AuthorAracelis Girmay
The poems in this highly anticipated second book are elegiac poems, as concerned with honoring our dead as they are with praising the living. Through Aracelis Girmay's lens, everything is animal: the sea, a jukebox, the desert. In these poems, everything possesses a system of desire, hunger, a set...
Eye Level: Poems
AuthorJenny Xie
ISBN1555978029
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...
Citizen Illegal
AuthorJosé Olivarez
ISBN1608469549
In this stunning debut, poet José Olivarez explores the stories, contradictions, joys, and sorrows that embody life in the spaces between Mexico and America. He paints vivid portraits of good kids, bad kids, families clinging to hope, life after the steel mills, gentrifying barrios, and everything...
The Black Maria
AuthorAracelis Girmay
ISBN1942683022
Praise for Aracelis Girmay:

"[Girmay's] every loss—she calls them estrangements—is a yearning for connection across time and place; her every fragment is a bulwark against ruin." — O, The Oprah Magazine

Taking its name from the moon's dark plains, misidentified as seas...
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
AuthorTerrance Hayes
ISBN0143133187
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
AuthorAda Limon
ISBN1571315128
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
AuthorLayli Long Soldier
ISBN1555977677
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...
Prelude to Bruise
AuthorSaeed Jones
ISBN1566893747
bookmarking this review here. http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online...

****

i need to say, first off, that poetry in english is really hard for me. i can do poetry in italian, but poetry in english, tough, man.

but a friend of mine agreed to read this with me, and the experience...
Not Here
AuthorHieu 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...
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