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The Body's Question

10 best books like The Body's Question (Tracy K. Smith): The Book of Delights, Deaf Republic: Poems, The Tradition, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, Magical Negro, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Soft Science, A Fortune for Your Disaster, Build Yourself a Boat, An American Sunrise: Poems

The Book of Delights
AuthorRoss Gay
ISBN1616207922
Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a genre-defying book of essays—some as short as a paragraph; some as long as five pages—that record the small joys that occurred in one year, from birthday to birthday, and that we often overlook in our busy lives. His is a meditation on delight that takes a clear-eyed...
Deaf Republic: Poems
AuthorIlya Kaminsky
ISBN1555978312
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...
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...
Magical Negro
AuthorMorgan Parker
ISBN1947793187
Magical Negro is an archive of Black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They...
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...
Soft Science
AuthorFranny Choi
ISBN1938584996
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....
A Fortune for Your Disaster
AuthorHanif Abdurraqib
In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It's a book...
Build Yourself a Boat
AuthorCamonghne Felix
ISBN1608466116
2019 National Book Award Longlist

A poetic exploration of trauma, healing, and survival from award-winning poet Camonghne Felix.

"With Build Yourself a Boat, Camonghne Felix heralds a thrillingly new form of storytelling, as much investigation as it is song, as broken as it is...
An American Sunrise: Poems
AuthorJoy Harjo
ISBN1324003863
In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family’s lands and opens a dialogue with history. In An American Sunrise, Harjo finds...
What the Living Do: Poems
AuthorMarie Howe
ISBN0393318869
Informed by the death of a beloved brother, here are the stories of childhood, its thicket of sex and sorrow and joy, boys and girls growing into men and women, stories of a brother who in his dying could teach how to be most alive. What the Living Do reflects "a new form of confessional poetry, one shared...
She Had Some Horses
AuthorJoy Harjo
ISBN1560258306

Friday afternoon. I take a taxi to the Buenos Aires Airpark. On my flight to Uruguay I read She Had Some Horses, by Jay Harjo. The poems seem somehow familiar, something . . . I am trying to put my finger on it . . . yes . . . they remind me of poems I have read in workshops at university—there is nothing technically...
Oceanic
AuthorAimee Nezhukumatathil
ISBN1556595263
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...
1919
AuthorEve L. Ewing
ISBN1608465985
Poetic reflections on race, class, violence, segregation, and the hidden histories that shape our divided urban landscapes.

The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots that comprised the “Red Summer” of violence across the nation’s cities, is an event that has shaped...
Thomas and Beulah
AuthorRita Dove
ISBN0887480217
No one can help him anymore.
Not the young thing next door
in the red pedal pushers,
not the canary he drove distracted

with his mandolin. There’ll be
no more trees to wake him in moonlight,
nor a single dry spring morning
when the fish are lonely for company.

She’s...
Wind in a Box
AuthorTerrance Hayes
ISBN0143036866
The third collection of poetry from the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award

Terrance Hayes is an elegant and adventurous writer with disarming humor, grace, tenderness, and brilliant turns of phrase. He is very much interested in what it means to be an artist and a...
Something Bright, Then Holes
AuthorMaggie Nelson
ISBN1933368802
Maggie Nelson's fourth collection of poems combines a wanderer's attention to landscape with a deeply personal exploration of desire, heartbreak, resilience, accident, and flux. Something Bright, Then Holes explores the problem of losing then recovering sight and insight -- of feeling lost,...
Ghost Of
AuthorDiana Khoi Nguyen
ISBN1632430525
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...
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...
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...
Indecency
AuthorJustin Phillip Reed
ISBN1566895146
Intricate, Intimate, Difficult, and Confrontational Poems That Push at the Boundaries of Selfhood, Skin, Culture, Sexuality, and Blood.

Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity...
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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