The End of the Alphabet

10 best books like The End of the Alphabet (Claudia Rankine): There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, The Tradition, Look, Magical Negro, When My Brother Was an Aztec, Wade in the Water: Poems, Lessons on Expulsion, Ghost Of, Eye Level: Poems, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands

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...

The Tradition

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?...

Look

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...

Magical Negro

Author	Morgan Parker
ISBN	1947793187

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...

When My Brother Was an Aztec

Author

Natalie 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,...

Wade in the Water: Poems

Author

Tracy K. Smith

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...

Lessons on Expulsion

Author	Erika L. Sánchez
ISBN	1555977782

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...

Ghost Of

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...

Eye Level: Poems

Author	Jenny Xie
ISBN	1555978029

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...

The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands

Author	Nick Flynn
ISBN	1555975747

New poetry by the acclaimed writer Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and The Ticking Is the Bomb

electrocution, no―the boy stood in the hot-hot room
stammering I did stammering I did stammering I
did stammering I did stammering everything you say I did
I...

Not Here

Author

Hieu 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...