BooksList.Best
Search

The Human Line

10 best books like The Human Line (Ellen Bass): The Book of Delights, Deaf Republic: Poems, The Tradition, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Magical Negro, When My Brother Was an Aztec, Don't Call Us Dead, Stag's Leap: Poems, Wade in the Water: 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Wade in the Water: Poems
AuthorTracy 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...
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
AuthorRoss Gay
ISBN0822963310
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,...
Meditations in an Emergency
AuthorFrank O'Hara
ISBN0802134521
Frank O’Hara was one of the great poets of the twentieth century and, along with such widely acclaimed writers as Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Gary Snyder, a crucial contributor to what Donald Allen termed the New American Poetry, "which, by its vitality alone, became the...
Satan Says (Pitt Poetry Series)
AuthorSharon Olds
ISBN0822953145
Poems examine life as a child, a woman, and a mother; death; and our relationship to the world. This book, Olds's first, was published when she was 37, and it launched her Pulitzer-winning career.

I am trying to write my
way out of the closed box
redolent of cedar. Satan
comes to me...
If They Come for Us
AuthorFatimah 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...
What We Carry
AuthorDorianne Laux
ISBN1880238071
Hadn't read this in a dozen or more years (thanks again Boone), and it's hot-damn fantastic. Here's an excerpt from one of my favorites, "After Twelve Days of Rain," which you can hear her read here:

Today, pumping gas into my old car, I stood
hatless in the rain and the whole world
went...
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...
About
Feedback
© BooksList.Best 2024