The Unswept Room

10 best books like The Unswept Room (Sharon Olds): The Tradition, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, The New Testament, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Don't Call Us Dead, The Wild Iris, The Seven Ages, The Hidden Lives of Owls: The Science and Spirit of Nature's Most Elusive Birds, Red Doc>, The Carrying: Poems

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?...

Night Sky with Exit Wounds

Author

Ocean 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...

The New Testament

Author

Jericho Brown

In The New Testament, Jericho Brown continues his tender examination of race, masculinity, and sexuality. These poems bear witness to survival in the face of brutality, while also elegizing two brothers haunted by shame, two lovers hounded by death, and an America wounded by war and numbered by religion....

Calling a Wolf a Wolf

Author	Kaveh Akbar
ISBN	1938584678

"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...

Don't Call Us Dead

Author	Danez Smith
ISBN	1555977855

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...

The Wild Iris

Author	Louise Glück
ISBN	0880013346

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...

The Seven Ages

Author	Louise Glück
ISBN	0060933496

The Seven Ages was written during a ten-week period in the summer of 1999.
The fierce, austerely beautiful, and visionary voice that has become Glück's
trademark speaks in these poems of a life lived in unflinching awareness.
Many of the poems in this collection bear the familiar features...

The Hidden Lives of Owls: The Science and Spirit of Nature's Most Elusive Birds

Author	Leigh Calvez
ISBN	1632170264

A naturalist probes the forest, mainly at night, to comprehend the secret lives of owls in this book that will appeal to readers of "Crow Planet "and "H is for Hawk." Join Leiigh Calvez on adventures into the world of owls: owl-watching, avian science, and the deep forest often in the dead of night. These...

Red Doc>

Author	Anne Carson
ISBN	0307960587

benightedly i gave this 4 stars i'm sorry/you are/yes/why
did you give it 4 stars/i wanted it to be like Aof
R/ poetry is never the same/as i'm learning mostly
from the reviews i am too inexperienced to learn from
the book itself/some of these poems are surreal/they
are/you don't...

The Carrying: Poems

Author	Ada Limon
ISBN	1571315128

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...

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...