Best Contemporary Female Poets

Top 10 Best Contemporary Female Poets : The Dead and the Living, The Will to Change, Complete Poems, Bluets, Thirst, The Leaf And The Cloud: A Poem, What the Living Do: Poems, Satan Says (Pitt Poetry Series), Smoke, Dear Boy

AuthorSharon Olds
ISBN0394715632
I saw that others were reading this review, so I pulled out this book at dawn and reread it and edited/ added some things in my review. Like this poem:

Possessed (for my parents)

I have never left.
Your bodies are before me
at all times, in the dark I see
the stars of your teeth...
AuthorAdrienne Rich
ISBN0393043614
"The Will to Change must be read whole: for its tough distrust of completion and for its cool declaratives which fix us with a stare more unsettling than the most hysterical questions...It includes moments when poverty and heroism explode grammer with their own dignified unsyntactical demands...The...
AuthorMarianne Moore
ISBN0140188517
How many of you have even heard of Marianne Moore?

I'm genuinely curious on this point because I hadn't until last week. Her relative obscurity (at least here in the UK) is a bit of a shame because she has an important voice in the world of poetry.

Her poetry is unusual and it’s very hard...
Bluets
AuthorMaggie Nelson
ISBN1933517409
Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color...

A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant...
AuthorMary Oliver
ISBN0807068969
Thirst, a collection of forty-three new poems from the Pulitzer Prize-winner Mary Oliver, introduces two new directions in the poet's work. Grappling with grief at the death of the love of her life and partner of over forty years, the remarkable photographer Molly Malone Cook, she strives to experience...
AuthorMary Oliver
ISBN0306810735
With piercing clarity and craftsmanship, Mary Oliver has fashioned an unforgettable poem of questioning and discovery, about what is observable and what is not, about what passes and what persists. As the U.S. Poet Laureate, Stanley Kunitz, has said: "Mary Oliver's poetry is fine and deep; it reads...
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...
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...
AuthorDorianne Laux
ISBN1880238861
Dorianne Laux’s long-awaited third book of poetry follows her collection, What We Carry, a finalist for the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. In Smoke, Laux revisits familiar themes of family, working class lives and the pleasures of the body in poetry that is vital and artfully...
AuthorEmily Berry
ISBN0571284051
Dear Boy is the dramatic and inventive debut by Emily Berry. These characterful, intelligent and darkly witty poems explore lives lived strangely in unusual worlds, through a series of deft and seductive soliloquies.

In a collection with a taste for ventriloquy and wickedness, and a flair...
The Mermaid's Voice Returns in This One
AuthorAmanda Lovelace
ISBN1524852317
Goodreads Choice Award-winning poet and USA TODAY bestselling author Amanda Lovelace presents the mermaid’s voice returns in this one — the third and final installment in her “women are some kind of magic” series, featuring a foreword from Lang Leav and 13 guest poems from leading voices...
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...
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé
AuthorMorgan Parker
ISBN1941040535
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...
AuthorMary Oliver
ISBN0807068756
Within these pages Mary Oliver collects twenty-six of her poems about the birds that have been such an important part of her life-hawks, hummingbirds, and herons; kingfishers, catbirds, and crows; swans, swallows, and, of course, the snowy owl; among a dozen others-including ten poems original...
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...
House of Light
AuthorMary Oliver
‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?’

Despite owning Oliver’s two volume New and Selected Poems, I couldn’t resist snatching up this tiny collection when I stumbled upon it at a library book sale in the fifty cents bin. Although it was her American...
Why I Wake Early
AuthorMary Oliver
ISBN0807068799
The forty-seven new works in this volume include poems on crickets, toads, trout lilies, black snakes, goldenrod, bears, greeting the morning, watching the deer, and, finally, lingering in happiness. Each poem is imbued with the extraordinary perceptions of a poet who considers the everyday in...
Warsan vs Melancholy
AuthorWarsan Shire
amazing, beautiful woman, who burned my brain.
an adapted verion of her poetry in lemonade: "I tried to change. Closed my mouth more, tried to be softer, prettier, less awake. Fasted for 60 days, wore white, abstained from mirrors, abstained from sex, slowly did not speak another word. In that time,...
Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
AuthorMary Oliver
ISBN0399563245
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presents a personal selection of her best work in this definitive collection spanning more than five decades of her esteemed literary career.
Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted...
AuthorJane Kenyon
ISBN1555972667
Otherwise collects a lifetime's work by one of contemporary poetry's most cherished talents. Opening with twenty new poems and including generous selections from Jane Kenyon's four previous books—From Room to Room, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Let Evening Come, and Constance—this collection...
A Thousand Mornings
AuthorMary Oliver
ISBN1594204772
In A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has come to define her life’s work, transporting us to the marshland and coastline of her beloved home, Provincetown, Massachusetts. In these pages, Oliver shares the wonder of dawn, the grace of animals, and the transformative power...
Dog Songs
AuthorMary Oliver
ISBN1594204780
Mary Oliver's Dog Songs is a celebration of the special bond between human and dog, as understood through the poet's relationship to the canines that have accompanied her daily walks, warmed her home, and inspired her work. Oliver's poems begin in the small everyday moments familiar to all dog lovers,...
Blue Horses
AuthorMary Oliver
ISBN1594204799
In this stunning collection of new poems, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has defined her life’s work, describing with wonder both the everyday and the unaffected beauty of nature.

Herons, sparrows, owls, and kingfishers flit across the page in meditations on love, artistry, and...
AuthorEmily Berry
ISBN0571331327
The powerful new collection from award-winning poet Emily Berry.

Emily Berry's Dear Boy was described as a 'blazing debut', winning the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2013. Stranger, Baby, its follow-up, is marked by the same sense of fantasy and play, estrangement and edgy humour...
AuthorAlice Oswald
ISBN0571274161
The poetry of Alice Oswald is preternatural…preternaturally gorgeous, preternaturally immediate and relevant and precise. We want to sink into that language and be in that bright place—perhaps not to live (among the flashing swords), but to die there, amongst one’s brethren, with poetry...
Dream Work
AuthorMary Oliver
ISBN0871130696
Dream Work, a collection of forty-five poems, follows both chronologically and logically Mary Oliver's American Primitive, which won for her the Pulitzer Prize for the finest book of poetry published in 1983 by an American poet. The depth and diversity of perceptual awareness-so steadfast and radiant...
AuthorNaomi Shihab Nye
ISBN0689825234
An award-winning novel about identity, family, and friendship from renowned writer and editor Naomi Shihab Nye.

The day after Liyana got her first real kiss, her life changed forever. Not because of the kiss, but because it was the day her father announced that the family was moving from St....
Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems
AuthorMary Oliver
ISBN0395850878
"What good company Mary Oliver is!" the Los Angeles Times has remarked. And never more so than in this extraordinary and engaging gathering of nine essays, accompanied by a brief selection of new prose poems and poems. (One of the essays has been chosen as among the best of the year by The Best American...
AuthorJoy Harjo
ISBN0393325342
Over a quarter-century's work from the 2003 winner of the Arrell Gibson Award for Lifetime Achievement.

This collection gathers poems from throughout Joy Harjo's twenty-eight-year career, beginning in 1973 in the age marked by the takeover at Wounded Knee and the rejuvenation of indigenous...
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...
AuthorAnne Sexton
ISBN0618057048
Anne Sexton is considered both a religious and feminist poet, a product of her upbringing and the era in which she lived. Born in 1928 outside of Boston to descendants of Puritans, Sexton was the oldest daughter in a deeply Christian family. Although her family may have expected more from her, Sexton...
AuthorAi
ISBN0393320189
Ai's collection is startling, difficult, and important. Selected from the five books preceding this collection - Cruelty, Killing Floor, Sin, Fate, and Greed - these poems tackle dangerous parts of the human spirit in ways that leave readers gasping for air. Her metaphors and similes are often spiritual,...
AuthorMary Szybist
ISBN1555976352
The troubadours
knew how to burn themselves through,
how to make themselves shrines to their own longing.
The spectacular was never behind them.
                        -from “The Troubadours etc.”
 
In Incarnadine, Mary Szybist restlessly...
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...
Jane: A Murder
AuthorMaggie Nelson
ISBN1932360719
Jane tells the spectral story of the life and death of Maggie Nelson’s aunt Jane, who was murdered in 1969 while a first-year law student at the University of Michigan. Though officially unsolved, Jane’s murder was apparently the third in a series of seven brutal rape-murders in the area. Nelson...
AuthorCarolyn Forché
ISBN0060909269
“Here is poetry of courage and passion, which manages to be tender and achingly sensual and what is often called ‘political’ at the same time. This is a major new voice.” — Margaret Atwood

The Country Between Us opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, where Carolyn Forché...
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,...
AuthorAdrienne Rich
"The strongest reason
for giving woman all the opportunities
for higher education, for the full
development of her forces of mind and body...
the most enlarged freedom of thought and action
a complete emancipation
from all the crippling influences of fear-
is the solitude...
AuthorEileen Myles
ISBN0062389106
A collection of thrilling new and beloved past work from one of America's most celebrated poets, Eileen Myles, a cult icon and modern favorite

Eileen Myles's poetry and prose are known for their blend of reality and fiction, the sublime and the ephemeral, in which Myles not only lets her readers...
Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems
AuthorRobin Coste Lewis
ISBN1101875437
A stunning poetry debut: this meditation on the black female figure through time introduces us to a brave and penetrating new voice.

Robin Coste Lewis's electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems meditating on the roles that desire and race play in the construction...
AuthorMargaret Atwood
ISBN0395454069
A collection of poems from Two-Headed Poems, True Stories and Interlunar, with seventeen new poems. Revisiting old friends is always fun! The new ones seem to cover a variety of themes on death, musings about aging and mortality (and I find it amusing that the now-mid-70s Atwood felt compelled to write...
AuthorMargaret Atwood
ISBN0395404223
Game After Supper


This is before electricity,
it is when there were porches.

On the sagging porch an old man
is rocking. The porch is wooden,

the house is wooden and grey;
in the living room which smells of
smoke and mildew, soon
the woman will light...
Rise of the Trust Fall
AuthorMindy Nettifee
ISBN0984251596
In Mindy Nettifee's second book, Rise of the Trust Fall, her poems possess a magic that can only come from a seasoned writer willing to share more on the page than she's comfortable with. Whether exploring the strange alchemy of healing, the perils of self-actualization, or the contemporary experience...
The Temple of My Familiar
AuthorAlice Walker
ISBN0753819481
A visionary cast of characters weave together their past and present in a brilliantly intricate tapestry of tales.

It is the story of the dispossessed and displaced, of peoples whose history is ancient and whose future is yet to come. Here we meet Lissie, a woman of many pasts; Arveyda the great...
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