GALILEO@UGA Subject Guides: National Poetry Month: Books of Poetry

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American journal : fifty poems for our time / selected and with an introduction by Tracy K. Smith.

A landmark anthology envisioned by Tracy K. Smith, 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States American Journal presents fifty contemporary poems that explore and celebrate our country and our lives. 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith has gathered a remarkable chorus of voices that ring up and down the registers of American poetry. In the elegant arrangement of this anthology, we hear stories from rural communities and urban centers, laments of loss in war and in grief, experiences of immigrants, outcries at injustices, and poems that honor elders, evoke history, and praise our efforts to see and understand one another.

The silk dragon : translations from the Chinese/ Arthur Sze

Arthur Sze has rare qualifications when it comes to translating Chinese: he is an award-winning poet who was raised in both languages. A second-generation Chinese-American, Sze has gathered over 70 poems by poets who have had a profound effect on Chinese culture, American poetics and Sze's own maturation as an artist. Also included is an informative insightful essay on the methods and processes involved in translating ideogrammic poetry. Sze's anthology features poets who have become literary icons to generations of Chinese readers and scholars.

Compass Rose / Arthur Sze

2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist "Compass Rose [is] a collection in which the poet uses capacious intelligence and lyrical power to offer a dazzling picture of our inter-connected world."--Pulitzer Prize finalist announcement [Sze] brings together disparate realms of experience--astronomy, botany, anthropology, Taoism--and observes their correspondences with an exuberant attentiveness."--The New Yorker

An exaltation of forms : contemporary poets celebrate the diversity of their art / edited by Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes.

At once handbook, reader, and guide to the literary tastes and wisdom of poets, An Exaltation of Forms is an indispensable resource certain to find a dedicated audience among poetry lovers. The editors invited over fifty contemporary poets to select a poetic meter, stanza, or form, describe it, recount its history, and provide favorite examples. The essays represent a remarkably diverse range of literary styles and approaches, and show how the forms of contemporary English-language poetry derive from a wealth of different traditions. The forms range from hendecasyllabics to prose poetry, haiku to procedural poetry, sonnets to blues, rap to fractal verse.

The redshifting web : poems 1970-1998/ Arthur Sze

A comprehensive collection by one of the most intensely musical and visionary poets writing today.

Citizen : an American lyric / Claudia Rankine.

A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive.

Sight Lines/ Arthur Sze

Winner of the 2019 National Book Award "The sight lines in Sze's 10th collection are just that―imagistic lines strung together by jump-cuts, creating a filmic collage that itself seems to be a portrait of simultaneity." ―The New York Times From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus.

Chinese writers on writing / edited by Arthur Sze.

'Chinese Writers on Writing' makes a contribution in illuminating this corner of the globe through the works of some of its finest writers. With more than half the works appearing in English for the first time, 'Chinese Writers on Writing' features authors such as Mo Yan, whose book Red Sorghum was made into an award-winning movie by the same name; Lu Xun, known as the Chinese George Orwell; and Gao Xingjian, recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature.

The cipher / Molly Brodak.

Molly Brodak's The Cipher is a deft and unsparing study of the limits of knowledge and belief, and of what solace can be found within those limits. ?We stand on the rim of the void,? Brodak writes. ?We hold our little lamps of knowing / on the rim, and look in.? Drawing vividly from mathematics, Christianity, European history, urban life, and the natural world, these poems reveal a vision of contemporary experience that is at once luminous and centered on an unshakable emptiness. Wise, sharp, and sometimes devastating, The Cipher leads us through a world in which little can be trusted, takes its measure, and does not look away.

The glass constellation : new and collected poems / Arthur Sze.

"This book is an overwhelming feast, a treasure, and more than enough proof that Sze is a major poet." --NPR National Book Award winner Arthur Sze is a master poet, and The Glass Constellation is a triumph spanning five decades, including ten poetry collections and twenty-six new poems. Sze began his career writing compressed, lyrical poems influenced by classical Chinese poetry; he later made a leap into powerful polysemous sequences, honing a distinct stylistic signature that harnesses luminous particulars, and is sharply focused, emotionally resonant, and structurally complex.

The tradition / Jericho Brown.

WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award "100 Notable Books of the Year," The New York Times Book Review One Book, One Philadelphia Citywide Reading Program Selection, 2021 "By some literary magic--no, it's precision, and honesty--Brown manages to bestow upon even the most public of subjects the most intimate and personal stakes."--Craig Morgan Teicher.

The Ginkgo Light/ Arthur Sze

"Classically elegant."--The New York Times Book Review Sze's free verse emphasizes at once how difficult, and how necessary, it is for us to imagine our world as a system whose ecologies and societies require us to care for all their interdependent parts." --Publishers Weekly "Sze's list-laden sequences capture the world's manifold facts one by one, then through discursive commentary exact from them a sense not only of aesthetic order but of universal cause and effect."--Boston Review

Selected poems, 1950-2012 / Adrienne Rich ; edited and with an introduction by Albert Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, and Brett C. Millier.

Sixty years of poems from pioneering writer, activist, and intellectual Adrienne Rich--"the Blake of American letters" (Nadine Gordimer). Adrienne Rich was the singular voice of her generation, bringing discussions of gender, race, and class to the forefront of poetical discourse. This generous selection from all nineteen of Rich's published poetry volumes encompasses her best-known work--the clear-sighted and passionate feminist poems of the 1970s, including "Diving into the Wreck," "Planetarium," and "The Phenomenology of Anger"--and offers the full range of her evolution as a poet.

Homie : poems / Danez Smith.

Homie is Danez Smith's magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith's close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family--blood and chosen--arrives with just the right food and some redemption.

Hard damage / Aria Aber.

Hard Damage works to relentlessly interrogate the self and its shortcomings. In lyric and documentary poems and essayistic fragments, Aria Aber explores the historical and personal implications of Afghan American relations. Drawing on material dating back to the 1950s, she considers the consequences of these relations--in particular the funding of the Afghan mujahedeen, which led to the Taliban and modern-day Islamic terrorism--for her family and the world at large. Invested in and suspicious of the pain of family and the shame of selfhood, the speakers of these richly evocative and musical poems mourn the magnitude of citizenship as a state of place and a state of mind. .

Like / A.E. Stallings.

A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry A stunning new collection by the award-winning young poet and translator Like, that currency of social media, is a little word with infinite potential; it can be nearly any part of speech. Without it, there is no simile, that engine of the lyric poem, the lyre's note in the epic. A poem can hardly exist otherwise. In this new collection, her most ambitious to date, A. E. Stallings continues her archeology of the domestic, her odyssey through myth and motherhood in received and invented forms, from sonnets to syllabics. Stallings also eschews the poetry volume's conventional sections for the arbitrary order of the alphabet. Contemporary Athens itself, a place never dull during the economic and migration crises of recent years, shakes off the dust of history and emerges as a vibrant character.

The hill we climb : an inaugural poem for the country Amanda Gorman ; foreword by Oprah Winfrey

The instant #1 New York Times bestseller and #1 USA Today bestseller Amanda Gorman's electrifying and historic poem "The Hill We Climb," read at President Joe Biden's inauguration, is now available as a collectible gift edition. In 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and youngest poet to deliver a poetry reading at a presidential inauguration. Taking the stage after the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden, Gorman captivated the nation and brought hope to viewers around the globe with her call for unity and healing.

Some Things I Still Can't Tell You

This book is a compilation of small observations and musings. It's filled with moments of reflection and a love letter to simple joys: passing a simple blade of grass on the sidewalk, the freedom of peeing outdoors late at night, or the way a hand-built ceramic mug feels when it's full of warm tea on a chilly morning. It's a catalog and a compendium that examines the complicated experience of being all too human and interacting with a complex, confounding, breathtaking world...and a reminder to stop and be awake and alive in yourself.

Eye level : poems / Jenny Xie.

For years now, I've been using the wrong palette. Each year with its itchy blue, as the bruise of solitude reaches its expiration date. Planes and buses, guesthouse to guesthouse. I've gotten to where I am by dint of my poor eyesight, my overreactive motion sickness. 9 p.m., Hanoi's Old Quarter: duck porridge and plum wine. Voices outside the door come to a soft boil. --from "Phnom Penh Diptych: Dry Season" 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 forces that moor the self and set it in motion, from immigration to travel to estranging losses and departures.

Different hours : poems / Stephen Dunn.

A wise and graceful new collection by one of our "major, indispensable poets" (Sidney Lea). The mysteries of Eros and Thanatos, the stubborn endurance of mind and body in the face of diminishment--these are the undercurrents of Stephen Dunn's eleventh volume. "I am interested in exploring the 'different' hours," he says, "not only of one's life, but also of the larger historical and philosophical life beyond the personal."

Pinwheel / Marni Ludwig.

Poetry. "Marni Ludwig has a vast and original mind and spirit, which along with her quiet, sometimes sharp humor, and her tenderness, implicate everyone. Her skill is like a good horse, who becomes one with the rider and with her wild, unheard of travels. Here is the real thing."—Jean Valentine

Deaf republic : poems/ Ilya Kaminsky

Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear--they all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya's girls, heroically teaching signing by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain.

Dancing in Odessa/ Ilya Kaminsky

Poetry. Winner of the 2002 Dorset Prize, and recipient of the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Ilya Kaminsky is a recent Russian immigrant and rising poetic star. Despite the fact that he is a non-native speaker, Kaminksy's sense of rhythm and lyic surpasses that of most contemporary poets in the English language. This magical, musical book of poems draws readers into its unforgettable heart, and Carolyn Forché wrties simply "I'm in awe of his gifts."

Call us what we carry : poems / Amanda Gorman

Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning.

Milk and Honey

The book is divided into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose. Deals with a different pain. Heals a different heartache. milk and honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.

Crush / Richard Siken ; foreword by Louise Glück.

Richard Siken's Crush, selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession and love. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. Siken's voice is striking.