Poetry

NPR Best Books of 2019
Chicago Tribune Best Books of 2019
Chicago Review of Books Best Poetry Book of 2019
O Magazine Best Books by Women of Summer 2019
The Millions Must-Read Poetry of June 2019
LitHub Most Anticipated Reads of Summer 2019

The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots comprising the nation's Red Summer, has shaped the last century but is not widely discussed. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event--which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries--through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history, and illuminates the thin line between the past and the present.

The reader is invited to take a stroll through a life: from the comforts and questions of childhood; through the audacity, heartbreak and yearnings of young adulthood and middle age; to the awakening of acceptance and, perhaps, some insight in later life.

Written at various times over the course of 40-plus years, the poems in this collection present moments remembered, and realizations arising, over the course of the poet's life so far.

In this stunning third collection from Madisen Kuhn, Madisen eloquently analyzes some of life's universal themes within the framework of a house. Whether it's the garden, the bedroom, or the front porch, Madisen takes you into her own "home," sharing some of the most intimate parts of her life so that you might also, someday, feel free to share some of yours.

Filled with beautiful hand-drawn illustrations from Melody Hansen, this boldly intimate, preternaturally wise, and emotionally candid collection encourages you to consider what home means to you--whether it's in the lush, green-lawned suburbs or a city apartment--and, more importantly, explores how you can find it even when home feels like it's on the far-off horizon.

In Arrows of Light, Andrea Potos lets us dwell in those fragile moments between day and night, love and loss, living and death. In the stillness of of a blue scarf lake, the pale ochre walls of Van Gogh's rooms, the light that pours through her Yaya's kitchen windows, Potos takes us to the cusp of the unknowable. Pulled through by the thread of her mother's illness and eventual death, this small, elegant collection shines its gold light on those stunning, ephemeral details -- her mother's coral lipstick, blueberries like small sapphires, laundry flapping on the line like angel wings -- that seem to give us tidings of the world beyond and its fluid relationship with what we know now and will always remember.

A new, feminist translation of Beowulf by the author of the much-buzzed-about novel The Mere Wife

Brash and belligerent, lunatic and envigorating, with passages of sublime poetry punctuated by obscenities and social-media shorthand. --Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker

The author of the crazy-cool Beowulf-inspired novel The Mere Wife tackles the Old English epic poem with a fierce new feminist translation that radically recontextualizes the tale.--Barbara VanDenburgh, USA Today

Nearly twenty years after Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf--and fifty years after the translation that continues to torment high-school students around the world--there is a radical new verse translation of the epic poem by Maria Dahvana Headley, which brings to light elements that have never before been translated into English, recontextualizing the binary narrative of monsters and heroes into a tale in which the two categories often entwine, justice is rarely served, and dragons live among us.

A man seeks to prove himself as a hero. A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. The familiar elements of the epic poem are seen with a novelist's eye toward gender, genre, and history--Beowulf has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment, powerful men seeking to become more powerful, and one woman seeking justice for her child, but this version brings new context to an old story. While crafting her contemporary adaptation of Beowulf, Headley unearthed significant shifts lost over centuries of translation.

Since 1988, The Best American Poetry has been the leading anthology of contemporary American poetry. The Washington Post said of the 2017 edition, "The poems...have a wonderful cohesion and flow, as if each contributes to a larger narrative about life today...While readers may question some of the selections--an annual sport with this series--most will find much that resonates, including the insightful author notes at the back of the anthology."

The state of the world has inspired many to write poetry, and to read it--to share all the rage, beauty, and every other thing under the sun in the way that only poetry can. Now the foremost anthology of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Major Jackson, the poet and editor who, "makes poems that rumble and rock" (poet Dorianne Laux). This brilliant 2019 edition includes some of the year's most defining, striking, and innovative poems and poets.

"Jane Kenyon had a virtually faultless ear. She was an exquisite master of the art of poetry." --Wendell Berry

In this quiet, clear-eyed collection, Townsend meditates on loss--childhood bereavement, depression, divorce--to arrive at the realization that it is through loss that we come to possess some of life's most profound gifts.

"The project of Alison Townsend's poetry is to chart a course through the deepest of losses--to attempt some safe passage through a lifetime's erasures. Intimate, warm and observant, this book involves us in the inscription of a life."--Mark Doty

Alison Townsend was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and spent her childhood in North Salem, New York. She received a B.A. at Marlboro College in Vermont, an M.A. at Claremont Graduate School in California, and an M.F.A. at Vermont College in Mont-pelier. She teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater.

Tennyson portrayed him, and wrote at least one poem under his name. Robert Graves was fascinated by what he saw as his work's connection to a lost world of deeply buried folkloric memory. He is a shapeshifter; a seer; a chronicler of battles fought, by sword and with magic, between the ancient kingdoms of the British Isles; a bridge between old Welsh mythologies and the new Christian theology; a sixth-century Brythonic bard; and a legendary collective project spanning the centuries up to The Book of Taliesin's compilation in fourteenth-century North Wales. He is, above all, no single "he."

The figure of Taliesin is a mystery. But of the variety and quality of the poems written under his sign, of their power as exemplars of the force of ecstatic poetic imagination, and of the fascinating window they offer us onto a strange and visionary world, there can be no question. In the first volume to gather all of the poems from The Book of Taliesin since 1915, Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams's accessible translation makes these outrageous, arrogant, stumbling and joyful poems available to a new generation of readers.