collection of poetry and essays

37 poetry collections to watch for in spring 2024

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April is Poetry Month so if you love poetry, watch for these books coming out in the first half of 2024.

Nucleus by Svetlana Ischenko

Nucleus   is a poetry collection that explores the tensions between Svetlana Ischenko's two poetic cultures as a Ukrainian Canadian immigrant and multilingual poet. With both structured sonnets and lyrical pieces, the book examines the tensions of translating oneself as a new immigrant. 

Nucleus is out now. 

Born in Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine, Ischenko is a Vancouver-based poet, translator, former actress and teacher. She writes poetry, essays and plays in both English and Ukrainian. Her poems have been featured in The Antigonish Review and Event. 

Once the Smudge is Lit by Kelsey Borgford and Cole Forrest, illustrated by Tessa Pizzale

Once the Smudge is Lit offers readers insight into the spiritual elements of Ojibway culture and explores the contemporary Indigenous experience. The verse and evocative illustrations touch on various themes ranging from love to community. 

Once the Smudge is Lit is out now.

Kelsey Borgford is a Nbisiing Nishnaabekwe from the Marten clan and an emerging author. She has a forthcoming children's book called What's in a Bead. 

Cole Forrest is an Ojibway filmmaker and programmer from Nipissing First Nation. They are the writer and director of various short films that have been screened at festivals including imagineNATIVE, TQFF and the Vancouver International Film Festival.

• Indigenous directors explore pandemic life through short films in NFB online project

Tessa Pizzale is a Moose Cree artist and student at Nipissing University. She is based in North Bay, Ont.

Talking to Strangers by Rhea Tregebov

Talking to Strangers is a poetry collection that explores new encounters with people and objects. As is characteristic of celebrated poet Rhea Tregebov, the book dabbles in the art of recollection and elegy with skill and tenderness. 

Talking to Strangers is out now.

Tregebov is a Vancouver-based poet, novelist and children's writer. She's written seven books of poetry and two novels, including Rue des Rosiers , and has won the J. I. Segal Award, the Nancy Richler Memorial Prize for Fiction, the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, the Pat Lowther Award and the Prairie Schooner Readers' Choice Award.

Hazard, Home by Christine Lowther

Hazard, Home is a collection of nature poetry with a decolonial lens. The work examines the world with wonder at the animals and plants — and grief due to urbanization, climate change and loss of biodiversity. 

Hazard, Home is out now. 

Read Environmental Services by Christine Lowther

Christine Lowther resides in ƛaʔuukwiiʔatḥ (Tla-o-qui-aht) territory on the west coast. She is the editor of Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees and its youth companion volume. She is also the author of four poetry collections. She served as Tofino's Poet Laureate during the COVID years and was shortlisted for the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize . 

Precedented Parroting by Barbara Tran   

The poems in  Precedented Parroting  explore themes of loss, the natural world, Asian stereotypes and our feathered friends. It's also a book about survival through generations and how both loss and feathers can enable and necessitate flight.

Precedented Parroting   is out now. 

Born in New York City, Barbara Tran is a poet whose work has appeared in Women's Review of Books, Ploughshares and The New Yorker. Honours include a MacDowell Colony Gerald Freund Fellowship, Pushcart Prize and Lannan Foundation Writing Residency. She was longlisted for the  2018 CBC Nonfiction Prize . She currently lives in Toronto.

Northerny by Dawn Macdonald

Northerny tells of what it's like to grow up in the North — and the many ways in which the North can be messy, beautiful and painful. This poetry collection breaks free of the perception of the North as a way to enlightenment or escape and gives a Northerner's perspective of growing up and making a living in the region.

Northerny is out now. 

Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse and studied mathematics and physics at university. Her poetry has been published in The Antigonish Review, Canadian Literature, The Fiddlehead, FOLIO, Grain, Literary Review of Canada and The Malahat Review, among others. Northerny is her first book. 

We Follow the River by Onjana Yawnghwe

We Follow the River follows one family who escapes from military violence in Myanmar to Thailand and finally Canada. The collection is about learning about family history and finding a home in a foreign land. 

We Follow the River is out now. 

Onjana Yawnghwe is a Shan-Canadian writer who lives on the lands of the Kwikwetlem First Nation in British Columbia. Her poetry books include Fragments, Desire and The Small Way, which were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. 

Teeth by Dallas Hunt

Teeth is a poetry collection that explores the consequences of colonization and why it continues to repeat itself in today's society. The book also celebrates the successes of Indigenous peoples and looks into the realities they face.

Teeth is out now. 

Dallas Hunt on Awâsis and the World-Famous Bannock

Dallas Hunt is Cree and a member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River First Nation) in Treaty Eight territory in northern Alberta. His children's book, Awâsis and the World-Famous Bannock , illustrated by Amanda Strong, was nominated for several awards and was one of the 2024  CBC Kids Reads  contenders . Hunt lives in Vancouver.

Gay Girl Prayers by Emily Austin

Gay Girl Prayers is a poetry collection that reclaims Catholic prayers and passages from the Bible to empower young women and members of the LGBTQIA+ community. At once sassy and funny, this book celebrates cultural and societal differences.  

Gay Girl Prayers is out now. 

• Why Emily Austin rewrote parts of the Bible through a queer and feminist lens

Emily Austin is an Ottawa-based writer. Her debut novel, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead , was longlisted for The Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour and shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award and the Ottawa Book Award.  

A Blueprint for Survival by Kim Trainor

A Blueprint for Survival is a poetry collection that starts in wildfire season and then explores the forms of resistance and survival in the context of climate change. It examines each of these forms as a blueprint for being in and seeing the world. 

A Blueprint for Survival is out now. 

Kim Trainor is the author of the poetry collections A thin fire runs through me , Karyotype and Ledi . Her poems have won the Fiddlehead's Ralph Gustafson Prize, the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize and the Great Blue Heron Prize. Her poem Desolation made the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize longlist . She lives in Vancouver.

Love Life Loss and a little bit of hope by Chief R. Stacey Laforme

In this poetry collection, Chief R. Stacey Laforme draws from his own experiences to share the moments and emotions that have shaped him. Intertwining pain and humour, it invites non-Indigenous people to explore Indigenous perspectives. 

Love Life Loss and a little bit of hope is out now. 

Laforme is the retired Chief of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation after serving his community for over 20 years. He is also a poet and storyteller, known for his collection Living in the Tall Grass: Poems of Reconciliation.  

Medium by Johanna Skibsrud

Medium is a poetry collection that gives voice to women vilified over the course of history including Helen of Troy, Shakuntala Devi and Marie Curie. The poems serve as a bridge through time and reimagine and reinterpret the myths as we know them. 

Medium is out now. 

Johanna Skibsrud has no faith in bestseller lists

Johanna Skibsrud is the  Scotiabank Giller Prize -winning author of  The Sentimentalists . She also wrote the novel  Quartet for the End of Time   and the short story collections  Tiger, Tiger  and  This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories . She currently divides her time between Nova Scotia and Arizona. 

impact statement by Jody Chan

Using patient records, psychiatric assessments and court documents, impact statement tells the history of psychiatric institutions within the context of colonialism. The collection deals with themes of migration, intergenerational trauma, gentrification and racialized violence all while making space for a better future. 

impact statement  is out now. 

Jody Chan is a Toronto-based writer, drummer, organizer and therapist. Their work includes haunt, all out futures and sick. They are the winner of the 2018 St. Lawrence Book Award and the 2021 Trillium Award for Poetry . 

you by Chantal Neveu, translated by Erín Moure

you is a book-length poem that explores the formation of self and personal autonomy. Through verse and the spaces in between, the beautiful voice of the work reclaims and affirms one's life. 

you is out now. 

Chantal Neveu is a Montreal-based author of seven books of poetry. Her book This Radiant Life , also translated by Erín Moure won the 2021 Governor General's Literary Award for Translation and the 2021 Nelson Ball Prize. 

Moure is a poet and poetry translator. Her most recent book is Chus Pato's The Face of the Quartzes and her latest poetry book is Theophylline .

West of West Indian by Linzey Corridon

West of West Indian is a poetry collection that explores the Queer Caribbean experience, both the pain and pleasure, as an individual and a collective. It dives into themes of love and autonomy using language that is often used to unsettle queer life. 

West of West Indian  is out now. 

Linzey Corridon is a writer and educator. He was born in the Caribbean and he now lives in Canada. 

A Year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje

A Year of Last Things is Michael Ondaatje's long-awaited return to poetry. Drawing on his personal experiences, this collection goes back in time to all the borders that he's crossed with imagery at once witty, moving and wise. 

A Year of Last Things  is out now. 

Michael Ondaatje is a Canadian literary icon. His novels and poetry have earned international acclaim, and he was the first Canadian ever to win the Man Booker Prize — in 1992, for the wartime story The English Patient . Born in Sri Lanka and educated in England, Ondaatje moved to Canada when he was 18 to attend university.

• For prize-winning poet and novelist Michael Ondaatje, every book is an act of discovery

Ondaatje began his writing career in 1967 as a poet, winning two Governor General's Awards for poetry before turning to fiction. Over his career, he's won the Giller Prize, the Governor General's Literary Award and France's prestigious Prix Medicis among other prizes.

The Seventh Town of Ghosts by Faith Arkorful

The Seventh Town of Ghosts explores these titular towns through songs that help readers grapple with the challenges of existence and independence. The book offers insight into the power of connection, tenderness and the human spirit.

The Seventh Town of Ghosts is out now. 

• Read  Family Affair by Faith Arkorful

Faith Arkorful has had her work published in Guts, Peach Mag, Prism International, Hobart, Without/pretend, The Puritan and Canthius, among others. She was a semi-finalist in the 2019 92Y Discovery Contest. Faith was born in Toronto, where she still resides. In 2020, she was shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize . 

The Knot of My Tongue by Zehra Naqvi

The Knot of My Tongue uses a variety of poetic forms to capture a cast of characters as they attempt to express the inexpressible, from a new immigrant to Canada trying to speak a new language to the myth of Philomena searching for ways to communicate after her husband cuts off her tongue. 

The Knot of My Tongue is out now. 

Zehra Naqvi is a Vancouver-based writer who was born in Karachi. She won the 2021 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers . The Knot of My Tongue is her debut poetry collection. 

shima by Shō Yamagushiku

shima is a poetry collection that questions both the past and future of a community exiled, anchored in the relationship of a father and son. It shows the fragility of memory with a voice at once yearning and precise. 

shima is out now. 

Shō Yamagushiku is a writer and researcher living in Victoria.  shima is his debut poetry collection. 

Oh Witness Dey! by Shani Mootoo

With no record of how they got there and where they're originally from, Shani Mootoo's great-great-grandparents were brought to Trinidad by the British. Oh Witness Dey! discusses the concept of "origin" through an exploration of history, displacements and legacy, starting with her own. 

Oh Witness Dey! is out now. 

Shani Mootoo on chocolate, house chores and cryptic notes

Mootoo is a writer and visual artist who currently lives in Ontario. Her debut novel was 1997's Cereus Blooms at Night. Her novel Polar Vortex was shortlisted for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize . Her other books include the novels Cane | Fire , Moving Forward Sideways like a Crab and Valmiki's Daughter. In 2022, she won the Writers' Trust Engel Findley Award for fiction writers in the middle of their career . 

Fine by Matt Rader

Fine takes place in the Kelowna area from June 2021 to June 2022. The poetry collection deals with the events from that time period, including the pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the November 2021 atmospheric river. Despite all these challenges, the poems present a voice of survival and an appreciation for the world's beauty. 

When you can read it: April 2024

Rader is a writer from Kelowna, B.C. He is the author of six volumes of poetry, a book of nonfiction and the short story collection What I Want to Tell Goes Like This . He teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. 

The Oneironaut ∅1 by Sheri-D Wilson

The Oneironaut ∅1 is the first book-long epic poem in a trilogy that explores what the future would look like if we couldn't dream. In this speculative account, scientist Rain is drawn to a small group of people who protect the world of illusion and feels compelled to help them bring down the dystopian regime and allow people to dream once again. 

'Let us speak differently about the world:' Poet says social change starts with language

Sheri-D Wilson is a Calgary-based writer and artist of 13 books, four short films and three words and music albums. She was appointed to The Order of Canada in 2019 and was the Poet Laureate Emeritus of Calgary from 2018-2020.

The Last to the Party by Chuqiao Yang

The Last to the Party is a poetry collection that deals with family, culture and diaspora through place and perspective — from a Saskatchewan childhood to family visits in Taiyuan. In this moving account, the speaker searches for moments of self-discovery and finds a strong poetic vision. 

When you can read it: April 2, 2024

Chuqiao Yang is an Ottawa-based poet whose work has been featured in The Unpublished City, Ricepaper, Arc Poetry Magazine, Canthius, Prism, Grain, CV2, Room, and on CBC Radio. Her chapbook, Reunions in the Year of Sheep, won the bpNichol Chapbook Award. 

The Lantern and the Night Moths by Yilin Wang

The Lantern and the Night Moths is a translation of poems by five contemporary and modern Chinese poets, Qiu Jin, Fei Ming, Dai Wangshu, Zhang Qiaohui and Xiao Xi. The poems are translated next to their original text and the book includes essays about the art of poetry translation. 

Yilin Wang is a writer, poet and Chinese-English translator. Her fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in Clarkesworld, The Malahat Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, Grain, CV2, carte blanche and The Tyee. They won the Foster Poetry Prize, an Honorable Mention in the poetry category of Canada's National Magazine award and were longlisted for the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize . She is based in Vancouver. 

Terrarium by Matthew Walsh

Terrarium is a poetry collection that explores queer identity and depression using a conversational writing style. Raw, confessional and often messy, the voice has a quality of intimacy and shared secrets. 

Matthew Walsh is a poet known for their debut book These are not the potatoes of my youth , which was a finalist for the Trillium and Gerald Lampert Awards . Walsh has previously contributed poetry to publications like The Malahat Review and Arc. They are now based in Toronto.

Sorry About the Fire by Colleen Coco Collins

Sorry About the Fire is a debut poetry collection that sees the world through a triple lens of Irish, French and Odawa heritage. Using rhythmic language, it attempts to detect patterns and answer questions of time and being.

Colleen Coco Collins is an interdisciplinary artist of Irish, French and Odawa descent. Based in Nova Scotia, Sorry About the Fire is her first poetry collection. 

Scientific Marvel by Chimwemwe Undi

Scientific Marvel is a poetry collection that looks into the history of and current life in Winnipeg. With humour and surprise, it delves into deeper themes of racism, queerness and colonialism while keeping personal lived experiences close to the page. 

• The Poetry of Why: poet Chimwemwe Undi on a lifetime of questions in verse

Chimwemwe Undi is a Winnipeg-based poet, editor and lawyer. She is the Winnipeg Poet Laureate for 2023 and 2024. Undi was longlisted for the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize . She won the 2022 John Hirsch Emerging Writer Award from the Manitoba Book Awards and her work can be found in Brick, Border Crossings, Canadian Literature and BBC World, among others. 

Midway by Kayla Czaga

Midway is a poetry collection that explores the writer's grief in the aftermath of her parents' deaths. The poems travel from the underworld to London's Tate Modern in a way that's both comforting and disconcerting. 

Kayla Czaga is also the author of For Your Safety Please Hold On and Dunk Tank . Her debut won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and was nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, among others. Czaga was on the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Drunk River . She lives in Victoria and served as the online poetry mentor for Simon Fraser University's The Writer's Studio.

Crying Dress by Cassidy McFadzean

Crying Dress is a poetry collection rooted in the tradition of lyric poetry while adopting its own spin and linguistic play that challenges an idea of poetic coherence. It spans various locations and brings together scenes from intimate moments in domestic life to ones featuring the ghosts of Brooklyn. 

Regina-raised Cassidy McFadzean is a past finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize and The Walrus Poetry Prize. Her poetry books are Drolleries and Hacker Packer , which won two Saskatchewan Book Awards. She also wrote a crown of sonnets called Third State of Being. She currently lives in Toronto. 

A Fate Worse Than Death by Nisha Patel

A Fate Worse Than Death is a poetry collection that uses the author's own medical records to investigate the worthiness of the disabled life. It explores how her multiple disabilities affect her daily life and shows how poetry allows her to offer complexity to her experiences — her pain, sickness, anger but also love. 

Nisha Patel is the Poet Laureate Emeritus of the City of Edmonton and a Canadian Poetry Slam Champion. She is the author of  Coconut .  A disabled and queer artist, she won the Queen's Platinum Jubilee Medal and the Edmonton Artists' Trust Fund.

Wet by Leanne Dunic

Wet follows a Chinese American model working in Singapore who wants better for the world: fair labour rights, breathable air and connection. With a mastery of photography and language, Wet tells her story as she feels lost and observes migrant workers in dangerous conditions. 

When you can read it: April 6, 2024

Leanne Dunic is an artist, musician, writer and PhD candidate. Her work includes poetry book To Love the Coming End and One and Half of You , which was named one of the best nonfiction books of 2021 by CBC Books . She won the 2021 LA Review Flash Fiction Award and currently lives in Vancouver. 

Songbook by Steven Heighton, edited by Ginger Pharand

Songbook brings together the lyrics and music of the late award-winning author and musician Steven Heighton, who died suddenly of cancer during an intensely creative period of writing. The poems are accompanied by chords, allowing musicians to bring them to life. 

When you can read it: April 23, 2024

Steven Heighton was a musician and author of 20 books of poetry, nonfiction and fiction, including Afterlands and Governor General's Literary Award winning  The  Waking Comes Late . He lived in Kingston, Ontario. 

• Steven Heighton, Governor General's Literary Award-winning poet, dead at 60

Ginger Pharand is a Kingston-based editor, educator and psychotherapist. 

Limited Verse by David Martin

Limited Verse is a collection of classic poems with a new twist — they're translated into New English, made up of only 850 words. 

When you can read it: April 30, 2024

David Martin is an author of poetry collections  Kink Bands   and Tar Swan , which was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award and the W.O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize. Martin won the CBC Poetry Prize in 2014 . 

I Will Get Up Off Of by Simina Banu

I Will Get Up Off Of is a poetry collection about trying to leave a chair. Bound by anxiety and depression and looking for hope everywhere from fitness influencers to psychics, the poems eventually become more and more desperate and highlight the importance of art when it comes to survival. 

When you can read it: May 21, 2024

Simina Banu is a Montreal-based author. Having published two chapbooks before, her first full-length collection of poetry was POP . Her poetry has appeared in filling Station, untethered, In/Words Magazine and the Feathertale Review, among others. 

Barfly by Michael Lista

At once hilarious and raw, Barfly uses Byronic rhymes and Auden's meters to discuss twenty-first century topics. 

When you can read it: June 4, 2024

Michael Lista is a Toronto-based poet and journalist, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, The Walrus and Toronto Life. He is the author of several books of poetry and a collection of essays. Lista was the winner of the 2020 National Magazine Award Gold Medals for both Investigative Reporting and Long Form Feature Writing. His story, The Sting , is being adapted into a television series for Apple TV+.

Lossless by Matthew Tierney

Lossless is a poetry collection that explores the connection between algorithms and sonnets, viewing the verses as lines of code. It does this all while accessing inherently human experiences of loss of relationships, faith, childhood and people. 

When you can read it: June 5, 2024

Matthew Tierney is the author of four books of poetry, including Midday at the Super-Kamiokande which was nominated for a ReLit Award. He is the winner of the 2013 Trillium Book Award for Poetry and is also a recipient of the K. M. Hunter Award and the P.K. Page Founders' Award. He lives in Toronto. 

Unwashed by Daniel Maluka

Unwashed is a poetry collection that reflects the author's experience as an immigrant to Canada and the themes of growing up, love and alienation. Image-rich and intense, the poems explore the city of Toronto in a loud and unapologetic manner.

When you can read it: June 15, 2024

Daniel Maluka is an artist and writer from South Africa based in Toronto. Unwashed is his debut poetry collection.

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Explore poetry using our special collections. Curated around specific themes and forms, these collections bring you the wealth of poetry available in the Archive.

59 collections

International Women’s Day

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Protected: The Daniel Day-Lewis Collection

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Competition

Poetry archive now wordview 2023 winners.

The Wordview 2023 collection showcases our winning 2023 poets and their work that captures this extraordinary year for future reflection.

Special Collection

Pn review at 50.

During 2023 PN Review is celebrating its jubilee. Since we started as Poetry Nation, a twice yearly hardback, in 1973, we’ve been publishing new poetry, rediscoveries, commentary, literary essays, interviews and reviews from around the globe. Our vast archive now includes over 270…

Poetry Archive Now Wordview 2022 Winners

The Wordview 2022 collection showcases our winning 2022 poets and their work that captures this extraordinary year for future reflection.

Guided Tour

Simon armitage: guided tour of the bbc 100 collection.

Celebrating 100 years of poetry on the BBC with Poet Laureate Simon Armitage

All Hallows

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National Poetry Day 2022

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Celebrate Summer with a collection dedicated to the season, comprised of poems about love, desire, insects and heat.

Speak its name

To celebrate Pride and the publication of 100 Queer Poems, edited by Andrew McMillan and Mary Jean Chan, ‘Speak its name’ is a collection of contemporary and twentieth-century voices by queer poets and poems with queer themes through a transhistorical…

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Celebrating Shakespeare

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Poetry, Peace & Protest

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Poems to make us smile

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Poetry Archive Now Wordview 2021 Winners

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Night listening

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Books of The Times

A Timely Collection of Vital Writing by Audre Lorde

By Parul Sehgal

• Sept. 15, 2020
• Share full article

In her public appearances, Audre Lorde famously introduced herself the same way: “I am a Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” There were occasional variations. “I am a Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet doing my work, coming to ask you if you’re doing yours,” she’d sometimes say. But there was always that garland of identifiers — and not just because she couldn’t be defined by one word. She wanted, as Angela Davis said, to “demystify the assumption that these terms cannot inhabit the same space: Black and lesbian, lesbian and mother, mother and warrior, warrior and poet.”

Lorde died in 1992 , at 58. She left riches: poems, essays and two genre-defining memoirs, “Zami” and “The Cancer Journals.” Her work is an estuary, a point of confluence for all identities, all aspects kept so strenuously segregated: poetry and politics, feeling and analysis, analysis and action, sexuality and the intellect.

“There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love,” she once wrote.

Any opportunity to contemplate Lorde would be a cause for celebration. “The Selected Works of Audre Lorde,” edited and introduced by Roxane Gay, arrives at an especially interesting moment, however. Lorde’s writing has rarely been more influential — or more misunderstood.

Even more than scandal or a shoddy biographer, a writer’s sheer quotability can guarantee an uneasy afterlife. Lorde’s lines ring like mantras, all strong cadences and neon warnings. “Your silence will not protect you.” “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” How often her ideas are plucked from her work, snipped and scraped, turned into zesty curls of quotation and used to garnish some very strange brews. Her notion of self-care as “political warfare,” as she described it after her second cancer diagnosis, has been snatched up as a generic wellness credo.

She would have been dismayed but never surprised. She witnessed the misuse of her words in her own time. In her 1979 open letter to the feminist writer Mary Daly, she objected to how crudely Daly had quoted her. “The question arises in my mind, Mary, do you ever really read the work of Black women?” she wrote. “Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us?”

Lorde, like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, is vulnerable to selective quotation. Black writers can be treated as oracles, read symbolically, with lazy reverence; their work is flattened into self-help or polemic, the message extracted and all torsions and contradictions (often the very ones that catalyze the writer) smoothed away. It’s the sort of reading that gives us a simplified, neutralized Lorde, deracinated from her radical roots.

This new collection brings together a vast selection of Lorde’s poetry and 12 pieces of prose, mostly essays, and a long excerpt from “The Cancer Journals.” One of the great unspoken pleasures of anthologies is bemoaning what didn’t make the cut, in fantasizing about one’s own unimpeachable selections. But this is a balanced and representative sampling of Lorde’s writing — inspired, even, where the poetry is concerned. I longed only for context and more restitution. In the introduction, Gay acknowledges the long tradition of misappropriation of Lorde’s work, but I wished for more reckoning with her political imagination and why she is persistently misread, with both cynicism and sentimentality.

For Lorde is everywhere today; we see the flowering of her most subtle ideas. In the essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” included here, she describes poetry as “the skeleton architecture of our lives”: “It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” The rise of the prison abolition movement has followed the decades of activism by Lorde and fellow Black feminist writers, including the Combahee River Collective, and many others. She feels present in every call to reconceive models of care and justice — in the work of the organizer Mariame Kaba, for example (“Poetry helps me to imagine freedom”), and the scholar Akwugo Emejulu, who spoke at a recent series of conversations on abolition inspired by Lorde. (“I hope that we can be brave, that we can be courageous, that we allow ourselves to think expansively about this idea of abolition,” Emejulu has said. “I hope that we allow ourselves to have our imaginations run wild.”) I hear Lorde’s words in Arundhati Roy’s essays on Covid-19: “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal.”

But to Lorde, “Without community, there is no liberation.” And community, for her, involved parsing difference, honoring it. In her time, as in ours, to speak of difference can court charges of divisiveness, even opportunism, but she regarded it as a fund of creativity and connection — the chance to “hone ourselves upon each other’s courage.”

On this point, a few omissions in this collection rankled — the pieces that reveal what it means to negotiate difference, with all its risks and rewards. I missed “Eye to Eye,” perhaps the most self-critical and self-revealing piece Lorde ever wrote, about the sources of anger between Black women. I missed her letter to Daly, too, and her public conversations with Adrienne Rich and James Baldwin, which felt like genuine events in their time.

Lorde loved to be in dialogue, loved thinking with others, with her comrades and lovers. She is never alone on the page. Even her short essays come festooned with long lines of acknowledgment to those who have sharpened their ideas. Ghosts flock her essays. She writes to the ancestors and to women she meets in the headlines of the newspaper — missing women, murdered women, naming as many as she can, the sort of rescue and care for the dead that one sees in the work of Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe. In “The Cancer Journals,” in which she documented her diagnosis of breast cancer, she noted: “I carry tattooed upon my heart a list of names of women who did not survive, and there is always a space left for one more, my own.”

The boon in this book is its wealth of poetry. Lorde is beloved for her essays and her groundbreaking memoir, “Zami,” with its vivid, sexy, very funny depictions of the drama of Downtown “gay-girl” life in the ’50s, but she insisted she was a poet first.

For those familiar with her biography, the poetry becomes a shadow journal — a document of her inner life, her hungers, as she left home young, labored in factories, taught high school students, taught cops. She married, bore two children, divorced, fell in love again (and again), with the brilliant women who were to become some of her chief interlocutors. The poems grow cleaner and clearer, with the years. The last ones are still full of appetite and “the taste of loving” even as she weakened, with a tumorous “town growing in my liver.”

“I am dying / but I do not want to do it / looking the other way,” she wrote.

Her work was interrupted; her work continues, as she knew it would. In “The Cancer Journals,” she described talking with Black women trying to organize New Orleans’s first feminist book fair. She was galvanized by their energy, and deeply moved: “These women make the early silence and the doubts and the wear and tear of it all worth it. I feel like they are my inheritors, and sometimes I breathe a sigh of relief that they exist, that I don’t have to do it all.”

Follow Parul Sehgal on Twitter: @parul_sehgal .

The Selected Works of Audre Lorde Edited and with an introduction by Roxane Gay 367 pages. W.W. Norton & Company. $16.95.

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Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

50+ Of Your Favorite Contemporary Poetry Collections

Amanda Nelson

Amanda Nelson is an Executive Director of Book Riot. She lives in Richmond, VA.

View All posts by Amanda Nelson

This giveaway is sponsored by Congotronic by Shane Book and Trickster by Randall Potts.

____________________

For this giveaway, we asked for your favorite contemporary poetry collections- leaving the definition of “contemporary” up to you- and here are your answers!

Time and Materials by Robert Hass

Nights I Let the Tiger Get You by Elizabeth Cantwell

Rookery by Traci Brimhall

Sun by Michael Palmer

King Me by Roger Reeves

Your Own, Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath by Stephanie Hemphill

The Fifty Minute Mermaid  by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill

Frameless Windows, Squares of Light by Cathy Song

Jelly Roll by Kevin Young

Sleeping on the Wing by Kenneth Koch and Kate Ferrell

Pilgrim by David Whyte

What the Living Do by Marie Howe

Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times by Jo Shapcott and Matthew Sweeney

Getting Stitches by Rudy K. Francisco

The Cinnamon Peeler by Michael Ondaatje

Gray Matter by Sarah Michas-Martin

Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood

No Matter the Wreckage by Sarah Kay

Missing You, Metropolis by Gary Jackson

Blowout by Denise Duhamel

Crush by Richard Siken

What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes? by Arlene Kim

Senegal Taxi by Juan Felipe Herrera

In Search of Midnight by Mike McGee

The Madness Vase by Andrea Gibson

Forgiveness Parade by Jeffery McDaniel

Bellocq’s Ophelia by Natasha Tretheway

Gentleman Practice by Buddy Wakefield

Dear Future Boyfriend by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz

Bicentennial: Poems by Dan Chiasson

Human Dark With Sugar by Brenda Shaughnessy

The Rhizome as a Field of Broken Bones by Margaret Randall

10,000 Wallpapers by Matt Shears

Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith

Breaking Poems by Suheir Hammad

Bitters by Rebecca Seiferle

Songs of a Clerk by Gary Beck

The Silence of Doorways by Sharon Venezio

God Particles by Thomas Lux

Anne Stevenson’s Poems 1955-2005

Words for Empty and Words for Full by Bob Hicok

Angle of Yaw by Ben Lerner

Wind in a Box by Terrance Hayes

Love Poems by Nikki Giovanni

Slamma Lamma Ding Dong by Dan Leamen

The Trouble with Poetry by Billy Collins

Blind Huber by Nick Flynn

Selected Poems by Bob Schneider

Now You’re the Enemy by James Allen Hall

Essays Against Ruin by Brian Clements

The Complete Works of Edna St. Vincent Millay

Men in Groups by Aaron Smith

Broetry by Brian McGackin

New Shoes on a Dead Horse by Sierra DeMulder

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Self-Reliance

Throughout his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson kept detailed journals of his thoughts and actions, and he returned to them as a source for many of his essays. Self-reliance is all that it sounds like plus considerably more. Learn from one of the greatest writers and poets in American history. His most famous work, Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self-Reliance can truly change your life for the better.

More About Self-Reliance

What is Ralph Waldo Emerson's most famous quote?

Ralph Waldo Emerson is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in American literary history. He was a philosopher, essayist, and poet who lived during the 19th century. His most famous quote is " Self-reliance is the foundation of a prosperous society." This quote is often cited as a cornerstone of Emerson's philosophy, which emphasized individualism, self-sufficiency, and the importance of following one's own path in life. This message continues to inspire and resonate with people around the world, making it one of the most enduring and memorable quotes in American literary history.

What is Emerson's most famous essay?

Ralph Waldo Emerson is most famous for his essay " Self-Reliance. " This essay, first published in 1841, outlines Emerson's philosophy of individualism and self-reliance, and it remains one of his most widely read and influential works. In " Self-Reliance ," Emerson argues that people should trust their own instincts and ideas, rather than blindly following the opinions and beliefs of others. He writes that people should cultivate their own inner voice, and that this inner voice is the key to true happiness and fulfillment. The essay is considered a classic of American literature, and its message continues to be relevant and inspiring to people around the world.

What are Ralph Waldo Emerson's most famous poems?

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a renowned poet and writer, and several of his poems have become well-known and widely celebrated. Some of his most famous poems include " Concord Hymn ," which he wrote to commemorate the Battle of Concord during the American Revolution, " Each and All ," a meditation on the interconnections between all things, and " Brahma ," a celebration of the unity of all things in the universe. Emerson's poetry is characterized by its use of rich and descriptive language, its philosophical themes, and its focus on individualism and self-reliance . His poems remain popular and widely read today, and they continue to inspire and influence people around the world.

What inspired Ralph Waldo Emerson to write?

Ralph Waldo Emerson was inspired to write by a variety of factors, including his experiences as a young man, his philosophical beliefs, and his interest in exploring the relationship between the individual and society. One of the most significant influences on Emerson's writing was his growing sense of disillusionment with traditional religious and cultural institutions. He saw these institutions as stifling and oppressive, and he felt that people were being denied the freedom to think and act for themselves. In response to this, Emerson began to develop a philosophy of individualism and self-reliance , and he sought to share this philosophy through his writing. Through his essays, poems, and lectures, he sought to inspire others to embrace their own inner voice and to live their lives according to their own values and beliefs.

What influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson?

Ralph Waldo Emerson was influenced by a wide range of factors, including his personal experiences, philosophical ideas, and cultural and historical events. Some of the most significant influences on his work include his exposure to the ideas of Transcendentalism, a philosophical and cultural movement that sought to bridge the gap between the individual and the divine. He was also inspired by his travels in Europe, where he was exposed to the works of leading European philosophers and poets. Additionally, Emerson was deeply influenced by the religious and cultural institutions of his time, and he sought to challenge and reject many of the traditions and beliefs that he saw as stifling and oppressive. These various influences helped shape his unique philosophy of individualism and self-reliance , which he sought to share with others through his writing.

What are 3 significant things about Emerson?

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a highly influential figure in American literary and cultural history. Here are three significant things about him:

Philosophical Thought: Emerson was a central figure in the Transcendentalist movement, which emphasized the importance of individual experience and the power of the human spirit to understand the world. His writing reflects these beliefs and encourages readers to trust their own instincts and ideas.

Literary Legacy: Emerson was a prolific writer, producing a large body of work that includes essays, poems, and lectures. His writing remains widely read and highly regarded today, and he is considered one of the most important American writers of the 19th century.

Cultural Influence: Beyond his literary achievements, Emerson also had a significant impact on American culture. His ideas about individualism and self-reliance have been widely influential, and they continue to shape our understanding of American values and ideals. Additionally, he was a prominent public speaker and a leading figure in the intellectual and cultural life of his time.

What is Ralph Emerson's motto?

Ralph Waldo Emerson's motto, or personal philosophy, can be best summed up by his famous quote, " Self-reliance is the foundation of a prosperous society." This quote reflects Emerson's belief in the importance of individualism and self-reliance, and it encapsulates the central themes that he explored in his writing. In Emerson's view, people should trust their own instincts and ideas, rather than blindly following the opinions and beliefs of others. He believed that this inner voice is the key to true happiness and fulfillment, and that it is the foundation of a prosperous and harmonious society. This message continues to inspire and resonate with people around the world, and it remains one of Emerson's most enduring and memorable contributions to American literary and cultural history.

What is Ralph Waldo Emerson most known for?

Ralph Waldo Emerson is most widely known for his contributions to American literature and cultural history as a writer, poet, and philosopher. He is considered one of the most important American writers of the 19th century, and his essays, poems, and lectures have had a profound impact on American intellectual and cultural life. Emerson is best known for his philosophy of individualism and self-reliance, which he expounded upon in works such as " Self-Reliance " and " Nature ." These works argue that people should trust their own instincts and ideas, and that this inner voice is the key to true happiness and fulfillment. Through his writing, Emerson sought to inspire others to embrace their own individuality and to live their lives according to their own values and beliefs. His legacy continues to be celebrated and studied today, and he remains one of the most widely read and influential writers in American literary history.

What type of people did Emerson gather around him?

Throughout his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson was associated with a wide-ranging group of people from various walks of life and intellectual disciplines. Some of the individuals who gathered around him included fellow writers, poets, philosophers, and artists, as well as intellectuals, reformers, and political activists. These individuals were drawn to Emerson's ideas about individualism and self-reliance , and many of them were influenced by his philosophy in their own work.

What is Emerson's theory?

Ralph Waldo Emerson is best known for his theory of individualism and self-reliance , which he expounded upon in his essays, poems, and lectures. At its core, this theory holds that people should trust their own instincts and ideas, rather than blindly following the opinions and beliefs of others.

According to Emerson, the inner voice is the key to true happiness and fulfillment, and it should be the guiding force in people's lives. His theory of individualism and self-reliance continues to be widely studied and celebrated today, and it remains one of his most enduring contributions to American literary and cultural history.

What type of poetry is Ralph Waldo Emerson known for?

Ralph Waldo Emerson is best known for his contributions to American literature as an essayist and philosopher, but he also wrote several influential works of poetry. He is particularly known for his lyrical and contemplative poems that reflect his philosophy of individualism and self-reliance .

Emerson's poetry is characterized by its focus on nature, spirituality, and the human experience, and it often explores the relationship between the self and the universe. His poems are notable for their vivid and evocative language, their spiritual themes, and their celebration of individual freedom and self-expression.

Some of Emerson's most famous poems include "Each and All," "The Rhodora," "Concord Hymn," and "Brahma." These works continue to be widely read and celebrated today, and they remain an important part of American literary and cultural history. Through his poetry, Emerson sought to inspire others to embrace their own individuality and to find their own path to happiness and fulfillment.

Why was Ralph Waldo Emerson important to Transcendentalism?

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a key figure in the Transcendentalist movement, which was a major intellectual and cultural movement that emerged in New England in the early 19th century. Transcendentalism was characterized by a focus on individualism, self-reliance, and the power of the individual spirit, and it sought to challenge traditional religious, social, and political beliefs and institutions.

Emerson was one of the leading voices of the movement, and he was known for his essays, poems, and lectures, which expounded upon his ideas about individualism, self-reliance, and the power of the individual spirit. Through his writing and speaking, he sought to inspire others to embrace their own individuality and to live their lives according to their own values and beliefs.

Emerson's contributions to Transcendentalism were significant, as he helped to define the movement and to shape its intellectual and cultural influence. He was a major influence on other leading Transcendentalists , such as Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott, and his ideas and writings continue to be widely studied and celebrated today.

Overall, Ralph Waldo Emerson's contributions to Transcendentalism were essential in shaping the movement's intellectual and cultural impact, and he remains one of the most important and influential figures in American literary and cultural history.

Popular Collections

Lectures / Biographies

This section includes the lectures given by Ralph Waldo Emerson and also includes various biographies on his life and those close to Emerson. The Sovereignty of Ethics and Mary Moody Emerson are included.

More Lectures

Early Emerson Poems

This section covers poems written early in Emerson’s career which some are not widely known. Fifty poems are available, including The Rhodora.

Uncollected Prose

This is a collection of writings, addresses, essays, and reviews by Emerson. Included are his famous works, The Last Supper.

The section does not cover the history and life of Emerson and his writings, but rather his work entitled “History.”

More About Histroy

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"The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." That quote has been inspirational to me and my business. I've taken risks and fallen, but I always get back up stronger than before. Matt Gallant BiOptimizers

The wisdom that is Emerson has been a strong impact on my career and in my roles as a father and husband. His advice is timeless. "Self Reliance" was the first work of Emerson's that I read and I still read it every year. Ron Halversen

I read Emerson's Self Reliance as a teen for English class. It didn't click for me at the time, but as I got older I found myself remembering bits and pieces. It's been a sort of backbone to my adult life that I've returned to again and again when I needed (self) guidance. Melissa Anderson

I recently attended an important dinner meeting with a potential new client. I reminded myself to be calm, watch my non-verbal cues and maintain eye contact. I learned these important items when reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The Conduct of Life". The essay emphasized the importance of "Behavior" and to celebrate "the wonderful expressiveness of the human body". Heather Paige Diet Food Delivery Service

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." To think Emerson uttered these words nearly two centuries ago and yet it is the perfect advice for today's youth." Alyssa Gonzalez TLC Graduate Credits

Emerson's advice, "Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer," is even more important in today's wealth-driven economy. Being a producer ensures your family's security and comfort even after you are gone." Ashley Haigh Carpet Tiles UK

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." Every business owner would be wise to heed Emerson's words." Caleb Hunter PuppyWire

There is no human alive could not appreciate the magnitude of living life free from all that we tightly wind ourselves. This freedom comes from the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Mark Mason Mark Mason

What I remember most about Emerson is he said not to worry about what has happened in the past, or what may happen in the future, but focus on that which dwells deep within you. Derek Mills Shoptimized

A year has not gone by since I left college that I have not read Emerson’s essay, Self Reliance. I have instilled Emerson’s wisdom on my daughter, family, and friends. Jeff Greenfield

My grandfather told me when I was young that instead of following the path of others, I should go where my heart took me. For me to leave a trail for others to follow. I learned years later it was a quote from Emerson. Todd Chism

People Influenced By Emerson

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was an American essayist, a poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. His well-known essays were Civil Disobedience and Life Without Principle.

Amos Bronson Alcott

Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888) was an American teacher, writer, philosopher, and reformer. As a key figure in the transcendentalist movement, his work and ideas were deeply interwoven with the broader currents of 19th-century American intellectual and social life. Born in Wolcott, Connecticut, Alcott pursued education and self-improvement with a passion that would define much of his life and career. Alcott’s educational philosophy was progressive and innovative. He advocated for a model of education that emphasized personal growth, moral development, and the cultivation of the imagination rather than rote memorization or strict discipline. This led him to found the Temple School in Boston, where he implemented his ideas. Although the school…

Stanley Cavell

Stanley Cavell (1926–2018) was an American philosopher renowned for his work in aesthetics, ethics, and the philosophy of language and for his contributions to the interpretation of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Thoreau. Cavell’s academic career was primarily associated with Harvard University, where he taught for over three decades and impacted contemporary American philosophy. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Cavell was raised in Sacramento, California. He pursued an undergraduate degree in music at the University of California, Berkeley, before shifting his focus to philosophy, where he found his true calling. Cavell earned his Ph.D. from Harvard, later joining the faculty, influencing generations of students and scholars through his teaching and writing. Cavell’s philosophical…

Ellen Louisa Tucker

Ellen Louisa Tucker (1811–1831) was not a public figure or philosopher in her own right but is remembered primarily for her profound influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American transcendentalist philosopher, essayist, and poet. Born in Concord, New Hampshire, Ellen was known for her beauty, vivacity, and profoundly religious nature. Her life was tragically short, but her impact, particularly on Emerson, was significant and enduring. Ellen and Emerson’s relationship began in 1827, culminating in their marriage in 1829 when Ellen was just 18 years old. Their time together was brief, as Ellen suffered from tuberculosis and died less than two years after their marriage, in February 1831, at the age…

Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller was a women’s rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement. She was also an American journalist. Her given name was Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, philologist, and a profound influencer of modern intellectual thought. His work is known for its radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth, its critique of religion and morality as understood in the traditional sense, and its exploration of the concept of the “will to power.” Nietzsche’s philosophy delves into the complexities of existence, the nature of power, and the potential for individual transcendence by creating one’s own values instead of relying on the values of others. Key works of Nietzsche include “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (1883-1885), a philosophical novel that introduces the idea of the Übermensch, or “Overman,” as…

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) was a Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian, and teacher during the Victorian era. Known for his sharp critique of democracy, industrialization, and the spiritual malaise of his time, Carlyle became one of the most influential thinkers of the 19th century. His work is characterized by a profound, often pessimistic, reflection on society and a strong advocacy for heroic leadership and individual moral integrity. Carlyle’s significant contributions include his essay “Sartor Resartus” (1833-1834), a satirical work that presents a philosophy of clothes as a metaphor for the human condition and societal values. His magnum opus, “The French Revolution: A History” (1837), is a dramatic and detailed account…

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Ralph Waldo Emerson was born

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1803.

The American Scholar

'The American Scholar' was a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson on August 31, 1837.

The Harvard Divinity School Address

Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered this speech before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge in July 15, 1838.

The Over Soul

There is a difference between one and another hour of life, in their authority and subsequent effect.

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures.

Nominalist and Realist

I cannot often enough say, that a man is only a relative and representative nature. Each is a hint of the truth.

Ruth Haskins Emerson

The mother of Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on 9 Nov 1768 Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts.

Lidian Jackson Emerson

She was the second wife of Ralph Waldo Emerson, America's best known and best-loved essayist, lecturer, poet in 19th-century.

The Harvard University Press

Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, History, Biography, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures

Princeton University Press

Princeton University Press published a book on Ralph Waldo Emerson named Emerson: The Roots of Prophecy.

University of Chicago Press

University of Chicago Press published a journal -Rethinking Self-Reliance: Emerson on Mobbing, War, and Abolition.

Boston Public Latin School

Ralph Waldo Emerson received his early education at home would serve him well in school.

Edward Waldo Emerson

(1844-1930) Was a physician, writer, and lecturer. Lived in Concord, Massachusetts most of his life. Was the youngest son of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Lydian Jackson Emerson (second wife). Educated at Harvard and graduated in 1866. He went to Harvard Medical School and graduated in 1874. His medical practice was in Concord until 1882 when his inheritance was delivered and decided to retire.

Ralph Waldo Emerson - American author, poet, philospher, and essayist, This site is dedicated to the memory of my late father, Emerson West, who was named after Ralph Waldo Emerson. The man I am today reflects the influence of my father and the life teachings of Emerson.

Research the collective works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Read More Essay

Emerson's most famous work that can truly change your life. Check it out

America's best known and best-loved poems. More Poems

Modern American Poetry Site

A comprehensive resource for the study of modern and contemporary American poetry.

Discover Poets

Discover Schools of Poetry

Pieces of criticism.

The Modern American Poetry Site

is devoted to the teaching and study of modern and contemporary American poetry with particular emphasis on original and excerpted scholarship about key poems, poets, and contexts. This criticism is accompanied by images, media, and the poems themselves.

The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe A Comprehensive Collection of E-Texts

Poe's works of poetry & fiction:.

• Poe's Poems   (“Alone,” “The Raven,” etc.)
• Poe's Tales   (“The Fall of The House of Usher,” etc.)

Poe's Works of Non-Fiction:

• Poe's Letters   (including letters from and to Poe, with a checklist)
• Poe's Literary Criticism   (Reviews and Notices)
• Poe's Essays, Sketches & Lectures   ( Eureka , “The Philosophy of Composition,” etc.)
• Poe's Miscellanea   (“Marginalia,” “The Literati,” etc.)
• Miscellaneous Documents   and Manuscript Material

Important and Scholarly Collections of Poe's Writings:

• The Works of Edgar Allan Poe   (edited by Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Edward Woodberry, 10 volumes, 1894-1895). This collection was the first serious attempt at a scholarly edition. Although rather conservative in regard to its selection of material, specifically omitting material that was questionable or which the editors did not deem worthy of public attention, it does include all of the most important works and collected a number of items for the first time. It also provided a useful set of introductory essays, notes (mostly on bibliographical matters) and a variorum edition for the poems (inclusive of what was known at the time).
• The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe   (edited by James Albert Harrison, 17 volumes, 1902). Although far from truly complete, and including several things that Poe did not write, this set was the standard scholarly edition of Poe's works for more than fifty years, and is still a commonly used reference for the criticism.
• The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe   (edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, Poems , Tales and Sketches — the definitive annotated scholarly edition of Poe's poetry, tales and sketches). The series long planned by Mabbott was continued after his death as The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe (chiefly edited by Burton R. Pollin), including The Imaginary Voyages ( The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The Journal of Julius Rodman and The Adventures of Hans Phaall ), The Brevities (including “Marginalia,” “Pinakidia,” etc.), Nonfictional Prose in the Broadway Journal and Nonfictional Prose in the Southern Literary Messenger . Two additional volumes were issued on Eureka and Edgar Allan Poe, Critical Theory: The Major Writings (edited by Stuart and Susan Levine).
• The Collected Letters of Edgar Allan Poe   (edited by John Ward Ostrom, Burton R. Pollin and Jeffrey A. Savoye, 2 volumes, 1948, 1966 and 2008). Although these three editions certainly do not include every letter that Poe wrote, they do include the known text of every letter that was available at the time the edition was published. A few letters not included have been identified since 2008, and the text of those letters is present in the online collection of letters.

About Poe's Works:

• Poe's Works in Annuals, Magazines and Periodicals   (first printings and recorded reprintings)
• Some Editions of Poe's Works
• Editorial Policies and Methods for Preparing Texts
• Searching   the Collected Works (via Google)
• The Canon of Poe's Works   (Poems, Tales, etc.)  (under construction)

Other Links:

• Main Page for the Poe Society
• Other Sites with Poe's Works in E-Text

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

“Ye who read are still among the living, but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows. For indeed strange things shall happen, and many secret things be known, and many centuries shall pass away, ere these memorials be seen of men. And, when seen, there will be some to disbelieve, and some to doubt, and yet a few who will find much to ponder upon in the characters here graven with a stylus of iron.” — from Edgar Allan Poe's “Shadow — a Parable” (1835).

Author.............: Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) (Except where otherwise noted.)

Site Author......: The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, Inc.

Created...........: April 4, 1998

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Women’s History Month

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March is Women’s History Month, a time for us to celebrate the lives and accomplishments of extraordinary, influential women. In particular, we remember the women poets who have helped shape American poetry—innovative poets including Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Adrienne Rich, and kari edwards. Here we’ve curated a collection of poems, videos, audio, essays, books, lesson plans, and ephemera in tribute to these and other women poets writing today.

Poems from the Women’s Suffrage Movement

Celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the 19th Amendment with poems from the women's suffrage movement, as well as additional classic and contemporary poems about women's history and rights.

A special commemoration with the New York Philharmonic for the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment and women's right to vote.

“ Still I Rise ” by Maya Angelou You may write me down in history …

“ Pain Scale ” by Catherine Barnett Floating above the gynecologist’s hands...

“ A water woman has no body ” by Lisa Ciccarello Emptiness is a blessing …

“ Bear Witness ” by Tiana Clark Before I knew...

“ Remember the Boys ” by Rachel McKibbens chucking rocks at the wasps’ nest,...

“ poem in praise of menstruation ” by Lucille Clifton if there is a river …

“ Equivalents ” by Mónica de la Torre My child is my mother ...

“ [we fight back to control the outside] ” by kari edwards again, playing with fire ...

“ Bring Back Our Girls ” by Marwa Helal It begins in Berlin …

“ Landscape ” by Robin Coste Lewis Pleasure is black …

“ Fragment of a Bride ” by Mary Jo Bang Relative to status and state, one often finds the strategic …

“ How to Triumph Like a Girl ” by Ada Limón I like the lady horses best …

“ A Pain That Is Not Private ” by Lara Mimosa Montes There is a time and place in the world for abstraction …

“ Suddenly ” by Sharon Olds And suddenly, it’s today, it’s this morning …

“ Exclusively on Venus ” by Trace Peterson Roses are red / violets are transsexual ...

“ Girl Saints ” by Emily Skaja O LORD, when the Angel said Listen …

“ Beauty ” by Ariana Reines These poisoned sensations have to be …

“ Ode to My Hair ” by Aria Aber Exotic, “omg so thick,” a rug, so to speak—…

“ Diving into the Wreck ” by Adrienne Rich First having read the book of myths …

“ Ballad ” by Sonia Sanchez forgive me if i laugh …

“ Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah ” by Patricia Smith My mother scraped the name Patricia Ann from the ruins …

“ A Man’s World ” by Tracy K. Smith He will surely take it out when you’re alone...

“ Urning ” by Layli Long Soldier *bring us to dark knots the black …

“ I'm Over the Moon ” by Brenda Shaughnessy I don’t like what the moon is supposed to do …

“ [the girls speak to each other via the common tongue]: Feather or a Rock ” by Ellen Welcker which do you love more …

“ After Baby After Baby ” by Rachel Zucker When we made love you had …

browse more poems

Audio Poems

“ We have no choice in the bodies that hold us ” by Holly Amos

“ WWE ” by Fatimah Asghar

“From an Italian Postcard Factory ” by Margaret Atwood

“ For the Sake of Retrieval ” by Linda Bierds

“ The Dragonfly ” by Louise Bogan

“ Quarantine ” by Franny Choi

“ homage to my hips ” by Lucille Clifton

“ Weathering Out ” by Rita Dove

“ Moon for Our Daughters ” by Annie Finch

“ For the Stranger ” by Carolyn Forché

“ Given to Rust ” by Vievee Francis

“ Witchgrass ” by Louise Glück

“ The Girl I Call Alma ” by Linda Gregg

“ Cleis ” by Marilyn Hacker

“ The Map ” by Marie Howe

“ A Woman’s Delusion ” by Susan Howe

“ We Named You Mercy ” by Amanda Johnston

“ Poem about My Rights ” by June Jordan

“ According to the Gospel of Yes ” by Dana Levin

“ Landscape with Clinic and Oracle ” by Lynn Melnick

“ Present Tense ” by Harryette Mullen

“ Ghosts ” by Kiki Petrosino

“ Millay’s Hair ” by Ann Townsend

“ Radial Scent ” by Sharon Wang

browse more audio

“ The Author to Her Book ” by Anne Bradstreet Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain …

“ Helen ” by H. D. All Greece hates …

“ Lady Lazarus ” by Sylvia Plath I have done it again…

“ In the Waiting Room ” by Elizabeth Bishop In Worchester, Massachusetts …

“ To My Ward-Sister ” by Vera Brittain Through the night-watches of our House of Sighs...

“ If thou must love me … (Sonnet 14) ” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning If thou must love me, let it be for nought …

“ The Sun-Dial ” by Adelaide Crapsey Every day …

“ Her Kind ” by Anne Sexton I have gone out, a possessed witch …

“ You Foolish Men ” by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz You foolish men who lay …

“ Tender Buttons [A Little Called Pauline ” by Gertrude Stein A little called anything shows shudders …

“ The Soul selects her own Society (303) ” by Emily Dickinson The Soul selects her own Society —

“ I Sit and Sew ” by Alice Dunbar-Nelson I sit and sew—a useless task it seems …

“ Poppies on the Wheat ” by Helen Hunt Jackson Along Ancona’s hills the shimmering heat …

“ Venus of the Louvre ” by Emma Lazarus Down the long hall she glistens like a star …

“ Alms ” by Edna St. Vincent Millay My heart is what it was before …

“ Life ” by Henrietta Cordelia Ray Life! Ay, what is it? E’en a moment spun …

“ Old Houses ” by Lizette Woodworth Reese Old loveliness, set in the country wind …

“ Lady Montrevor ” by Christina Rossetti I do not look for love that is a dream …

“ [Like the very gods] ” by Sappho Like the very gods in my sight is he who …

“ Interlude ” by Edith Sitwell Amid this hot green glowing gloom …

“ The Answer ” by Sara Teasdale When I go back to earth …

“ Life ” by Edith Wharton Life, like a marble block, is given to all …

“ On Virtue ” by Phillis Wheatley O Thou bright jewel in my aim I strive …

“ The Women’s Litany ” by Margaret Widdemer Let us in through the guarded gate...

“ Beauty ” by Elinor Wylie Say not of Beauty she is good …

Tina Chang Reads "Bitch Tree"

Going for Motherlode: On Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born by Miranda Field

Field discusses Adrienne Rich’s manifesto, along with feminism and the notion of “women’s poetry.” read more

Brooks, H. D., and Rukeyser: Three Women Poets in the First Century of World Wars by Marilyn Hacker

Hacker considers these three poets in the context of the extreme social and political changes that were occurring in the world during the first century of world wars, and how they chose to respond to those changes in their own work. read more

Visibility Is Poor: Elizabeth Bishop’s Obsessive Imagery and Mystical Unsaying by Katie Ford

Ford peeks into the mind of Elizabeth Bishop as her obsessions—maps, moons, animals, oil, gasoline, colors—appear again and again in her poems. read more

Shot Through with Brightness: The Poems of H. D. by Marie Ponsot

“Badly anthologized for decades as Ezra Pound’s Imagiste acolyte, she is best known by only her earliest poems,” Ponsot writes of H. D., and seeks to provide a more wholesome look at the work of H. D. throughout her literary career. read more

Impossible Poetry? On Gertrude Stein by Anne Waldman

Waldman takes a look at Gertrude Stein’s serial poem Stanzas in Meditation , particularly “Stanza XVI,” which Waldman dubs “a seemingly impossible text,” a “heroic foray into uncharted poetic territory” and a “wild experiment begging patience.” read more

The Young Insurgent’s Commonplace-Book: Adrienne Rich’s “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” by Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker discusses the personal, literary, and feminist importance of Adrienne Rich’s “Snapshots of a Daughter-in Law.” read more

Double-Bind: Three Women of the Harlem Renaissance by Anthony Walton

Walton discusses Jessie Redmon Fauset, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Georgia Douglas Johnson, and the challenges they faced as black, female poets. read more

Women of the New Gen: Refashioning Poetry by Diann Blakely

Diann Blakely discusses “The New Gen” and asks: “How are the New Gen poets different, and how are they like their stateside cousins?" read more

From the Archive

Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution , edited by Alix Olson This anthology, edited by internationally touring spoken word artist Alix Olson, collects the work of thirty-five female spoken word poets of different styles and backgrounds.

Lesson Plans

Complicated Identities: On Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck” Clarifying one’s identity is a process that goes on throughout life. “Diving into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich speaks to the complicated process of finding, and defining, oneself.

Incredible Bridges: Poets Creating Community, “Gate A-4” by Naomi Shihab Nye This lesson plan, part of the series “Incredible Bridges: Poets Creating Community," provides a sequence of activities that you can use with your students before, during, and after reading “Gate A-4.”

Poet-to-Poet: From “Manatee/Humanity” by Anne Waldman This lesson plan presents a series of activities that are aligned with the Common Core State Standards, and encourages your students to engage in a multimedia experience with the Academy of American Poets’ Board of Chancellors.

On Marilyn Nelson’s My Seneca Village This lesson plan is based on Marilyn Nelson’s poetry collection My Seneca Village (Namelos, 2015), in which she recreates Seneca Village, a multiracial neighborhood that existed in 19th-century Manhattan.

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Home > Poems & Essays > On Poetry > Take Note: Eleven New Collections by Asian American Poets

Take Note: Eleven New Collections by Asian American Poets

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

In honor of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, poet and author of the new collection Oceanic (Copper Canyon Press, 2018), notes eleven poetry collections by Asian American writers she can't wait to read this summer and fall 2018.

When I was first discovering poetry late in my undergrad years, you could usually find me sitting cross-legged in the Humanities wing of our mighty campus library, pouring over collections and dusty back-copies of hallowed literary magazines. This was pre-blogs, pre-online journals, pre YouTube—the popular internet as we know it was just starting to crackle alive in those years. 1995: I was just issued my first email address. I didn't know what to do with it except to say hello with perhaps a goofy joke to my dorm friends or younger sister. During that year, I was always surrounded by friends, and I have been an extrovert most of my life, but there was a loneliness I couldn't quite place, a silence and quiet as I flipped the pages of those books and journals. It's only now, twenty-three years later, that I can even find the source: I barely (if ever) saw any Asian last names in those pages. I certainly couldn't find any poet who even remotely looked like me as I scanned our already large poetry offerings. So I clung to the poems of Rita Dove, Lucille Clifton, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Sharon Olds, and devoured whatever I could find of Latino and African American poets, photocopying my favorites so I could tack them above my dorm desk. It wasn't until grad school that I discovered Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, Jessica Hagedorn, Fatima Lim-Wilson, and the like. But where were the poets my age? Surely I couldn't be the only one out there. I think of how not knowing other Asian American poets my age for so many years sprung forth a longing and aloneness that I didn't even have the vocabulary for. How I wish I could whisper into the ear of twenty-year old me and say, hold on, hold on: two poets (Sarah Gambito and Joseph O. Legaspi) who share your poetic hunger across the country will soon join forces to create their dream, this magical group called Kundiman for community and kinship. Other writing groups like VONA will hold workshops for writers of color in all genres and life-long friendships and connections will be forged. That, as hard to believe as you thumb through the (literally and metaphorically) pale pages of these top journals like Poetry and American Poetry Review , Asian American poets will eventually be regularly published and featured and celebrated, and you will find kinship and joy in finally finding others who were there all along and more who paved the way in their own brave and brilliant time, but because you were never taught their poems, never taught they even exist, eventually you won't feel like the odd duck sitting there with your feathers tucked around you, backpack already heavy and bulgy with books at your side. That in 2003, you'd make your own debut and this college would have your first book on these very shelves. And zipping to mid-2018: a whole bevy of Asian American books are about to storm the contemporary poetry scene— have been storming the scene—but I can't time travel yet, and so here, for you all here in the now, for Asian American and Pacific Islander Month: stand up, stand up and take notice:

1. Hey, Marfa by Jeffrey Yang (October 2018, Graywolf) Yang returns with a truly unique project of text and visuals and a synthesis of lyric and history and landscapes. Paintings and drawings of Marfa's landscapes and substations by artist Rackstraw Downes connect with Yang's texts throughout this incredible collection.

2 . Isako Isako by Mia Ayumi Malhotra (Alice James, September 2018 ) This collection sings and whirs with mighty sustenance, food and blood and praise: "O praise…to the girls swatting birdies/ and shooting hoops when their husbands weren't looking,/ to the coed who crossed the country, where men spat/ why ain't chu in camp, youjapyoudog, who was held by/ the lady at the railway station. Lord knows her name/ but glory hallelujah to her too, whoever she may be."

3. Landia by Celina Su (Belladonna*, May 2018 ) Landia refers to a made-up word, sort of an in-between place. Maps and belonging and not belonging encourage the reader to cross various terrains of family and the family we make on our own among aubades and delicious lyric registers: "My hands are frostbitten, his bear the burns from last summer. Still, this is migration, this is the making of homes."

4. Republic of Mercy by Sharon Wang (Tupelo, October 2018) In Sharon Wang's collection, both desire and grief intertwine for a urgently original offering:"Each time I try/ an algal bloom/ replaces language's surface. Ruby-red & unmoored/ waves over laminate surfaces…/ Everything alive aching/ for more aliveness."

5. A Portrait of the Self as Nation: New and Selected Poems by Marilyn Chin (W.W. Norton, October 2018) Thirty years of pioneering and groundbreaking poems from Marilyn Chin showcased here provide a solid backbone of the corporeal and feminist wisdom I've admired and hungered for—a poet who understands the many shapes of what it means to cross-pollinate genre.

6. A Cruelty Special to Our Species by Emily Jungmin Yoon (Ecco, September 2018) This book confronts the histories of sexual violence against women who were forced into sexual labor in Japanese-occupied territories during World War II. You'll be stung with lines asserting magic still remains with women no matter what: "Let us keep/our stars to ourselves and we shall pray/to no one. Let us eat/what makes us holy."

7. If They Come for Us by Fatimah Asghar (One World, August 2018 ) Asghar's much-anticipated collection promises more of her bountiful vision and cross-cultural celebrations and lamentations. This is a poet to watch and let yourself be awakened to worlds where, "The kids at school ask me where I'm from & I have no answer./ I'm a silent girl, a rig ready to blow. The towers fell two weeks/ ago & I can't say blow out loud or everyone will hate me."

8. Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods by Tishani Doshi (Copper Canyon Press, October 2018) In her stunning third collection of poetry, Tishani Doshi addresses violence against women and gives voice to a feral song, releasing tenderness and wisdom in gorgeous spools. Simply one of the best collections of the year for me because I'm haunted by the various speakers in these pages—such brutal, beautiful truths uncovered on each page.

9. Inside Me an Island by Lehua M. Taitano (WordTech Editions, June 2018) This exciting collection from the queer native Chamoru writer explores notions of home and what it means to bravely wrestle the notion of belonging anywhere and to anyone, a place where one can demand such things as, "Give me your birds, she will say, and I will tell you a story./ A stone, too, admits hunger./ The boy is willing. Loses all his beaks."

10. ever really hear it by Soham Patel (Subito Press, 2018) You'll flip for these sonnet-like poems that try to demystify the lure of American popular music. The title of this collection comes from a sentence in James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" and the poems beautifully sing homage to various women musicians.

11. Marianna's Beauty Salon by Bushra Rehman (Sibling Rivalry Press, May 2018) Bushra Rehman's first collection of poetry is a love song for Pakistani girls from Queens. Feminist, fierce, and often funny, her poems bring us into a world of Bollywood movie stars, mice stuck in glue traps, and queer heartache at the Museum of Natural History.

More On Poetry

Carl Phillips on Audre Lorde

Respect the Mic: Celebrating 20 Years of Poetry from a Chicagoland High School

On Common Ground: Loess Hills anthology book review

What is on common ground .

On Common Ground is a collection of essays, poetry, art, and all about the Loess Hills created by experts and creatives from a wide range of fields after a trip to the Loess Hills together in 2021. The participants include writers, artists, theologians, biologists, and more, who each viewed the Loess Hills through the lens of their own expertise and life experiences. The resulting works share each contributor's unique perspective on the Loess Hills.  Some are celebratory, other mournful, and many have a conservation element. For those who may not know or remember, loess is a deposit of ancient glacial silt that forms hills, and here in western Iowa, we have the most extensive loess hills in the world other than a remote part of China. I think it's great to see such an insightful work devoted to this geological treasure. On Common Ground was edited by Drs. Ryan Allen and Brian T. Hazlett, and I think perhaps Dr. Allen said it best in his epilogue: "At the heart of the  On Common Ground experience is a realization that there is wisdom in collaboration."

On Common Ground is published by Ice Cube Press , an independent publisher based in North Liberty, Iowa. 

Contributors to  On Common Ground

On Common Ground is edited by Ryan Allen and Brian T. Hazlett

Ryan Allen is an assistant professor of English and writing and Brian T. Hazlett is a biology professor, both at Briar Cliff University here in Sioux City.

On Common Ground  also includes pieces from 

• Kristen Drahos, assistant professor of theology at Baylor University
• Jim Helfers, a literature professor from Grand Canyon University
• Patrick Hicks, a professor of creative writing and literature and writer-in-residence at Augustana University
• Mike Langley, a local musician and member of the Iowa Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame
• Melanie Krieps Mergen, a writer, musician, and Briar Cliff alum
• Vincent Miller, chair of Catholic Theology and Culture at the University of Dayton
• Scott R. Moats, a biologist who lives at Broken Kettle Grasslands and serves the Nature Conservancy as their Iowa and Missouri Fire Manager and Iowa director of Stewardship
• Cornelia F. Mutel, an ecologist and writer of many works including the iconic Fragile Giants
• Dan O'Brien, a wildlife biologist, rancher, and award-winning writer
• Aric Michael Ping, a conservationist who works in ecological management
• John T. Price, a professor at University of Nebraska Omaha, director of his English Dept's Creative Nonfiction Writing Program, writer, and editor of The Tallgrass Prairie Reader
• James Calvin Schaap, a writer and retired Dordt University professor 
• Daryl Smith, one of the founders of the University of Northern Iowa's Tallgrass Prairie Center
• Jerry Wilson, a writer of many works, former editor of South Dakota Magazine , and retired teacher
• Norma Clark Wilson, a poet, editor, essayist, and University of South Dakota English Professor Emerita
• Nan Wilson, a noted regional artist
• William M. Zales, a retired professor who now lives in the Loess Hills

Phew! That's quite an impressive collection of thinkers and creators! (note: these are based on their author bios in the book. Many of them have doctoral degrees but chose not to include the title Dr. in their bios so I didn't use them either.)

How to get On Common Ground

On Common Ground: Learning and Living in the Loess Hills is available on (affiliate link:) Amazon and other online retailers. It is also available in store at Book People in Sioux City, Prairie Lights in Iowa City, and is likely to be available at other bookstores and gift shops around Iowa that sell books by local authors.

There are also some in-person events celebrating the book, and some copies of the book are likely to be available at those events:

• Thursday, August 24th, 2023 at 7pm at Briar Cliff University in the St. Francis Assisi Room
• Saturday, August 26th, 2023 from noon to 2pm, at Book People on Hamilton Boulevard 

I really encourage you to go to these events if you're at all interested--it takes a lot of work to write a book and it is so heartening to reach that finish line of having it published and out to the public, and one of the best parts is definitely getting to go celebrate your book at public events! 

Congratulations and well done to all the contributors to On Common Ground: Learning and Living in the Loess Hills . I definitely think this is an important book that furthers the literature on the Loess Hills, plus an enjoyable and thought-provoking read for anyone interested. 

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Author Interviews

Callie siskel on 'two minds', her new poetry collection about love and loss.

Scott Simon

NPR's Scott Simon talks with poet Callie Siskel about her latest collection "Two Minds." Siskel lost her father when she was 12, and writes about making loss part of living.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

A poem for National Poetry Month.

CALLIE SISKEL: "Mirror Image." (Reading) When he was alive, we rode the elevator. I recall his reflection in the brass doors more easily than his body next to mine. Absence is not absolute, it's insidious - it leaves us the mirror image. My face, for example, my brother's, his stance.

SIMON: Callie Siskel joins us from Los Angeles. She's the author of "Arctic Revival," winner of the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship and has a new book of poems that touch on loss, going on, growing up and making loss a part of living. Her highly anticipated first full-length collection of poems is "Two Minds," and she joins us now. Thanks so much for being with us.

SISKEL: Thank you so much for having me.

SIMON: Of course, a lot of people would remember your father, wouldn't they?

SISKEL: Yes. Yes, they would. My father was a film critic, Gene Siskel. And this book is dedicated to him and his memory.

SIMON: Yeah. Do you remember him as a poet, in images, phrases? What comes back to you?

SISKEL: I remember his presence. I remember how he looked at the world and how he engaged me as his daughter and as a person. I remember his playfulness, his humor and, yeah, just what it was like to have an incredible father.

SIMON: Yeah. How old were you when he left you?

SISKEL: I was 12.

SIMON: You write a line that I agree with, but I'm not sure what it means. Absence is not absolute, it's insidious.

SISKEL: Yeah. I think the word absence suggests gone in a final sense, right? But the goneness keeps recurring, it keeps haunting and it morphs and reappears. And that's what I mean by insidious. There's no such thing as absence full stop.

SIMON: When did you start writing poems with an idea that poetry might become your life?

SISKEL: Probably not until graduate school, because that first degree I got, my master's, really instilled in me a sense of professionalism and confidence. But I always loved poetry. And as soon as my dad died, I was looking for a medium to express myself, and poetry was sort of my natural move.

SIMON: How so? Help us understand that.

SISKEL: I think that poetry has this ability to put you into contact with whomever you want to speak to. And there's no sense of needing to plot anything. There's no - there's just a very quick way to access what you want to access in a poem.

SIMON: May I ask you about your mother?

SISKEL: Yeah.

SIMON: You have a line in a poem that goes, all my life I've watched her make couples out of everything, even the napkin rings. Do you have more of an understanding now of what she went through?

SISKEL: I do. As I approach the age she was when my dad died and as I now have a daughter myself, as of last year, I'm seeing things more and more from her perspective. My mom is a beautiful romantic, and that line about seeing couples everywhere speaks to that. She loved my father so much.

SIMON: May I ask you to read from your poem "Cocktail Hour"?

SISKEL: Yes, of course. "Cocktail Hour." (Reading) On nights, my mother's boyfriend stayed over. I would come home from school and find his Reeboks straightened on the welcome mat. I'd shrug my bag off in my room and walk toward the kitchen, find a pot percolating with meat sauce, a wooden spoon half soaked in orange liquid resting on the lid. I'd know where they were, taking their time drinking clear cocktails inside the living room. There I'd announce myself, tall, indignant as a man inside the doorway, as if I were my father coming home early, hungry for dinner.

SIMON: Oh, my God. I mean, that's rough stuff because you - I'm sorry, I feel sorry for the guy.

SIMON: And I feel sorry for your mother, you know? She loved your father and - but he's gone. And then...

SISKEL: Yeah. I think this poem is less about faulting her and more about finding a way to bring my father back to me. Part of writing this book for me is claiming my father for myself, rearticulating our relationship. And entering the house as him is a metaphor for that.

SIMON: Yeah. Your father notably loved "Saturday Night Fever."

SISKEL: Yes.

SIMON: The John Travolta film. Let's set the scene a bit.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STAYIN' ALIVE")

BEE GEES: (Singing) The New York Times' effect on man. Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother, you're staying alive, staying alive.

SIMON: Your father loved this film so much, he bought John Travolta's suit, right?

SISKEL: Mm-hmm.

SIMON: Let me ask you to read from your poem "Transparent Man."

SISKEL: OK. (Reading) My father saw the movie 17 times and bought that suit, the exact one, at auction. I asked my mother why he kept it shut in cedar hanging on a rack with all our winter coats and not inside his closet, where later I buried my face inside his jackets. Why didn't we display it? That's not who he was, my mother said. Besides, it almost stood up by itself. It had to. No one ever tried it on. Once, I opened the garment bag and peered inside to see a different actor, one who seemed to play my father, full of light. A young, transparent man dressed up in white.

SIMON: Wow. You know, I read your poems, oh, and it reminded me of something, now having lost both of my parents. I wish we could have known our parents when they were as young as we were.

SISKEL: Yeah, exactly, as a young man.

SIMON: I mean, we'd understand them better, wouldn't we?

SISKEL: Yeah. I feel that, you know, my dad himself lost both of his parents when he was very young, before the age of 9. And not only have I always wanted to talk to my dad about loss and losing him, which is of course paradoxical, but also about what it's like to lose a parent. That's something I would have wanted to have.

SIMON: Callie Siskel. Her book of poems, "Two Minds." Thank you so much for being with us.

SISKEL: Thank you so much for having me. This was wonderful.

Copyright © 2024 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Think Out Loud

Poet and essayist aimee nezhukumatathil on ‘world of wonders’.

Broadcast: Thursday, April 18

The award winning poet, writer and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s genius lies in making connections between the astonishments of the natural world and the particular wonders of her own — and all of our — lives. Nezhukumatathil is the author of four collections of poems, including “Oceanic,” and her latest book, a bestselling collection of essays, is called “World of Wonders.” Nezhukumatathil is a professor of English at the University of Mississippi, and joins us in front of an audience of students at McDaniel High School.

Contact “Think Out Loud®”

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook , send an email to [email protected] , or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.

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Memoirs of the life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan. By Thomas Moore ... To which are added the autograph letters printed in that work and many others unpublished; fragments of essays; unfinished plays and poems; and other manuscripts of Sheridan; and many portraits of himself and his contemporaries. Collected and arranged by his grandson, Richard Brinsley Sheridan ...

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library > Memoirs of the life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan. By Thomas Moore ... To which are added the autograph letters printed in that work and many others unpublished; fragments of essays; unfinished plays and poems; and other manuscripts of Sheridan; and many portraits of himself and his contemporaries. Collected and arranged by his grandson, Richard Brinsley Sheridan ...

Description

Collection information, subjects, formats, and genres, access and usage rights, identifiers.

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The Best Reviewed Essay Collections of 2022

Featuring bob dylan, elena ferrante, zora neale hurston, jhumpa lahiri, melissa febos, and more.

We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction ; Nonfiction ; Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections ; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime ; Graphic Literature ; and Literature in Translation .

Today’s installment: Essay Collections .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing  by Elena Ferrante (Europa)

12 Rave • 12 Positive • 4 Mixed

“The lucid, well-formed essays that make up In the Margins  are written in an equally captivating voice … Although a slim collection, there is more than enough meat here to nourish both the common reader and the Ferrante aficionado … Every essay here is a blend of deep thought, rigorous analysis and graceful prose. We occasionally get the odd glimpse of the author…but mainly the focus is on the nuts and bolts of writing and Ferrante’s practice of her craft. The essays are at their most rewarding when Ferrante discusses the origins of her books, in particular the celebrated Neapolitan Novels, and the multifaceted heroines that power them … These essays might not bring us any closer to finding out who Ferrante really is. Instead, though, they provide valuable insight into how she developed as a writer and how she works her magic.”

–Malcolm Forbes ( The Star Tribune )

2. Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri (Princeton University Press)

8 Rave • 14 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Lahiri mixes detailed explorations of craft with broader reflections on her own artistic life, as well as the ‘essential aesthetic and political mission’ of translation. She is excellent in all three modes—so excellent, in fact, that I, a translator myself, could barely read this book. I kept putting it aside, compelled by Lahiri’s writing to go sit at my desk and translate … One of Lahiri’s great gifts as an essayist is her ability to braid multiple ways of thinking together, often in startling ways … a reminder, no matter your relationship to translation, of how alive language itself can be. In her essays as in her fiction, Lahiri is a writer of great, quiet elegance; her sentences seem simple even when they’re complex. Their beauty and clarity alone would be enough to wake readers up. ‘Look,’ her essays seem to say: Look how much there is for us to wake up to.”

–Lily Meyer ( NPR )

3. The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan (Simon & Schuster)

10 Rave • 15 Positive • 7 Mixed • 4 Pan

“It is filled with songs and hyperbole and views on love and lust even darker than Blood on the Tracks … There are 66 songs discussed here … Only four are by women, which is ridiculous, but he never asked us … Nothing is proved, but everything is experienced—one really weird and brilliant person’s experience, someone who changed the world many times … Part of the pleasure of the book, even exceeding the delectable Chronicles: Volume One , is that you feel liberated from Being Bob Dylan. He’s not telling you what you got wrong about him. The prose is so vivid and fecund, it was useless to underline, because I just would have underlined the whole book. Dylan’s pulpy, noir imagination is not always for the squeamish. If your idea of art is affirmation of acceptable values, Bob Dylan doesn’t need you … The writing here is at turns vivid, hilarious, and will awaken you to songs you thought you knew … The prose brims everywhere you turn. It is almost disturbing. Bob Dylan got his Nobel and all the other accolades, and now he’s doing my job, and he’s so damn good at it.”

–David Yaffe ( AirMail )

4.  Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos (Catapult)

13 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed Read an excerpt from Body Work here

“In her new book, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative , memoirist Melissa Febos handily recuperates the art of writing the self from some of the most common biases against it: that the memoir is a lesser form than the novel. That trauma narratives should somehow be over—we’ve had our fill … Febos rejects these belittlements with eloquence … In its hybridity, this book formalizes one of Febos’s central tenets within it: that there is no disentangling craft from the personal, just as there is no disentangling the personal from the political. It’s a memoir of a life indelibly changed by literary practice and the rigorous integrity demanded of it …

Febos is an essayist of grace and terrific precision, her sentences meticulously sculpted, her paragraphs shapely and compressed … what’s fresh, of course, is Febos herself, remapping this terrain through her context, her life and writing, her unusual combinations of sources (William H. Gass meets Elissa Washuta, for example), her painstaking exactitude and unflappable sureness—and the new readers she will reach with all of this.”

–Megan Milks ( 4Columns )

5. You Don’t Know Us Negroes by Zora Neale Hurston (Amistad)

12 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed

“… a dazzling collection of her work … You Don’t Know Us Negroes reveals Hurston at the top of her game as an essayist, cultural critic, anthropologist and beat reporter … Hurston is, by turn, provocative, funny, bawdy, informative and outrageous … Hurston will make you laugh but also make you remember the bitter divide in Black America around performance, language, education and class … But the surprising page turner is at the back of the book, a compilation of Hurston’s coverage of the Ruby McCollom murder trial …

Some of Hurston’s writing is sensationalistic, to be sure, but it’s also a riveting take of gender and race relations at the time … Gates and West have put together a comprehensive collection that lets Hurston shine as a writer, a storyteller and an American iconoclast.”

–Lisa Page ( The Washington Post )

6. Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

11 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed Listen to an interview with Rachel Aviv here

“… written with an astonishing amount of attention and care … Aviv’s triumphs in relating these journeys are many: her unerring narrative instinct, the breadth of context brought to each story, her meticulous reporting. Chief among these is her empathy, which never gives way to pity or sentimentality. She respects her subjects, and so centers their dignity without indulging in the geeky, condescending tone of fascination that can characterize psychologists’ accounts of their patients’ troubles. Though deeply curious about each subject, Aviv doesn’t treat them as anomalous or strange … Aviv’s daunted respect for uncertainty is what makes Strangers to Ourselves distinctive. She is hyperaware of just how sensitive the scale of the self can be.”

–Charlotte Shane ( Bookforum )

7. A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast by Dorthe Nors (Graywolf)

11 Rave • 1 Positive Read an excerpt from A Line in the World here

“Nors, known primarily as a fiction writer, here embarks on a languorous and evocative tour of her native Denmark … The dramas of the past are evoked not so much through individual characters as through their traces—buildings, ruins, shipwrecks—and this westerly Denmark is less the land of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales and sleek Georg Jensen designs than a place of ancient landscapes steeped in myth … People aren’t wholly incidental to the narrative. Nors introduces us to a variety of colorful characters, and shares vivid memories of her family’s time in a cabin on the coast south of Thyborøn. But in a way that recalls the work of Barry Lopez, nature is at the heart of this beautiful book, framed in essay-like chapters, superbly translated by Caroline Waight.”

–Claire Messud ( Harper’s )

8. Raising Raffi: The First Five Years by Keith Gessen (Viking)

4 Rave • 10 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Raising Raffi here

“A wise, mild and enviably lucid book about a chaotic scene … Is it OK to out your kid like this? … Still, this memoir will seem like a better idea if, a few decades from now, Raffi is happy and healthy and can read it aloud to his own kids while chuckling at what a little miscreant he was … Gessen is a wily parser of children’s literature … He is just as good on parenting manuals … Raising Raffi offers glimpses of what it’s like to eke out literary lives at the intersection of the Trump and Biden administrations … Needing money for one’s children, throughout history, has made parents do desperate things — even write revealing parenthood memoirs … Gessen’s short book is absorbing not because it delivers answers … It’s absorbing because Gessen is a calm and observant writer…who raises, and struggles with, the right questions about himself and the world.”

–Dwight Garner ( The New York Times )

9. The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser (Doubleday)

8 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed • 1 Pan Watch an interview with CJ Hauser here

“17 brilliant pieces … This tumbling, in and out of love, structures the collection … Calling Hauser ‘honest’ and ‘vulnerable’ feels inadequate. She embraces and even celebrates her flaws, and she revels in being a provocateur … It is an irony that Hauser, a strong, smart, capable woman, relates to the crane wife’s contortions. She felt helpless in her own romantic relationship. I don’t have one female friend who has not felt some version of this, but putting it into words is risky … this collection is not about neat, happy endings. It’s a constant search for self-discovery … Much has been written on the themes Hauser excavates here, yet her perspective is singular, startlingly so. Many narratives still position finding the perfect match as a measure of whether we’ve led successful lives. The Crane Wife dispenses with that. For that reason, Hauser’s worldview feels fresh and even radical.”

–Hope Reese ( Oprah Daily )

10. How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo (Viking)

8 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from How to Read Now here

“Elaine Castillo’s How to Read Now begins with a section called ‘Author’s Note, or a Virgo Clarifies Things.’ The title is a neat encapsulation of the book’s style: rigorous but still chatty, intellectual but not precious or academic about it … How to Read Now proceeds at a breakneck pace. Each of the book’s eight essays burns bright and hot from start to finish … How to Read Now is not for everybody, but if it is for you, it is clarifying and bracing. Castillo offers a full-throated critique of some of the literary world’s most insipid and self-serving ideas …

So how should we read now? Castillo offers suggestions but no resolution. She is less interested in capital-A Answers…and more excited by the opportunity to restore a multitude of voices and perspectives to the conversation … A book is nothing without a reader; this one is co-created by its recipients, re-created every time the page is turned anew. How to Read Now offers its audience the opportunity to look past the simplicity we’re all too often spoon-fed into order to restore ourselves to chaos and complexity—a way of seeing and reading that demands so much more of us but offers even more in return.”

–Zan Romanoff ( The Los Angeles Times )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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• Explore an Unexpected Goldmine of Poetry in Government Documents

Carol L. Highsmith, photographer. [Second Floor, East Corridor. Mural depicting Lyric Poetry (Lyrica) in the Literature series by George R. Barse, Jr.. Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C.] . Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

April is National Poetry Month, and the perfect time to shine a spotlight on a hidden treasure in the Government Documents collection at Sycamore Library. You might be surprised to learn how much poetry, writings about poetry, and even performances of poetry are available in the often seemingly dry-as-a-desert world of government information, and what a significant role our government plays in preserving and promoting the rich tapestry of our poetic heritage. From studies of classic authors to lessons in how to write poetry, government documents contain a plethora of poetic resources.

Poetry as Literature

Perhaps the richest source of poetic resources in government is the Library of Congress. Their website hosts a treasure trove of poetry-related materials, including finding aids to help you.

Finding Poems : Is there a poem you half-remember—maybe you can quote a line or phrase, or you think you know the author, but can’t remember the title? This is a list of tools and resources from the Library of Congress that can help you identify that elusive poem using whatever information you might have. And remember, if none of these suggestions proves helpful, you can always Ask Us .

Sixty American Poets, 1896-1944 : In 1945, while he was a poet in residence at the Library of Congress, Allen Tate compiled this bibliography of sixty of the most important American poets of the previous 50 years (not leaving himself out), listing the chief works, recordings of works, and major criticism or biographies of each poet, and providing his own highly opinionated commentary on each. A decade later, Kenton Kilmer of the Legislative Reference Service revised and expanded the content with more recently published material while adhering to Tate’s original list of sixty poets.

Poet Laureate

From 1937 to 1986, the Library of Congress had a position called Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (sometimes abbreviated as Consultant). Their job was similar to that of a reference librarian, and the consultant’s job duties consisted primarily of serving as a collection specialist and a resident scholar in poetry and literature.

On December 20, 1985, an Act of Congress ( Public Law 99-194 ) established the position of Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry (usually abbreviated as Poet Laureate). This position has focused more on more on organizing local poetry readings, lectures, conferences, and outreach programs. Nearly half of the laureates have taken on a signature Poet Laureate Project to improve the national appreciation of poetry. 

The Library of Congress webpage has a list of all Consultants and Poets Laureate with a short biography of each.

Ada Limón is the current Poet Laureate . She was appointed by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden on July 12, 2022 and reappointed for a historic two-year second term on April 24, 2023.

Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund

This fund was established by philanthropist Gertrude Clarke Whittall in 1950 to promote the appreciation of poetry, drama, and other literature. On April 23, 1951—the anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth—a Poetry Room was dedicated where the library hosts lectures, poetry readings, and other literary events supported by this fund. These are some of the many chapbooks that were published by the Library of Congress as a permanent record of the lectures given by illustrious poets and scholars with the support of the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund. 

Anniversary Lectures, 1959 : These lectures include “Robert Burns, 1759,” by Robert Hillyer; “Edgar Allan Poe, 1809,” by Richard Wilbur; and Alfred Edward Housman, 1859 ,” by Cleanth Brooks.

Carl Sandburg: With a Bibliography of Sandburg Materials in the Collections of the Library of Congress is a lecture on the life and works of Sandburg presented in the Library of Congress on January 8, 1968 by Mark Van Doren. It includes a poem about Sandburg—”Where a Poet’s From,” by Archibald MacLeish—and a bibliography of works by Sandburg in the Library of Congress.

Wallace Stevens: The Poetry of Earth is a  lecture by A. Walton Litz that locates the essence of the poetry of Wallace Stevens in a constant struggle to depict the inner, personal world of pure imagination while remaining faithful to the external world of objective facts.

Walt Whitman: Man, Poet, Philosopher : These three lectures were delivered at the Library of Congress by Gay Wilson Allen, Mark Van Doren, and David Daiches on January 10, 17, and 25, 1955, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first edition of Whitman’s poetry collection Leaves of Grass . 

State University Publications

State universities are government institutions and frequently publish poetry either in the form of books issued by their university presses, or through a literary journal that publishes poems by students or by professional poets.

100 Love Sonnets / Cien sonetos de amor  is a classic collection of poems by Pablo Neruda translated by Stephen Tapscott and published in a beautifully designed volume by University of North Texas Press with the original Spanish poems and the English translations appearing side by side on facing pages.

The Green Fuse , named after a Dylan Thomas poem , was a literary journal published by North Texas State University from 1971 to 1990 (in 1988 the NTSU was renamed the University of North Texas). This annual print publication showcased art, poetry, and prose created by NTSU/UNT students. In 1977, according to a letter by alumnus Douglas Ray published in  The North Texan , the journal was almost not published because of a lack of funds, but enough funds were raised privately to publish a limited edition entitled  Shadow of the Green Fuse . The following year a major effort was made to secure funding from the Student Service Fund, and in the spring of 1978 publication of  The Green Fuse was renewed. In 1990 the journal was continued under the new title North Texas Review .

The Texas Review is a literary review showcasing fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, short plays, and comics/art. The  Texas Review partners with Texas Review Press (the University Press of Sam Houston State University) and Sam Houston State University’s MFA in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing to publish two issues per year. 

Poetry as History

Ever since ancient times, poetry has been used as a popular medium for vividly conveying personal experiences of wars, social upheavals, and other major historical events.

The Battle Line of Democracy: Prose and Poetry of the World War is an anthology of patriotic poetry and prose compiled during World War I for the edification and inspiration of American children and published by the U.S. Committee on Public Information. The Committee on Public Information was the first large-scale propaganda agency of the U.S. federal government, established in 1917 to raise public support for the war effort.

Poetry in Response to 9/11: A Resource Guide : The terrorist attack on the United States that took place on September 11, 2001 was an overwhelming experience that elicited a number of varied responses. Many of these responses were took the form of poetry, which can express the deepest, most intense emotions. The Library of Congress has compiled a guide to these poems that includes an anthology of selected poems written or published within a year of the attacks; links to online collections of poems archived by various institutions;  a bibliography of print publications about the September 11 attacks; and some suggestions for where to find additional poems .

Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience is an anthology resulting from a series of writing workshops sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts for returning troops and their families at military installations in the United States and overseas. Taught by professional novelists, poets, historians, and journalists, some of whom were veterans themselves, these workshops provided service men and women with the opportunity to write about their wartime experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq using a variety of literary forms, including fiction, poetry, letters, essays, memoirs, and personal journals. Other formats in which these works are available include  Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience  [E-Book]  and  Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience  [Audio CD] , which includes performances of creative works that memorialize experiences of Americans in the Civil War, the two world wars, and the Vietnam conflict.

“ A Critique of Coronavirus ” is a poem by Elana R. Osen, a specialty registrar at St. George’s University Hospital in London, that was published the July 2020 issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases , a journal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It describes the peculiar experience of “looking around and not seeing or sensing anything observably different from normal, whilst at the same time being in the midst of a pandemic.” You can listen to a podcast of Dr. Osen discussing with Sarah Gregory her experience of writing the poem, or read a transcript of the podcast . 

“ Of Those We Have Lost and Those Who Have Saved So Many Others ” by Terence Chorba is an article published later during the pandemic, in the July 2022 issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases . It looks at the modernist calligrams of Guillaume Apollinaire, a Belarus-born French poet who was one of the many casualties of the great influenza A (H1N1) pandemic of 1918, and also comments briefly on two other poets who lost their lives during the First World War, not from battle wounds, but from infectious diseases: John McRae, author of “In Flander’s Fields,” who died of meningitis, and Rupert Brooke, author of many well-known war poems, who died from an infected mosquito bite. Comparisons and contrasts are drawn between the 1918 flu pandemic and the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Poetry and Special Populations

These documents are just a few samples of the ways government agencies have helped marginalized populations—often populations marginalized by the government—use poetry as a tool for self-expression, self-awareness, and a way to explore and embrace their own unique life experiences.

First Peoples

When it was established in 1962, the Institute of American Indian Arts was a high school funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Today they are a world-class institution that offers certificate, undergraduate, and low-residency graduate programs as well as lifelong learning classes, all taught from indigenous perspectives. Joy Harjo , the 23rd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, attended IAIA in the 1960s when it was still a high school. From the beginning they have encouraged students to experiment, and over the years the IAIA has curated a large collection of student works. Poems written by students who attended IAIA from 1962 to 1965 are collected in a 27-page chapbook with the lengthy title Anthology of Poetry and Verse: Written by Students in Creative Writing Classes and Clubs during the First Three Years of Operation (1962-1965) of the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico .  

Incarcerated Persons

The Echo is a monthly newspaper produced by and for inmates in the Texas criminal justice system. In addition to news stories, policy updates, opinion pieces, recipes, and other information, each issue features original works such as poetry and fiction that serve as an outlet for the inmates’ creative expression. Like most publishers of poetry, The Echo always has far more submissions than space to print them all (the editors claim to have over 100 submissions approved for publication at any given time), but inmates are always encouraged to send in their work.

For a study of the purpose and effectiveness of this publication, see  A Critical Examination of “The Echo”: Prison Publication of the Texas Department of Corrections , a 1977 thesis by NTSU Journalism student David A. Hadeler.

The Elderly

Care and Independent Living Services for Aging: Competency Based Teaching Module is the rather prosaic title of a textbook published in 1977 by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) to train future workers in the field of occupational home economics. This particular module includes an anthology of poems and prose excerpts about love and old age , general attitudes toward aging , religious perspectives on aging , and death and dying that can be used to stimulate discussions among students about how different people experience the aging process.

Poetry in the Classroom and the Community

Educational institutions and libraries across the country receive funding and support from government grants to promote literacy and poetry appreciation. These initiatives often include poetry workshops, readings, and community outreach programs aimed at fostering a love of language and literature among people of all ages and backgrounds.

Found Poetry is created by selecting words, phrases, lines, and sentences from one or more written documents and combining them into a poem. Raw material for found poems can be selected from newspaper articles, speeches, diaries, advertisements, letters, food menus, brochures, short stories, manuscripts of plays, shopping lists, and even other poems. A collection of text resources written by well-known authors is provided in this online set of primary sources from the Library of Congress.

Vacation Water-Fun is an anthology of poems written by schoolchildren to remind themselves of important concepts regarding water safety. The poems were written as part of an education initiative by the Bureau of Reclamation and the anthology provides an enduring record of their experience. The children’s poems are illustrated with whimsical cartoons by Bureau of Reclamation employee David Cunningham.

ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) is a comprehensive, easy-to-use, searchable, Internet-based bibliographic and full-text database of education research and information. ERIC indexes education research found in journal articles, books, and gray literature. (Gray literature includes materials produced by nonprofits, advocacy organizations, government agencies, and other sources not typically made available by commercial publishers.) Depending on the copyright status, materials indexed in the ERIC database may be available as full text or as a citation to an external source.

The ERIC database contains many useful articles and books on using poetry in the classroom, either teaching about poetry itself, or using poetry to enhance the teaching of other subjects. These are just a few examples of the intriguing and innovative content you can find here:

“ #Poetryisnotdead: Understanding Instagram Poetry within a Transliteracies Framework ” is an article by Kate Kovalak and Jen Scott Curwood published in Literacy , the official journal of the United Kingdom Literary Association. It is not a government publication, but the full text of this article is available for free through ERIC. This fascinating case study examines the very recent phenomenon of adolescents creating multimodal creative works such as digital poetry enhanced by photo-editing apps, then sharing their creations with an online audience. The authors conclude that the interaction of creators of instapoetry and their audience has led to an increased exposure and relevance of poetry writing and appreciation; a space for student-centered writing, reading, and analysis of poems; and a relevant method of peer review and collaboration.

“ Green Writing: The Influence of Natural Spaces on Primary Students’ Poetic Writing in the UK and Australia ” is an article published by Paul Gardner and Sonia Kuzich in the Cambridge Journal of Education . This study contrasts the experiences of students writing about nature from within the classroom, using a vicarious experience of nature as a stimulus, versus students who write their poems based on a direct experience of nature. The results suggest that standards of writing improve when students are given direct contact with natural spaces.

Teaching Poetry Writing to Adolescents , a book by Joseph Tsujimato published by the ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication Skills, contains many exercises that teachers can use in their classrooms to teach students how to write poetry. These exercises can also be used to teach yourself how to write poems!

Some of the most interesting teaching materials in ERIC are those that describe how to use poetry to enhance the teaching of decidedly non-poetic subjects.

“ Poetic License: Using Documentary Poetry to Teach International Law Students Paraphrase Skills ” is an article by Robin Nilon published in InSight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching that demonstrates how studying the poems of poet-lawyer Charles Reznikoff can help law students learn the art of paraphrasing legal cases. Student first summarize Reznikoff’s own poems inspired by reported legal cases into prose form, then they try their hand at summarizing other reported cases as poetry. Students improved their paraphrase skills as well as their understanding of policy analysis. This teaching technique can also be applied to improve students’ critical thinking and writing skills in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. (The device of transforming prose into poetry and poetry into prose is not new— Benjamin Franklin describes in his autobiography how he expanded his vocabulary and improved his writing skills by translating articles from the Spectator into verse, then back to prose.)

“ Writing and Reading Multiplicity in the Uni-Verse: Engagements with Mathematics through Poetry ” is an article by Nenad Radakovic, Nenad, Susan Jagger, and Limin Jao published in For the Learning of Mathematics: An International Journal of Mathematics Education . Their article describes the types of mathematical poetry, provides examples of several poems by mathematician-poets, relates their variable results at conducting an in-service teacher education workshop in mathematical poetry, and suggests how the concrete imagery and emotional content of poems can provide students with a non-threatening and holistic way to engage with “a field of study that is often seen as disembodied and abstract.”     

Poetry as Therapy

The  National Association for Poetry Therapy  provides this useful definition of poetry therapy:

Poetry therapy is the use of language, symbol, and story in therapeutic, educational, growth, and community-building capacities. It relies upon the use of poems, stories, song lyrics, imagery, and metaphor to facilitate personal growth, healing, and greater self-awareness. Bibliotherapy, narrative, journal writing, metaphor, storytelling, and ritual are all within the realm of poetry therapy.

Government agencies focused on health and wellness have found reading or writing poetry to be an effective way to help patients heal from traumatic experiences as well as an effective everyday practice that anyone can use to improve their own self-awareness and general well-being.

In the 1990s the Texas Department of Health, in cooperation with several other agencies, encouraged therapists to use poetry writing as well as the creation of visual art to help victims of sexual abuse share their often long-suppressed stories and give voice to their overwhelming and often difficult to express feelings. A selection of poems and artworks were published in two anthologies named after each year’s theme for Sexual Assault Awareness Month— Sharing the Secret, Surviving the Silence from 1993 and Listen to the Children from 1995.   

Poetry in Performance

Long before it was a written art form, poetry was primarily oral. Sung, chanted, or recited, oral poetry has been sometimes improvised on the spot, sometimes passed down from generation to generation and developed communally. (See D.M. Kgobe’s essay “ ORAL POETRY: The Poet’s Performance and His Audience in an African Context with Special Reference to the Northern Sotho Society ” for a discussion of how these techniques and traditions have continued into current times.)

Several government publications and websites contain recorded performances of poetry, often by the poets themselves. Other documents provide advice on creating oral poetry and sharing it with the local community.

Inaugural Poems

Inaugural Poems in History : Only four United States presidents so far have invited poets to read a new poem, specially composed for the occasion, at their inaugurations. This page at the poets.org website includes the text of each poem and a link to a video of the poet reading at the inauguration. (Robert Frost was having trouble seeing his manuscript because of the sun’s glare bouncing off the snow, so he ended up reciting his poem “The Gift Outright” from memory instead of reading the newly composed poem, but you can read both poems here.)

You can also watch several of the poets reading their inaugural poems on YouTube:

• Amanda Gorman reads “The Hill We Climb” at Biden’s inauguration
• Richard Blanco reads “One Today” at Obama’s second inauguration
• Elizabeth Alexander reads “Praise Song for the Day” at Obama’s first inauguration
• Miller Williams reads “Of History and Hope” at Clinton’s second inauguration
• Maya Angelou reads “On the Pulse of Morning” at Clinton’s first inauguration
• Robert Frost reads “The Gift Outright” at Kennedy’s inauguration

These are several posts from the Library of Congress From the Catbird Seat blog that discuss inaugural poets and their poems:

• “ Richard Blanco’s Inaugural Poem: ‘One Today’ ” (Jan. 28, 2013)
• “ Was Maya Angelou a Poet Laureate? Yes and No. ” (May 29, 2014)
• “ Inaugural Poetry – Robert Frost and Maya Angelou ” (Feb. 25, 2016)
• “ Poetry and the Presidential Inauguration ” (Jan, 18, 2017)
• “ Amanda Gorman Selected as President-Elect Joe Biden’s Inaugural Poet ” (Jan. 14, 2021)
• “ Congratulations to Amanda Gorman ” (Jan. 21, 2021)
• “ ‘For there is always light’: Amanda Gorman’s Inaugural Poem ‘The Hill We Climb’ Delivers Message of Unity ” (Jan. 22, 2021)

Amanda Gorman recites her inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb,” during the 59th Presidential Inauguration ceremony in Washington, Jan. 20, 2021. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took the oath of office on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol. (DOD Photo by Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Carlos M. Vazquez II) CC BY 2.0

Library of Congress

The Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature is an extensive archive of live recordings of poets and other writers participating in public literary events at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, plus studio recordings made in the Library’s Recording Library. Hear renowned poets such as Robert Frost , Audre Lorde , Derek Walcott , Denise Levertov , Robert Penn Warren , Maya Angelou , and many others reading and discussing poetry by themselves and their colleagues.  

From the Catbird Seat is the official poetry and literature podcast of the Library of Congress. Their archive features recordings of poets reading and discussing their work at the Library of Congress, and offers behind-the-scenes interviews with special guests. In 2023, From the Catbird Seat was replaced by the Bookmarked blog, which combines From the Catbird Seat with the National Book Festival blog.

White House

James Earl Jones Performs Shakespeare at the White House Poetry Jam : On May 12, 2009, in the first year of his presidency, Barack Obama initiated the White House Poetry Jam, more formally known as the White House Evening of Music, Poetry, and the Spoken Word. 

In his opening remarks, President Obama summed up the purpose of this event :

Now, we’re here tonight not just to enjoy the works of these artists, but also to highlight the importance of the arts in our life and in our Nation, in our Nation’s history. We’re here to celebrate the power of words and music to help us appreciate beauty, but also to understand pain, to inspire us to action and to spur us on when we start to lose hope, to lift us up out of our daily existence, even if it’s just for a few moments, and return us with hearts that are a little bit bigger and fuller than they were before.

The highlight of the evening was this intensely moving performance of a monologue from Shakespeare’s Othello by Academy Award winning actor James Earl Jones.

Also on the program was Lin-Manuel Miranda’s preview of a little project he was working on at the time— a hip-hop musical called Hamilton .

In Memoriam: Ray Bradbury 1920-2012 : One of the more unlikely government sources of recorded poetry is NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory . In this tribute to the late science fiction author Ray Bradbury, posted on YouTube the day after his death in 2012, Bradbury reads his poem “If Only We Had Taller Been” during a symposium with Arthur C. Clarke, journalist Walter Sullivan, and scientists Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray. The symposium took place on November 12, 1971, the evening before Mariner 9 began its orbit around Mars and became the first spacecraft to orbit another planet. 

ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center)

“ A Poetry Coffee House: Creating a Cool Community of Writers ,” by Kristen Ferguson, provides tips and ideas for teaching elementary and secondary students how to share their writing through a coffee-house style poetry reading. This activity includes a discussion about poetry, a poetry writing workshop, and an open mike sharing session. The article, provided for free through the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) database, originally appeared in Reading Teacher  71, no. 2 (September 2017): 209–13. doi:10.1002/trtr.1610 .

A Reason to Celebrate

As we celebrate National Poetry Month, let us not overlook the invaluable contributions of federal, state, and local government agencies in preserving, promoting, and honoring the art of poetry. Through its publications, websites, and initiatives, the government provides a platform for poets to share their voices, preserves the poetic heritage of the nation, and cultivates a deeper appreciation for the power of language and expression.

So, whether you’re delving into the archives of the Library of Congress, exploring the publications of the Government Publishing Office, or participating in poetry events sponsored by federal agencies, take a moment to appreciate the rich poetic resources to be found in government documents. Happy National Poetry Month!

Do You Want to Know More?

The UNT Libraries Subject Guide Poetry in Government Publications lists more government resources related to poetry.

Visit Sycamore Library on the University of North Texas Campus to explore the many poetic resources in our Government Documents Collection. Sycamore Library is also host to the UNT Libraries Juvenile and Curriculum Materials Collections , which contain many children’s and young adult books related to poetry .

If you need assistance with finding or using government information, please visit the Service Desk in the Sycamore Library during  regular hours , contact us by phone (940) 565-4745), or send a request online to  [email protected] .

If you need extensive, in-depth assistance, we recommend that you e-mail us  or call the Sycamore Service Desk at (940) 565-2870 to make an appointment with a member of our  staff .

Article by Bobby Griffith

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Taylor Swift has long been inspired by great poets. Will she make this the year of poetry?

Tick, tick, tick. Taylor Swift is dropping her highly anticipated 11th era album "The Tortured Poets Department" on Friday, giving fans just days to break out the quills and notebooks, brush up on cursive writing and spend hours fitting words and alliterative phrases together like a perfect poetic puzzle.

Swifties will listen to the album with a white, beige and black aesthetic for at least a "Fortnight" (the name of the first song), delving into the lyrics and instrument choices on 20 tracks (there are four versions of the album with 16 base tracks and one unique bonus song per version).

From the erudite fanatic to the dignified scholar, Swift's newest body of art will be celebrated and scrutinized profusely. TikToks will speculate why "Florida!!!" has three exclamation points and who "The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived" is about. Her album artwork will be recreated, painted, sketched and collaged. Her new hits will be covered by singers on YouTube. The album two years in the making will make way for poetry to shine as the main character in 2024.

At least that's what Delaney Atkins, an Austin Peay State University professor, believes will happen. Since 2021, Atkins has taught one of the first Taylor Swift themed classes at the university level.

"I'm being vindicated right now," Atkins says. "If anybody ever doubted my class, here you go. There is space in the academic sphere for Taylor Swift."

"The Tortured Poets Department" may be a new trademark filed by Swift's team, but Atkins points out the idea of writers being insulted and aggrieved by a cruel society is nothing new.

"Her album has songs like 'The Albatross,' which is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge that I teach in my class," she says, "and it has been on my syllabus since the beginning."

Coleridge wrote  "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" in 1834. The poem is about an albatross that is abused by sailors as a metaphor for poets abused by society. The sailors fail to understand the beautiful creature, similar to how society fails to understand writers. Atkins sees this as a window into the album.

"A tortured poet is somebody who is so ingrained in their feelings and their emotions, just the ability to take that kind of emotion and make it art," Atkins says. "I think what she's getting at with the department is symbolizing a group of people who all set out to do the same thing but have different ways of going about it. Anyone in the past, present or future can be a part of the department."

Swift has referenced the department of esteemed writers in numerous songs across her discography. She's drawn from Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" poem twice. The second line of "The Outside" from her debut album has the line "I tried to take the road less traveled by," and in "'Tis The Damn Season" from "Evermore" she says "and the road not taken looks real good now." Fans think she announced "Evermore" on Dec. 10, 2020, to intentionally coincide with Emily Dickinson's birthday, and an internet rabbit hole links Dickinson to its song "Ivy." In the "Folklore: Long Pond Studio Sessions" documentary, Swift says her song "The Lakes" relates to William Wordsworth and John Keats.

"There was a poet district; these artists who moved there were kind of heckled for it," Swift says, "and made fun of for it as being these eccentrics and these kind of odd artists who decided that they just wanted to live there."

Atkins teaches, at length, these examples and many others. She plans to incorporate the new "Tortured Poets" works in her fall class.

Worlds away, the impact of Swift is felt in South Africa

A hemisphere away in Africa, Taylor Swift's writing transcends borders and cultures.

"I'm amazed at Taylor's breadth of work, at her level of maturity," says Abigail George , a screenwriter, poet and author who has written 20 books and hundreds of poems and essays. "What Taylor's been given is a gift from God."

George lives in Gqeberha, South Africa. She's practiced and studied literature her entire life. Her mother bought her a typewriter when she was 12. She won her first national manuscript competition in 1995. Her younger brother Ambrose started a publishing company, a small independent press, to publish her first three books. In 2015, George wrote an essay titled "The Hypomanic, and Unquiet Mind of the Tortured Poet." The essay reads in part:

"What will become of me if I am not loved?" the physical body asks itself. The mirror becomes the looking glass. The reflection becomes a figment of the imagination when you can find nothing comforting in it. Yet the tortured poet finds beauty and elegance in everything. 

Swift dubbed herself the "Chairman" when she announced the new album, and George credits the singer's innate ability to capture the human experience as what makes her worthy of the title. George puts Swift in the same realm as Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Edgar Allan Poe.

"I've written a book about Emily Dickinson, and I'm going to say something controversial that Taylor Swift is in the same league as Emily Dickinson," George says. "There's such a purity about her work. There's a purity about Taylor Swift."

Swift's writing has matured over the years, but she has incorporated complex themes since the beginning. In "Fifteen," a wise Nashville teenager wrote: "I've found time can heal most anything / And you just might find who you're supposed to be / I didn't know who I was supposed to be / At fifteen."

In November 2017 as part of the Target-exclusive "Reputation" magazines, Swift published two poems: "If You're Anything Like Me" and "Why She Disappeared." The end of "Why She Disappeared" is almost a harbinger of her phoenix-like resiliency: "without your past, / you could never have arrived- / so wondrously and brutally, / By design or some violent, exquisite happenstance / …here. / And in the death of her reputation, / She felt truly alive."

Brace for impact. Swiftmania will make landfall, again, on April 19 with a ripple effect expected to wash over the world. George thinks the album will be healing and therapeutic. Atkins thinks it will inspire many to create art. Although only Swift and her close circle know what catchy hooks and heart-wrenching verses the album contains, one thing is for certain: "The Tortured Poets Department" will be an embodiment of an artist who studies, refines and perfects her craft.

"Taylor Swift doesn't just make history," George says. "It's like, it's an ongoing process. It's yesterday, today, and tomorrow. I think 20 years from now, 30 years from now, even 100 years from now, she will still be relevant. She'll still be topical. People will still be talking about her."

Don't miss any Taylor Swift news; sign up for the  free, weekly newsletter "This Swift Beat."

Follow Taylor Swift reporter Bryan West on  Instagram ,  TikTok  and  X as @BryanWestTV .