Pretty Words - New In Poetry

Description: The first poetry collection in twenty-five years by the National Book Award-winning author, Joyce Carol Oates, observes the human heart and mind while exploring subjects ranging from politics and racism to poverty and loss.

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Description: Picked on at home, criticized for talking trash while beating boys at basketball, and always seen as less than her best friend, a girl struggles to like and accept herself.

Description: "A new book by Don Mee Choi that includes poems, prose, and images"-- Provided by publisher.

Description: "In this collection of personal essays and poetry, acclaimed poet and performer Pamela Sneed details her coming of age in New York City during the late 1980s. Funeral Diva captures the impact of AIDS on black queer life, and highlights the enduring bondsbetween the living, the dying, and the dead. Sneed's poems not only converse with lovers past and present, but also with her literary forebears- like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde-whose aesthetic and thematic investments she renews for a contemporary American landscape. Offering critical focus on matters from police brutality to LGBTQ+ rights, Funeral Diva confronts the most pressing issues of our time with acerbic wit and audacity"-- Provided by publisher.

Description: "Adam Mansbach--a young and mostly unknown jazz musician, rapper, poet, screenwriter, and novelist - had just had his first brush with fame from a most unlikely source: a book of rhyming couplets about putting his young daughter to sleep that had improbably sold millions of copies and shot to the top of bestseller lists. Just as his dreams of writing success were coming true - interviews on late-night and morning shows, standing-room only events, an audiobook read by Samuel L. Jackson and Werner Herzog (not all dreams make sense) - he received a call from his father, with news about his older brother, David. 'my father said david has taken his own life & i answered as if i didn't understand or hadn't heard. my reply was what? & he repeated it. there is plenty to regret & perhaps this is insignificant but i wish i had not made him say it to me twice.' This epic poem tells the story of a young man grappling with the death of his beloved and troubled older brother - but more than that, trying to understand the nature of love, family, and mortality itself. In his Go the Fuck to Sleep, Mansbach deftly captured for millions of readers the comic tension betweeen the love we have for our newborn children and the ways they drive us crazy; here, he uses that same sensitivity and ability to find a fresh language for common human experience to illuminate the search for meaning within grief at the other end of life. Mansbach finds himself facing a sudden void where once he brother stood without any way to make sense of the loss. This poem turns into his ritual of grief, his way of redeeming and understanding loss - and moving on"-- Provided by publisher.

Description: In her new collection, Jorie Graham deepens her vision of our futurity. What of us will survive? Identity may be precarious, but perhaps love is not? Keeping pace with the desperate runaway of climate change, social disruption, our new mass migrations, she struggles to reimagine a habitable present-- a now-- in which we might endure, wary, undaunted, ever-inventive, counting silently towards infinity.

Description: "On January 20, 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and youngest poet, at age twenty-two, to deliver a poetry reading at a presidential inauguration. Her inaugural poem, "The Hill We Climb," is now available to cherish in this special edition." -- Provided by publisher.

Description: "Wound from the Mouth of the Wound was selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry"-- Provided by publisher.