Grief Poetry

A genre-bending exploration of poetry and human migration—another revelatory expedition from the National Book Award–winning poet who changed the way we see art, the museum, and the Black female figure. Winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Twenty-five years ago, after her maternal...

In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It's a book about a mother's death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author's black friends wanted to listen to "Don't Stop Believin'". It's about wrestling with histories, personal and shared.

Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics - of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience.

Innermost is a collection of both free-verse and fixed-verse poetry written over a period of half a decade about every emotion felt inside the human heart. These poems will transport you to a whole other world within the innermost depths of the human soul.

National Book Award finalist, Iraq war veteran, novelist, and poet Kevin Powers creates a deeply affecting portrait of a life shaped by war. Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting captures the many moments that comprise a soldier's life: Driving down the Texas highway; waiting for the unknown in the dry Iraq heat; writing a love letter; listening to a mother recount her dreams. Written with evocative language and discernment, Powers' poetry strives to make sense of the war and its echoes through human experience.

Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful - the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.

When I lost my brother suddenly in September 2018, I felt as though my world had ended. Grief brings so many raw emotions, and trying to move on from a loss like that is truly a powerful and difficult journey. In this collection, I bring you along on that journey with me, opening my soul and sharing all the deep emotions that I felt at each step of the way. These poems are honest, and express how I experienced the stages of grief, and I hope through my words you can find something to connect to.

A collection of Ella Wheeler Wilcox poems that I found to be a comforting distraction during the grieving process. Poems about death, life, existing, and coping.

Pain and trauma are what makes us human, arguably unifying us as a species. Finding our way out can be traumatic itself at the best of times, always confusing and so often riddled with false starts and mistakes. Through poetry, this collection will make you cry, laugh, empathize, question, and eventually help you find your way through and out of that dark place. From someone who has experienced the journey, and put in the years of study and work required to build a tool set to make the needed progress toward better mental health—the time is right to share this work with the world.

Adam Scott Campbell survived a life-threatening brain tumor at age nine that recurred as a young adult. When thereafter he faced death again, he was ready for heaven. Instead, heaven came to him. Visited by his Angel, she filled him with the strength, courage, hope, and life to continue on with a purpose--to share that we are never alone and that we are stronger than we know.

We Are the Winter People is the collected works of Jenny Rowbory. The diverse range of poetry deals with love, loss, and the poet's ever-changing relationship with faith. Despite the struggles depicted within the work, it is an ultimately empowering collection, filled with strength, determination, and hope.

Honeybee is a collection of raw, honest, and intimate conversations with oneself that lead you on a journey of reflection. By writing truthfully about the intricacies of her experiences, Rideau’s first collection of work is one that will speak to the very depths of those who read it, inspiring a will to question, heal and empower.

Laurence McKeown almost died in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh/Maze Prison in the North of Ireland, following 70 days on hunger strike in 1981. In later years, he helped facilitate poetry workshops in the prison and co-founded a prisoners magazine. In this, his debut collection of poems, written both during his incarceration and in subsequent years, Laurence reflects upon his developing political consciousness, exploring themes of politics, family, comradeship, longing, desire, and love.

This exciting collection of free-form poetry with over 40 poems by Susan J. Farese, MSN, RN, is a sharing of both professional and personal thoughts and feelings. Susan is a strong advocate of the creative use of poetry to express the wonderment, frustration, dedication, and the love of nurses for their profession and their patients.

The Secrets Behind My Eyes is a collection of poetry that follows a tween girl on her journey toward growth and maturity. It depicts her struggles with depression and anxiety, pain, loss of friendships, and love. It attests to forming a strong spirit in the face of trouble as well as exploring and validating the emotions that come along with the adventure of living.

From the emotional highs and lows of love won and lost to the feelings of hope, fear, anxiety, and loss, this anthology of poems journeys through the ephemera of everyday life - pausing here and there in the realm of dreams.

Smoke is a collection of poems written over the course of two years. It is portrait of grief and the courage it takes to sit with it. It is an account of what it feels like to be intimate with sadness and loneliness. It is a portrait of healing. Smoke is documentation of growth and its grueling processes. It begins in grief and ends in joy. It is a book where the black girl rescues herself.

Subverting celebrated classics of poetry and mythology and examining horrors from contemporary film and cultural fact, National Book Award-winner Justin Phillip Reed engages darkness as an aesthetic to conjure the revenant animus that lurks beneath the exploited civilities of marginalized people. In these poems, Reed finds agency in the other-than-human identities assigned to those assaulted by savageries of the state. In doing so, he summons a retaliatory, counterviolent black spirit to revolt and to inhabit the revolting.

Jose Ángel Graña Abad nos trae con su decimocuarta publicación “Este corazón muge y grita”, un conjunto de poemas de una intensidad extrema, que constituyen una obra poética, que evocándonos la pasión y la fuerza de “El rayo que no cesa” *, ha conseguido generar un universo de imágenes poéticas de gran belleza. El baile pasional de la dialéctica del amor y la muerte, del materialismo y el idealismo, se desarrolla en los versos, donde incluso llegan a cantar Janis Joplin, Paty Smith, o Amy Winehaouse.

Sometimes lovers enter a relationship with the best of intentions but wind up in a place far from love. Sometimes poets attempt love poems, simple and pure, but.... Over breakfast, a husband trying to deny creeping out on his wife the previous night can't help but give hints about the creepy things he really did. On a beach, a man minding his own business is accosted by a pretty woman before a strong tide embarrasses them both. A tone-deaf proposal for marriage ends in murder. A traditionally arranged marriage spins into a deranged and surreal nightmare. These aren't anti-love poems. These are poems born and burned out of love.