Grief Poetry

The Back of Your Pickup: Poems of Love, Loss, and the Roads That Never Led Home. I remember the summer heat sticking to my skin, the radio humming a song we half-knew, and your hand tapping the steering wheel like you had nowhere to be but everywhere to go. The back of your pickup wasn’t just a truck bed—it was a church, a confessional, a place where love was whispered under a sky too big for the things we couldn’t say. The Back of Your Pickup is a collection of poetry that lingers in the spaces between love and loss, between leaving and staying, between who we were and who we became.

Dark Poems is a collection of poetry from the archives of burgeoning poet D.K. Mckenzie. Forty vivid poems all forged from the dark realms of the psyche. Each poem offers a poignant and sometimes heartbreaking outlook on the topics of life, death, relationships, and everything in between.

Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes, in the first powerfully elegiac section, a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the US border with Mexico. The poems of the third section - a moving transcription of Gander’s efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer’s - rise like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation.

Dean Browne arrives at the After Party with the maturity and style of an altogether more seasoned poet. In a debut collection of standout and stand-alone poems, each tests the boundaries of its unique universe. Browne is a mesmeric teller of strange tales, imaginings that can seem origamically contained within the compressed dimensions of a poem. A leg sets off on a long train journey; a Parisian alley cat is launched into space; earthbound lovers attempt to connect while their inner lives prove unbridgeable.

Divided into three parts—Body, Mind, and Soul—Brianna Pastor’s intimate collection of poems invites us inside a highly sensitive mind and explores what it’s like to discover neurodivergence in adulthood and view life through an empathetic lens. Hopefully, by deepening our understanding of sensitivity and how it affects others, we can move one step closer to a more connected, healed world.

From Finnish saunas and soppy otters to grief, grandparents and Kellogg's anti-masturbation pants, Slug is a book which holds a mirror lovingly up to the world, past and present, through Hollie's driving, funny, hopeful poetry and prose. Slug is about the human condition: of birth and death and how we manage the possibilities in between.

The Bridge of Fire, which appeared in 1907, was Flecker's first published collection of poetry. It contains 35 poems, a number of which were revised and republished in later collections. As with Flecker's other collections, two persistent themes emerge: the poet's fascination with the glories of Grecian antiquity and his premonitions of an early demise. Flecker seemed to be acutely aware that not only would he pass away himself, but also the fading world of British imperialism of which he was a characteristic representative.

This is a story from the Chilling Ghost Stories collection. The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe, tells of a talking raven's mysterious visit to a distraught lover, tracing the man's slow fall into madness. First published in January 1845, the poem is often noted for its musicality, stylized language, and supernatural atmosphere.

This edition brings together A Scattering and Anniversary into a single book of lamentation and remembrance, its subject being Christopher Reid's wife, the actress Lucinda Gane, who died of cancer at the age of 55. A Scattering was first published in the UK in 2009 to wide acclaim, winning the Costa Book of the Year Award. This moving and fiercely self-reflective collection is divided into four poetic sequences.

Popular Instagram poet and bestselling author Morgan Harper Nichols reimagines the classic heroine's journey—from the very first call to adventure, through trials, hardships, and new relationships, all the way back home—and offers key lessons and affirmations to encourage and equip you every step of the way.

Francesco Petrarch’s Canzoniere (translated in English as ‘Scattered Rhymes’) is a collection of 14th century poems famed for their exploration of love, grief, spirituality and nature. Peter Thornton's accessible new translation brings Petrarch to the 21st century in direct, rhymed, English verse - for academics and poetry enthusiasts alike.

The Life of a Wannabe Mogul: Mental Disarray, Bella Thorne’s collection of illuminating and inspiring poems chronicles her personal struggles, relationships, and wild-child lifestyle, all with her trademark wit and wisdom.

Instagram superstar and poet Nikita Gill shares a collection of poems crafted as the world went into lockdown, tackling themes such as mental health and loneliness, and the precarity of hope. Through the life cycle of a star, she invites the listener to feel connected to the universe, taking us on a journey through the five stages of grief to the five stages of hope.

A classic poem written to mirror the pain of the loss of romance. There is no remedy. There seems no hope. The anguish comes through loud and clear in this piece, written by William Hope Hodgson and narrated by Glenn Hascall.

Grief. An emotion we all experience at one time or another, but there is no grief greater then the loss of a loved one. In this short poem by William Hope Hodgson, the narrator is alone with his grief and the realization that what had been will never be again.

From one of the most-viewed spoken word poets of all time, a poetry collection exploring themes of loneliness, anxiety, and longing, while also celebrating the gifts that come with being alone - the chance to live on your own terms, to learn to love yourself without any distractions, and to become your own biggest champion.

Blue Crayon is a collection of poetry and prose about mental health and endurance. Rowen Ingrid Parker explores the themes of love and survival in this moving and powerful collection of poems.

Celebrating James Tate’s work as it transcends convention, time, and everything that tells us, “No, you can’t do that,” Hell, I Love Everybody gives us the poet at his best, his most intimate, hopeful, inventive, and brilliant. John Ashbery called Tate the “poet of possibilities,” and this collection records forays into possibilities for American poetry’s future. With a foreword by Terrance Hayes, it is sure to give listeners new and old a lasting collection of favorites.

A gorgeous collection of poems exploring womanhood, sisterhood, love, loss, and longing, for people who find catharsis in poems, or people who have always wanted to read or listen to poetry, but don’t know where to start.

The Perseverance is the remarkable debut book by British-Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus. Ranging across history and continents, these poems operate in the spaces in between, their haunting lyrics creating new, hybrid territories. The Perseverance is a book of loss, contested language and praise, where elegies for the poet's father sit alongside meditations on the d/Deaf experience.