Grief Poetry

Courage is a common hope that we can cultivate together. These prayers and poems can be listened to in group settings—among friends, families, and worshipping communities—and are also ideal for personal reflection.

Our quoted authority is not the people in white coats but those with a quill, a heart and a soul that can take these feelings of love and loss and with the ink of words put to verse feelings and emotions that can be re-lived and shared by all. As they venture through depression, war, slavery to heartache and the loss of loved ones our eyes may mist and tears gently fall at what collectively we have done, have experienced, have witnessed and lost.

We Alive, Beloved moves beyond being a poetry collection; it's a celebration of the profound aspects of our existence. Each poem seeks to immortalize the fleeting moments of joy, love, resilience, and inspiration that often slip through the grasp of our fast-paced lives.

With My Back to the World engages with the paintings and writings of Agnes Martin, the celebrated abstract artist, in ways that open up new modes of expression, expanding the scope of what art, poetry, and the human mind can do. Filled with surprise and insight, wit and profundity, the book explores the nature of the self, of existence, life and death, grief and depression, time and space. Strikingly original, fluidly strange, Victoria Chang's new collection is a book that speaks to how we see and are seen.

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.

Following on his exquisite Stones, Young's new collection shapes stories of familial and familiar love, inspired in part by other lives. A central sequence, “The Two-Headed Nightngale,” is spoken by Millie-Christine McCoy, the famous conjoined African American “Carolina Twins.” Born into slavery and ill treatment as a “freak” sensation in 1851 and later free women, their alto and soprano voices harmonized, and Young's poem explores their evolving selfhood and self-understanding: “As one we sang, /we spake— / She was the body / I the soul / Without one / Perishes the whole.”

In her electric fourth collection, Melissa Broder penetrates the itch of existence and explores numberless deaths: the annihilation of self, the bereavement of love, the destruction of fantasy, the transmutation, even, of our ideas of dying. What emerges is an infinite series of false endings - each a trap door containing the possibility for alchemy, rebirth, and renewal. Last Sext confronts both eternal longing and the mystery of mortality, with language hot, primal, and dark.

With Love, Grief and Fury contains love poems, for people and the planet; grief poems brimming with compassion, sharing tears and mourning what was and contemplating what could be; and poems of fire and fury that will kick some ass, tell the truth and inspire change and hope. Over thirty years after she first stormed the UK poetry scene, the trailblazing and award-winning writer Salena Godden has produced her most audacious and definitive collection to date. Like a big sister’s arm around your shoulder, With Love, Grief and Fury is important and nourishing for the soul.

"Ashes in the Milk" will remind listeners that their greatest path to healing lies within—all they must do is walk down the path. Valerie Johns, MA, MFT, is a prolific poet, author, and therapist who is passionate about helping others heal from their deepest wounds.

I Had A Brother Once is a brilliant, genre-defying work - both memoir and epic poem - about the struggle for wisdom, grace, and ritual in the face of unspeakable loss. Adam is forced to re-remember a brother he thought he knew and to reckon with a ghost, confronting his unsettled family history, his distant relationship with tradition and faith, and his desperate need to understand an event that always slides just out of his grasp.

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.

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.

Quando perdemos alguém que amamos, iniciamos uma longa jornada, atravessando um dos períodos mais dolorosos da vida. Para nos oferecer um pouco de conforto, Martha Hickman compartilha meditações, frases inspiradoras e breves preces que lhe deram força e coragem para enfrentar a perda da filha, que morreu aos 16 anos num trágico acidente. Com textos curtos e simples—o que é muito útil durante o luto, quando a capacidade de concentração e compreensão está reduzida—este livro traz pequenas doses de encorajamento e apoio para cada dia do ano.

Steph Catudal is beloved for her poignant meditations on loss, uncertainty, and illness, and the raw, wise reflections of her “brilliant, unflinching, lyrical” (Matt Haig) New York Times bestselling memoir Everything All At Once. Now, Catudal brings her trademark wisdom and strong lyrical voice to bear in her first collection of verse, delving into the challenging yet often rich parts of life people often lack the courage to face.

In this collection, explore a variety of poems depicting a time of loneliness, growth, and self reflection. How change can often be unwanted, and the feelings that transpire with overcoming it.

This is the worst book of poetry ever written.

Something is coming, it's hiding in the dark. In shadows, it is stalking, ready to stop your heart. This poetry collection will take you deep into the depths of hell, Through lava filled pits.

The Twilight Zone Haiku explores the essence of Rod Serling’s iconic, uncanny 1960s television show through haiku, giving us dazzling, spot-on snapshots of each episode. In seventeen syllables, Boykin captures the show's main objective: to deliver a keen jolt of existential awareness.

Written with vivid prose, a bit of lyrical poetry, and the mystical essence of works by Rumi and Hafiz, this blog-to-audiobook story illustrates the beauty of letting go of the old to usher in the new.

This is a book about who I was and who I am. About pain and depression and suicide and regrowth. It's about hope and living a future you didn't expect to live. More specifically, it is about my suicide attempt in 2019, after years of struggling with alcoholism, depression, and self-harm. It's about my second chance and making it all that it can be. It uses my writing from before my attempt and after my attempt to compare how I changed and my views of life.