Grief Poetry

In the searing poems of his new collection, Twice Alive, the Pulitzer Prize-winner Forrest Gander addresses the exigencies of our historical moment and the intimacies, personal and environmental, that bind us to others and to the world. Drawing from his training in geology and his immersion in Sangam literary traditions, Gander invests these poems with an emotional intensity that illuminates our deep-tangled interrelations.

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.

The Apocalyptic Mannequin by Stephanie M. Wytovich is a collection that strips away civilization and throws listeners into the lives of its survivors. The poems inside are undelivered letters, tear-soaked whispers, and unanswered prayers. They are every worry you've had when your electricity went out and every pit that grew in your stomach, while watching the news at night. They are tragedy and trauma, but they are also grief and fear, fear of who - or what - lives inside us, once everything is taken away.

This collection of Sona Van’s poems is a tribute to the victims of genocide and war. With extraordinary feminine sensitivity, the poet looks at the world in all its striking contrasts, constantly probing the depths of her consciousness with new modes of expression. The collection consists of ephemeral poems characterized by dramatic encounters with nothingness in which an uncanny ability to capture extreme situations prevails. Sona Van’s poetry represents the truest testimony of historical experience and the reality in which it still lives.

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.

Winner of the 2022 American Book Award Finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Finalist for Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry Named one of the Best Books of 2021 by The Boston Globe and Lit Hub From the critically...

A brilliant, genre-defying work—both memoir and epic poem—about the struggle for wisdom, grace, and ritual in the face of unspeakable loss “A bruised and brave love letter from a brother right here to a brother now gone . . . a soaring, unblinking gaze into the meaning of life itself...

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.

Wraith Like Me is the journey of a woman from childhood through her mid-30s. These strange poems chronicle her experiences with trauma, abuse, anxiety, and a bottomless rage. The words begin the trails of healing, hope, and self-acceptance (a story that will continue in future poetry collections).

This poetry collection deals with life, death, love, and the loss of a beloved, albeit complicated, parent.

The Snake, the Scorpion, the Sage: A Poetry Book contains 38 poems across the themes of chaos, madness, lost love, violence, shadow work, dreams, nightmares, death, and the messy side of life experience.

Love Glutton is a poetry anthology that features 75 poems on the adventurous mysteries of love, lust, life, and memory. Tadhg Culley is a professional screenwriter, published author, and poet from the UK. He has written 10 feature film screenplays, nine poetry books, eight TV series scripts, eight novellas, three guidebooks, one memoir, one novelette, one collection of short stories, and many other short-form works, delving into documentary, theater, animation, and games.

Paper Heart is a collection of poetry stemming from the places where light and darkness have shaped who Jennifer LeBlanc is as a writer. Written over years of introspection, love, pain, and hope, each poem is a placeholder for something that held her mind for either a bright moment or a dark hour.

You will confront your darkest fears and beckon them to the surface of your mind. Nightmares will cause conflict between the charcoal days and bleak nights. With a splash of colorful, sweet sentiment to contrast the shadows, Dark Days will leave a twisted, yet merry mark on your soul.