Grief Poetry

The First Flower After the Fire is a companion for the quiet journey through the aftermath of a shattering event. It is a collection of poetry that speaks to the moments that feel unspeakable—the initial shock, the haunting echoes, the slow mending of the scars, and the gentle return of the light. This book is not a guide with easy answers. It is a quiet room, a validation of your pain, and a testament to the profound strength found in resilience.

In this impressionistic collection of “poetry and other thoughts scattered to the wind,” author Ruqayyah K. Muhammad reflects on topics such as self-discovery, aging, motherhood, grief, gratitude, spirituality, and love of many varieties.

Gathering Broken Light confronts pasts we cannot understand, largely following the October 2017 mass shooting. Anchored in the severity and the beauty of the Mojave Desert landscape, fractured narratives, surrealist repetition, and imagistic lyricism work to contemplate grief, including both overwhelming sorrow and deep love. To those lost by gun violence, a voice yearns, “I wish I could sing the sky to you.”

A new volume of poetry from Robert Hass is always an event. In Summer Snow, Hass further affirms his position as one of our most highly regarded living poets. Hass’s trademark careful attention to the natural world, his subtle humor, and the delicate but wide-ranging eye he casts on the human experience are fully on display in his masterful collection. Touching on subjects including the poignancy of loss, the serene and resonant beauty of nature, and the mutability of desire, Hass exhibits his virtuosic abilities and expansive intellect, and tremendous listenability.

From acclaimed poet Franny Choi comes a poetry collection for the ends of worlds—past, present, and future. Choi’s third book features poems about historical and impending apocalypses, alongside musings on our responsibilities to each other and visions for our collective survival.

Take a look into the mind of the undead bohemian Jack Townson, an artist who found himself trapped in a world of nightmares, a life without sunlight, never to feel the warmth of day or the permanence of true love. Jack dives inward to put pen to paper, filling each minute with forbidden secrets—from the loves he's lost, to the friends he's made, to the villains who have plagued him, and the dreams of tomorrow. Step into the shoes of a child of dusk trying to find his way back into the dawn.

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

Abrir el corazón, dejar que se desangre, así entiende Alberto Villarreal la poesía y, en este nuevo libro, rompe con todo lo que nos enseñaron sobre ocultar lo que sentimos y esconder el amor que no encaja en lo que otros esperan. Cada poema de Te daré el olvido habla sin filtros sobre nombrar lo que duele y amar con valentía, sin miedo. Es un testimonio sobre lo difícil que es olvidar a las personas que hemos amado, y cómo su ausencia se vuelve un eco constante en el cuerpo.

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 Nightingale,” 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.”

This is an account of a life lived online. Swiping for approval. Scrolling for gratification. Searching for connection. From the glow of a screen in the middle of the night, to the harsh glare of the hospital waiting room, Validate Me, is a raw and honest look at the highs and the lows of a digital life.

A microscopic and intense view of the sometimes invisible and ignored parts of the world we inhabit. Peering into cities and our place within them, the poet searches for meaning after the death of his father, and observes the flora and fauna, which provide beauty and nourish us. This book delights the senses and poses the question, are we contributing to, or ultimately destroying our planet?

A classic poem from acclaimed author Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Grief sometimes comes at Christmas. We may believe there is no hope for happiness again on the day of Christmas bells and gifts, but in the midst of this grief there is the birth of hope. When something is lost - something new may be found. Not easy, but universally true.

Library of Small Catastrophes, Alison Rollins's ambitious debut collection, interrogates the body and nation as storehouses of countless tragedies. Drawing from Jorge Luis Borges's fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to offer a lyric history of the ways in which we process loss. "Memory is about the future, not the past", she writes, and rather than shying away from the anger, anxiety, and mourning of her narrators, Rollins's poetry seeks to challenge the status quo.

When Erin Vincent was fourteen years old, both of her parents were killed in a traffic accident. Almost forty years later, the number 14 began haunting Erin, appearing everywhere–in the books she was reading, in films, TV shows, and on the news. The repetition felt significant, so Erin began to explore the number beyond her personal understanding. The result is Fourteen Ways of Looking, a memoir of magisterial fractals and a profound meditation on grief, memory, numerology, and the creative process.

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.

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.

The Shatter Between Heartbeats is not a poetry collection. It is a psychological event. A descent into the raw architecture of the human mind, where trauma is not described but embodied-where anxiety tightens like a vice, depression seals every exit, and survival is carved line by line without anesthesia. Written by E. T. Vale and edited by Amir Kapoor, this groundbreaking anthology explores the lived experience of mental illness through twenty-four unflinching, interconnected poems.

Em seu sexto livro de poesia, Bruna Beber conduz o leitor por um caminho limiar entre tempo e espaço, vida e morte.

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.

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.