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Poetry

Cover of Afrfican American Poetry:
edited by Kevin Young
9781598536669
2020

Taking the measure of the tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song sets a new standard for a genuinely deep engagement with Black poetry and its essential expression of American genius.

Cover of Another Way to Dance: Cont
by Cyril Dabyd
0920661599
1996

Poetry Anthology. Asian American Studies. This anthology includes selected works of some of the most active and dynamic contemporary poets writing in North America. Reflecting to varying degrees sensibilities based on ancestral Asian homelands and on lives in Canada and the United States, the poetry reproduced here is of a wide-ranging appeal and refreshing modernity, depicting a shifting, kaleidoscopic landscape of cultural and spiritual heterogeneity and individual interpretations. Includes works by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Marilyn Chin, Chitra Banerjee, Garrett Hongo, Kimiko Hahn, Carolyn Lei-Lanilau, David Mura, Michael Ondaatje, Sasenarine Persaud, and Arthur Sze

Cover of Borderlands / La Frontera:
by Gloria Anzaldúa
9781879960855
2012

Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenged, and continue to challenge, how we think about identity. Borderlands / La Frontera remaps our understanding of what a "border" is, presenting it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us. [also 1999 edition]
Recommended by YWCA Madison

Cover of Citizen: An American Lyric
by Claudia Rankine
9781555976903
[2014]

Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV--everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named 'post-race' society.

Cover of Homie: Poems
by Danez Smith
9781644450109
2020

Rooted in the loss of one of Smith's close friends, this magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family--blood and chosen--arrives with just the right food and some redemption. 

Cover of Let America Be America Aga
by Langston Hughes
0807615501
2004

Langston Hughes was uncommonly attuned to the ideals of freedom and democracy and the sometimes elusive American dream. The poems collected here offer a hopeful, truly democratic vision for America. Incantatory and stirring, passionate and provocative, they are as resonant for our times as they were over half a century ago.

Cover of Looking Out, Looking In: A
by William Lu
9781558857612
2012

The poems included in this comprehensive anthology run the gamut of styles and themes, but all are by Latinos writing from the mid- twentieth century to the present. Some deal with issues specific to the Hispanic experience, such as displacement, identity and language. Others ponder universal concerns, such as love, family and humanity.

Cover of Magical Negro: Poems
by Morgan Parker
9781947793187
2019

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. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. 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.

Cover of Of Poetry & Protest: From
by Philip Cushway, by Michael Warr
9780393352733
2016

Of Poetry and Protest gives voice to the current conversation about race in America while also providing historical and cultural context. It serves as an excellent introduction to African American poetry and is a must-have for every reader committed to social justice and racial harmony.

Cover of The Tradition
by Jericho Brown
9781556594861
2019

Jericho Brown's daring 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning book of poetry details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown's mastery, and his invention of the duplex--a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues--is testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.

Cover of When the Light of the Worl
edited by Joy Harjo
9780393356809
2020

United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo gathers the work of more than 160 poets, representing nearly 100 indigenous nations, into the first historically comprehensive Native poetry anthology. This landmark anthology celebrates the indigenous peoples of North America, the first poets of this country, whose literary traditions stretch back centuries.