National Poetry Month April 2024: Books

Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, the luminous poetry collection by presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage.

This comprehensive and authoritative collection of all 1,775 poems by Emily Dickinson is an essential volume for all lovers of American literature.

The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence. At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea, these poems confronts our time's vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.

The primary nature, the tangible and the conventional are transformed into a magical universe in search not of the transcendent, but of the deeply human, preserving the mystery and awe, proving that indeed one of the most strange qualities of poetry remains the ability to extract the great and the extraordinary from the everyday common.

Poetry in English from Edmund Spencer to Sylvia Plath with introductions to each poet and a selection of their works.

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness--between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves.

Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right.

In 1855, a small volume appeared, self-published by a failed Brooklyn journalist and carpenter- twelve untitled poems and a preface announcing the author's aims. A commercial failure, this book was the first stage of a massive, lifelong enterprise. Six editions and thirty-seven years later, Leaves of Grass had been recognized as one of the central masterworks of world poetry.

milk and honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. About the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity.

In Obit, Chang writes of "the way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking." These poems reinvent the form of newspaper obituary to both name what has died ("civility," "language," "the future," "Mother's blue dress") and the cultural impact of death on the living.

Widely regarded as one of the finest works of literature in the Western canon, Homer's Odyssey is a masterpiece of classical epic poetry. The tale follows the travels of the Greek hero Odysseus as he strives to return to his homeland after waging battle in the Trojan War.

Concerns the Christian story of the Fall of Man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Milton's purpose, stated in Book I, is to "justify the ways of God to men" and elucidate the conflict between God's eternal foresight and free will.

Updated edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets, with a brand new introduction by Stephen Orgel.

Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother's death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it.

A collection with a feminist ethos that cuts across race, gender identity, and sexuality.

Edgar Allan Poe's is credited not only with inventing or significantly advancing the short story, detective fiction, and science fiction, but also with being one of the first Americans to pursue a career in writing as a vocation. This comprehensive volume is a career-spanning collection of Poe's stories and poems.