Contemporary Poetry

A book cover with colorful, swirling clouds of green, blue, yellow, and orange. The title,

Wondering if you should be reading more poetry? Here are 8 collections to spend time exploring.

Here’s the list in the catalog – https://decorah.biblionix.com/?booklist=27005

 

Book cover of "The Rain in Portugal: Poems" by Billy Collins, featuring a close-up of a classical drawing of a woman's face looking upwards. The text "New York Times Bestseller" and "Author of Aimless Love" are also displayed.

The Rain in Portugal

By Billy Collins

The Rain in Portugal “a title that admits he’s not much of a rhymer” sheds Collins’s ironic light on such subjects as travel and art, cats and dogs, loneliness and love, beauty and death. His tones range from the whimsical “the dogs of Minneapolis . . . / have no idea they’re in Minneapolis” to the elegiac in a reaction to the death of Seamus Heaney.

A student of the everyday, Collins here contemplates a weather vane, a still life painting, the calendar, and a child lost at a beach. His imaginative fabrications have Shakespeare flying comfortably in first class and Keith Richards supporting the globe on his head. By turns entertaining, engaging, and enlightening, The Rain in Portugal amounts to another chorus of poems from one of the most respected and familiar voices in the world of American poetry.

 

A book cover with colorful, swirling clouds of green, blue, yellow, and orange. The title, "The Octopus Museum," and the author's name, "Brenda Shaughnessy," are written in white text over the abstract background. The book is a collection of poems.

The Octopus Museum

By Brenda Shaughnessy

Informed by Brenda Shaughnessy’s craft as a poet and her worst fears as a mother, the poems in The Octopus Museum blaze forth from her pen: in these pages, we see that what was once a generalized fear for our children (car accidents, falling from a tree) is now hyper-reasonable, specific, and multiple: school shootings, nuclear attack, loss of health care, a polluted planet.

As Shaughnessy conjures our potential future, she movingly (and often with humor) envisions an age where cephalopods might rule over humankind, a fate she suggests we may just deserve after destroying their oceans. These heartbreaking, terrified poems are the battle cry of a woman who is fighting for the survival of the world she loves, and a stirring exhibition of who we are as a civilization.

 

The cover of the book "feeld" by Jos Charles features a detailed sketch of a bird's nest centered on a plain white background. A gold sticker indicates it as a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Text below the nest mentions the National Poetry Series and selection by Fady Joudah.

feeld

By Jos Charles

Selected by Fady Joudah as a winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series, Jos Charles’s revolutionary second collection of poetry, feeld, is a lyrical unraveling of the circuitry of gender and speech, defiantly making space for bodies that have been historically denied their own vocabulary.

“i care so much abot the whord i cant reed.” In feeld, Charles stakes her claim on the language available to speak about trans experience, reckoning with the narratives that have come before by reclaiming the language of the past. In Charles’s electrifying transliteration of English

  • “Chaucerian in affect, but revolutionary in effect”
  • what is old is made new again. “gendre is not the tran organe / gendre is yes a hemorage.” “did u kno not a monthe goes bye / a tran i kno doesnt dye.” The world of feeld is our own, but off-kilter, distinctly queer”
  • making visible what was formerly and forcefully hidden: trauma, liberation, strength, and joy.

Urgent and vital, feeld composes a new and highly inventive lyrical narrative of what it means to live inside a marked body.

 

The cover of “Faithful and Virtuous Night” by Louise Glück features a nighttime cityscape with a complex web of highways and buildings. The sky is dark, and the image is overlaid with the title, author’s name, and a National Book Award Winner seal.

Faithful and Virtuous Night

By Louise Glück

Louise Glück is one of the finest American poets at work today. Her Poems 1962-2012 was hailed as “a major event in this country’s literature” in the pages of The New York Times. Every new collection is at once a deepening and a revelation. Faithful and Virtuous Night is no exception.

You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it’s the same place but it has been arranged differently. You were a woman. You were a man. This is a story of adventure, an encounter with the unknown, a knight’s undaunted journey into the kingdom of death; this is a story of the world you’ve always known, that first primer where “on page three a dog appeared, on page five a ball” and every familiar facet has been made to shimmer like the contours of a dream, “the dog float[ing] into the sky to join the ball.” Faithful and Virtuous Night tells a single story but the parts are mutable, the great sweep of its narrative mysterious and fateful, heartbreaking and charged with wonder.

 

Book cover for "Dog Songs" by Mary Oliver. Features an illustration of a dog sitting and looking into the distance. The text includes "New York Times Bestseller," "Poems," and "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize." The Penguin Books logo is also present.

 

Dog Songs

By Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver’s Dog Songs is a celebration of the special bond between human and dog, as understood through the poet’s relationships to the canines that have accompanied her daily walks, warmed her home, and inspired her work. Oliver’s poems begin in the small everyday moments familiar to all dog lovers, but through her extraordinary vision, these observations become higher meditations on the world and our place in it.

 

 

 

Book cover of "Citizen: An American Lyric" by Claudia Rankine. The image features a black hooded sweatshirt floating against a white background. The National Book Award Finalist emblem is displayed on the right side. Title and author's name are printed in bold black letters.

Citizen

By Claudia Rankine

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.

 

Book cover of "An American Sunrise: Poems" by Joy Harjo. The cover features a gradient sky transitioning from deep blue to a warm orange horizon. At the bottom, silhouettes of people wearing traditional clothing stand in a circle, looking towards the sunrise.

An American Sunrise

By Joy Harjo

In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family’s lands and opens a dialogue with history. In An American Sunrise, Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where her people, and other indigenous families, essentially disappeared.

From her memory of her mother’s death, to her beginnings in the native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo’s personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings. Her poems sing of beauty and survival, illuminating a spirituality that connects her to her ancestors and thrums with the quiet anger of living in the ruins of injustice. A descendent of storytellers and “one of our finest”•and most complicated”•poets” (Los Angeles Review of Books), Joy Harjo continues her legacy with this latest powerful collection.

 

The book cover of "American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin" by Terrance Hayes features an abstract blue background with symmetrical, mirrored designs. The title is written in white, bold hand-drawn lettering, with red stars on either side of the author's name.

 

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

By Terrance Hayes

In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country’s past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered–the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.

 

 


Posted: August 26, 2021

Categories: Book Lists, For Adults