In Verse: Poetry Collections for a Big Life Change
Feature image photo by mikroman6 via Getty Images
If you’ve been reading my work recently or following me on social media, you know I’m about to embark on a big life change: a move. I have never lived anywhere that wasn’t in Pennsylvania. This state is my home, but I’m ready to move on from it.
This move has come with a host of emotions: I’m excited, I’m anxious, and I’m scared. Scared that things won’t go as planned, anxious that I might not like my new city, and excited to start a new life for myself. I’m in flux, but being very mindful about how a big change could easily untether me. I’m working at staying grounded, and a part of that is turning toward poetry.
These books aren’t specifically about big life changes themselves, but they do ask big questions about grief, humanity, and more. They ground me not because these poets have answers to said questions, but because they dare to ask them.
Soft Science by Franny Choi
I have only ever wanted to bite
down hard on whatever was offered
to my hothouse mouth.
I was first introduced to Choi’s work when she co-hosted the VS podcast with Danez Smith. I hadn’t read any of her chapbooks, but when Soft Science came out, it was next to impossible to get my hands on it. It was always sold out wherever I looked for it. When I finally did get it, I was struck by the world within the book, the world Choi questions and interrogates.
One of the big questions asked in this book is about what separates the human from the machine, in this modern world, where do we draw that line? It makes me think about how we work, the current state of the “content machine,” and how we make everything in our lives fodder for online consumption. Or we are forced to.
These poems are rife with Turing tests and examinations of what makes us human. One of the things that the book offers as an answer is itself. I walk away from it with a thought that humans were given the gift of making art. A machine can formulate art as well, but it doesn’t have the understanding of what it is doing the way we do.
There is also the question of what the poem can do, especially within the poem “You’re So Paranoid.” Many people will offer the poet’s job is to witness the atrocities of the world and make art despite, but this poem makes me think: is witness enough? In the poem, the police offers give up their humanity to move with machine precision and brutality. They are ostensibly humans but humans acting at the will of an oppressive state, robbing them of what makes us recognizable to each other.
The speaker in the poem muses:
The cop speaks and I call a plum into his mouth it doesn’t shut him up.
Poetry, as beautiful and stirring as it is, has its limits. I chose this book of poems because everything changes, but how we respond to that change can make us more ourselves, more human.
Ghost of by Diana Khoi Nguyen
If you are unafraid, beware.
This book deals heavily with the death of the author’s brother by suicide, so I want to tell you this before you go into it. Grief can feel insurmountable. Maybe it is insurmountable. The death of a brother is vastly different from moving across states, so why did I choose this book?
I chose it because of my fear and my grief. Quite frankly, I don’t know what to do with either. I’m in therapy, I’ve acquired all the tools I need to make this move successful, so why am I still grieving?
In the above-referenced poem, “Grief Logic,” the speaker tries to work out just that, the logic of grief. It is a stunning poem, a heartbreaking one. I think of it often and reading it again for this has come with that same swell of emotion. I have five brothers, two of which I still speak to. To lose one of them would wreck me. In this poem, the speaker states
If this doesn’t end the world, the world will end after it.
and I can’t help but think how poignant and true that is of grief. The times in my life where I have lost someone or some version of myself, it felt like I would never survive it. These poems survive though, they endure the grief of the author, they carry that grief along with her. Poetry, even when you aren’t the one that has written it, can carry your grief.
Grief is the most human emotion. A big change can come with that grief, and it is important to know this and let it come. To not fight it even if you are scared or worried. It cannot be rushed or hurried along, so it is best to let it take its course.
In “An Empty House Is a Debt,” the speaker writes something I will leave you with:
A human terrifies.
A human is someone who becomes terrified, and having become terrified,
craves an end to her feat.
This craving carves a cave.
I Was A Bell by M. Soledad Caballero
How long since my body
carried joy?
I have to confess that Caballero was one of my college professors, which is in part why I love this book. I also love it because it deals with a similar change. Caballero writes of coming to the US, her journey out of a country changed by a coup, and even her present-day cancer diagnosis.
What I learned from this book is the enduring spirit of the heart. The heart that can be wracked by grief and fear of the unknown, can still recover, can still beat. In the poem “Pacific Dreams,” Caballero writes of missing the Pacific Ocean, a place where her body was once suspended in the cool water, the smell of seafoam in the air.
The opening line is quoted above, and I ask myself the same question often. A part of why I am moving is because I am moving toward joy, which I have rarely ever experienced in my life. The body is so fragile, robbing it of joy can have lasting effects. I’m trying to prevent that from happening.
Reading as the speaker talks of becoming accustomed to the strange land of the United States, I feel empathy for the small girl in those poems. I’m moving as an adult and I’m terrified, it must have been so hard to lose a home for a girl so small.
The poems that deal with cancer and the havoc it wreaks on the body are so complex and divine.
too much life. That is
what the doctor says. Many routes of muscles, blood
to dance with, invade. So many ways to make mountains
of death.
These lines appear in “What You Are Doing Is Living,” a poem that confronts the terror of death and tests and the body. It’s a beautiful collection that makes me want to confront change instead of shying away from it.
Hull by Xan Phillips
have you ever heard
of intimate space
compounding with want
This collection is daring, it burns in your hands as you read it. The titular poem contains the lines:
It is for the
dead’s inability to do so
that I rattle the coins in my
chest. In every exhale there
is audacity
These poems have audacity, and that is something I want to mirror in my own life. To have the audacity to want change, to strive for it. I like to think of it as my ancestral duty. These poems guide me toward that thinking.
Many of them chronicle the realities of violence enacted on Black people throughout history, from slavery to modern-day lynchings. These poems take on the voices of the deceased or are in conversation with them. It’s a challenging read because of its history, and its emotionality.
In “I Never Used To Write About Birds,” the speaker says
this is the closes I’ll get to grabbing
our unjust god by the pearls
strung across his throat so I can ask
why he sat back in luster
all these millennia
watching my people die
and all I can think of is the audacity it takes to write those lines. Phillips is a strong poet, and an obviously audacious one. I hope you find this in their work too.
Winter Recipes from the Collective by Louise Glück
I try to comfort you
but words are not the answer;
Anytime anyone dares to ask me who my favorite poet is, I mention Glück. Her work is not only beautiful, it is honest, the purest form of truth, for me.
Winter Recipes from the Collective is her most recent book, and while reading it, I was struck by it’s quietude. I know that doesn’t sound like it makes sense when talking about poetry, but the book is really a study in patience, in observation, in looking.
In “Autumn” the speaker writes
The part of life
devoted to contemplation
was at odds with the part
committed to action.
To change is to be committed to action, no matter how scary it is. I spent many years contemplating this move and feeling stuck in this city, but now I’ve put in the action necessary to make it a reality.
I list Glück as a favorite poet because her voice is so clear and wanting. It is begging to get at the meat of what is in its sights. Whether that thing is relationships or the natural world, she approaches it along with you. You the reader and the speaker hand-in-hand, getting to know what is being discovered together.
What impressed me about this collection is that Glück is such a celebrated poet that there is no one left for her to impress. She’s writing with a new eye, in my opinion. Writing with that honesty I love so much. I consider her collected poems to be my favorite book, and it shows: The collection is well worn with brown edges and a softness that comes from opening a book again and again.
There is so much beauty in discovery, and I find that in this collection. I have complete confidence that you will, too.
In Verse: Poetry Collections for a Summer Picnic
Feature image photo by ivan-96 via Getty Images
I don’t know where you are reading this from, but for me, this summer has been hellishly hot. Almost too hot to enjoy the splendors outside, the hostas in my front yard, my neighbor’s fig tree, the bumblebees dug deep into flowers. I hope you have or have planned some time outside on a cooler day, preferably for one of my favorite activities: a summer picnic.
Some of my favorite memories involve a picnic at a local park at one of the shelters on the grounds. Playing music and singing along, taking a date to a special spot, riding my bike through the designated bike paths, then settling down for a light snack and an ice cold drink.
What makes these summer picnics even better is literature. Whether that entails talking about all the new books you are reading or bringing a book to read to yourself or a date, something about reading a book in the sun with birds chirping, surrounded by greenery, is heaven.
Here are five books that I think are perfect for your summer picnic reading. Whether you’re new to poetry or a fanatic, these books will be a way into deeper reflection and conversation with yourself or your date.
Pilgrim Bell by Kaveh Akbar
There is room in the language for being
without language.
This book of poems was highly anticipated by many, including myself. After reading Akbar’s first collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, I was stuck in this place of wanting more. I gifted another copy of the book to a friend and talked about it with other poets. I read it more than once. I listened to him on podcasts talking about his work, which is what I do when I know there is so much more I can learn and understand about poetry and poets.
What is so great about this collection is that it is so personal, and that makes it awe-inspiring for me. The language does that thing that good poetry does, it surprises me. I don’t see the next line coming as I go along, it is beautiful and languid. But there is also loss and struggle in this collection. One of the things that first drew me to Akbar’s poetry was knowing that he was a sober person, like me. I wanted to read poets reflecting on sobriety to prove to myself that I could be a sober poet, that the magic wasn’t in the drink.
In “There Is No Such Thing As An Accident Of The Spirit,” Akbar writes
Show me one beast
that loves itself as relentlessly
as even the most miserable man.
and in those lines, there is truth, yes, but also vulnerability and an understanding of what makes us human. I think about myself when I come to this line, which is kind of the point of it. To love oneself “relentlessly” even at your worst moment, to have an elevated sense of self. I don’t find judgment in this though, only observation.
I come to this book when I want to learn something, when I want to be challenged and swayed in the same note.
Dispatch by Cameron Awkward-Rich
I used to fear my body
was a well anyone could toss
their wishes into
Pulling from the above lines, I think this collection says a lot about who has claim to the body, with the speaker working that out through the poems. Poets are always musing about the body, but this collection is different, as it explores being a person that is both Black and trans.
As I’m sure many of the people reading this understand, historically, those that are Black, trans, and queer have had untold violences enacted on their bodies and their psyches, which I think this book delves into as well. What is the psychological toll of watching another Black person murdered by police, another Black trans woman murdered by an angry man; what do we do with ourselves when we learn of these violences?
There is a poem in this collection that very often gets quoted or passed around on the internet, and for good reason. I think it contains the answer to the questions I’ve just asked. “Meditations in an Emergency” chronicles the way the speaker moves through a day in a perpetual state of heartbreak. The poem ends with the lines:
“Like you, I was raised in the/institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand/on my stupid heart.”
I read these lines but especially the entire poem as a mediation on how it is easy to despair, but it is vital to dream and make a better world. To have faith that things can be better, despite what we know of the world.
Trophic Cascade by Camille T. Dungy
I have loved every cell of her body from the time I could count them
until now
What first drew me to Dungy’s work was her reflections on the natural world. The way she listed and described flowers, greenery, animals, mountains, all seemed so careful and attentive, and soon I sought out more of her work. What I love about Trophic Cascade is how much it contains. From meditations on motherhood, sex, the dwindling natural world, to racial violence, so much intersects in these poems.
The poem “Nullipara” begins:
I have learned love rests on the odd assortments of petals.
pick buttercup, pick sweet pea:
You love me. You love me.
and these reflections on love, whether they be between lovers or between mother and daughter, are also rich with the language of the green world. In Dungy’s poetry, I find that we can find ourselves in nature, that we are not so different from the flowers and the beasts, though we find ourselves to be far superior.
This comparison is evident in the titular poem, where the speaker muses on how becoming a mother changed everything about her world just as the reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone changed everything about that ecosystem.
The more we can learn and cherish about the world around us, the better we will understand ourselves.
New and Selected Poems: Volume Two by Mary Oliver
Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine
If you are going to read one poet in a park, let it be Mary Oliver. Her poetry is widely quoted for a reason. This book is the most “loved” that I own, meaning it is dog-eared, coffee-stained, and post-it noted. Years ago, I found myself trying to connect with the world and turned to Oliver’s poetry as a way to get out of myself and my incessant worrying.
What I think makes Oliver so quotable is she states things that we want to connect so plainly. Where we are struggling to make sense of the world around us, she has a grasp on it and has decided to share that knowledge with us.
In “This World” she writes:
As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs
even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe the stars sing too
and it makes me think that everything has a song, we just don’t know the language in which they sing, the tone and melody cannot be heard with the naked human ear. This wonder is so pertinent in Oliver’s poetry, making her one of the most celebrated of our time.
frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss
To return from paradise I guess they call that
resurrection.
This collection is one of the most talked about and celebrated books of 2021, and for good reason. Seuss takes us into the past, into girlhood and its struggles, with these mesmerizing sonnets that play with the form.
These poems are untitled and untraditional. They are playful yet unflinching in their honesty. When reading this book, I first struggled with some of the poems that lacked punctuation, but once I got a reading groove going, it became so easy to get lost in the world of each poem.
The poems in this collection that got to me the most were those documenting the often brutal life on a farm. In one poem, the speaker tells of a sow giving birth:
“Mama/suffer to rid herself of each fancy body. Pigs have more hair than you’d/ think. Ice-white, and long white lashes.”
This almost angelic description of the mother pig is contrasted with the deaths of two of her children, one of them crushed by her in the night.
The poems are just so honest, about the speaker’s life and her relationship to the literature she is creating. The language isn’t trying to hide behind itself or shield the reader from horrors. It just is, and that kind of writing is something that I’m drawn toward.
If you want to impress your date with your poetry knowledge, I definitely recommend reading this book.
In Verse: Poetry Collections for Pride Month
feature art: Autostraddle // photo: CSA Images via Getty Images
I love Pride month, it’s a time where I feel the most alive, and most able to bask in the glow of lesbians and queer women that I love. Just as I have discussed in regard to music, there are so many talented LGBTQ poets who are gaining recognition in the world now. I feel so blessed to be able to read their work and even talk with them about their work. In a field that was once dominated by the cis straight white male voice, LGBTQ poets and poets of color are finally starting to get their due.
These books I have chosen for In Verse this month are by LGBTQ writers and cover many topics that sometimes do and do not have to do with being queer. Whether they choose to write about queerness or not, these collections are still invaluable reads during Pride month.
Head Off & Split by Nikki Finney
If I touch her there everything about me will be true
This book, a National Book Award winner, is stunning. I truly felt knocked back when reading these poems, especially the ones dealing with the atrocities of the Bush administration. The poems are alive, and moving, like a body of water. They chart the humanity of people who lost their lives during storms, they refuse to look away and so force you to look as well.
Poems like “The Aereole” bring the reader into a more intimate space. The body becomes centered and focused, and desire comes with it.
In “The Clitoris,” the speaker says
In water
desire can rise,
honor sea levels,
ignore land-locked
cartographers.
In water
desire refuses retreat.
and it ties together the embodied and the wild. coming back to water means calling on the storm waters that took so many lives, ruined homes, shifted landscapes for many people and families. What can we make of the desires of the water, does water want to destroy, does it want to have the power to cradle a life in its hands? I think of all this while reading this collection. I don’t come out with any answers, but poetry does not have to provide that for me.
Finney is a fabulous poet who’s work I myself need to delve deeper into. Head Off & Split is a great place to start for newcomers.
Space Struck by Paige Lewis
Lately, I’ve been feeling betrayed by names
The first poem I ever read by Paige Lewis was “You Can Take Off Your Sweater, I’ve Made Today Warm,” a beautiful and celestial poem, and I immediately was in love with their work. What I loved about the poem was that the “you” felt like it was me, and so I was pulled into this strange world, listening to the commands and seeing everything as it was revealed to me.
The poem begins:
“Sit on the park bench and chew this mint leaf.
Right now, way above your head, two men
floating in a rocket ship are ignoring their
delicate experiments, their buttons flashing
red.”
I think starting the poem with a command is what makes me like it so much, it immediately situates you in the world of the poem. It orders you to pay attention. The rest of the poems also grab your attention, but for different reasons. One thing I found in the poems is a refreshing humor I don’t often find in the books I choose to read. Like, one of my favorite lines in a poem:
“I’m the vice president of panic, and the president is missing.”
While there is humor in the poems, there is also a sense of doom, of feeling small and untethered. But also a fear of taking up too much space in a world with disappearing habitats and endangered species. There is so much contained within their words that I find myself in, that resonate so deeply with being a human that also cares deeply about the world around them.
Lewis is a very compassionate poet, you can feel it in the work and in the language. It’s a great collection to read this Pride month for that reason.
Against Heaven by Kemi Alabi
Walk to the store & back without disappearing
This book deals with the sometimes unpretty reality of being a queer person in public, but especially a Black queer person, and all the histories tied up in those identities. The poem “The Lion Tamer’s Daughter Learns the Rules” includes the lines:
“Winner takes
shape.
Loser,
salt!”
and the words are both historical and biblical. There is an admission and recognition that the speaker can never be the “winner” because of history. Because when you’re Black and queer in the world, any stranger can be a death sentence.
So much of life for Black queer people is being asked to choose, which this poem deals with. In some queer spaces there is anti-blackness, and in some Black spaces there is homophobia and transphobia. To hold all of these identities in one body is to be, in a way, always choosing. Unless of course you find the blissful company of other Black queer and trans people.
Alabi’s work is sharp and precise. The poems do what I love in poems: They surprise me. Sometimes there are words I couldn’t imagine that appear next. Just as I’m getting comfortable an in the rhythm of the poem there is a turn. I like that kind of poetry, it leaps off the page, it kind of shakes you by the shoulders.
I’ve been looking forward to this collection of poems since reading Alabi’s work in an anthology of Black poets. It certainly did not disappoint. I recommend this work if you are Black and trans but most importantly, if you are not. There is so much power in reading stories that do not mirror our own. That’s where you can find your humanity.
Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong
I lost it all with my eyes/ wide open
Ocean Vuong will be known as one of the most celebrated writers of our time, and for good reason. Vuong’s work is delicate and seeing, it really reaches into the core of what sticks with us and makes us feel.
Many people might have had their first introduction to his work through prose, specifically On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and that makes sense to me. But I deeply encourage you as a reader to also read Vuong’s poetry.
Night Sky With Exit Wounds, as I read it, deals with generational trauma, queerness, and family. It is a deeply personal work as many poetry collections are, but the language really sets this book apart from others I’ve read.
The poem, “Eurydice” starts with the lines
“It’s more like the sound
a doe makes
when the arrowhead
replaces the day
with an answer
to the rib’s hollowed
hum.”
It is a devastating beginning. It does what good poetry does and imagines a new language for you. It says something plain but in a way that expands the definition. Vuong does this a lot in this book, and I really love that in this work and envy that skill.
Vuong has a great quote about how queerness saved his life that gets passed around almost every pride, and I can’t help but think of it when I read this book, and when I read his newest collection, Time is a Mother. Being your truest self is how you save your own life, the perfect message for the Pride season.
When I Grow Up I Want To Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen
Our kissing would rhyme/ with cardiac arrest
I got introduced to Chen Chen’s work the same way I do many poets: they tweet something smart or cool and I follow, then buy their book. I was drawn in by the title of this collection and bought it almost immediately. Reading through it, I found humor and a biting nature that was so refreshing and welcome.
“Summer Was Forever” covers the pressures of the version of you your family wants you to be and who you are in reality. It also is a poem about young love, young queer love and desire and I find it so beautiful and sweet. Those early queer crushes are always so monumental and I think this poem gets that across so well.
In “Elegy,” the speaker muses:
“Like all scholars in any sort of heaven, I will study
the metaphysics of madness. I will find
that the littler the light, the better it tastes.
On Earth lately, I’ve been looking at everyone
like I love them, & maybe I do. Or maybe I only love
one person, & I’m beaming from it.”
Chen’s poems have that element of surprise that I talked about earlier. It is beautiful and it’s engaging. The music in the poems is so prevalent, even when the poem is wide and stretching and feels a little chaotic. I try to read poems that challenge me, and many of these poems challenged me. It’s always a good sign when you have to stop and google something when you are reading, and I did that many times with this collection.
Chen’s poetry made me feel the way Dunce made me feel, I found myself smiling at some sections and reading with a furrowed brow at others. When a book of poems makes you ride the wave of emotion that way, it has done its job.
In Verse: Poetry Collections That Conjure Spring
Feature image by CSA Images via Getty Images
It’s spring.
There are many poets that come to mind for me when reflecting on spring, and probably some for you as well, but I want to recommend a few that you might not think of.
In these books, you won’t necessarily find flowers and natural scenes, but you will find a general feeling of rebirth, of growth, and of finding peace within the things that trouble us.
I hope you find at least one of these collections to be suitable for you, and whatever your spring may bring.
x
DJ
Odes to Lithium by Shira Erlichman
The side effect of a passion for
waves is dream upon dream where every object is as blue as the sea.
Shira makes me think in spring. I’ve participated in her writing community, In Surreal Life, twice now, and she has crafted a space that is both bright and vivid. With her own wisdom and that of visiting poets, you are always surrounded by the sweetness and rigor of poetry.
This collection of poems is about Shira’s mental health journey, but also love, and also heartbreak, and triumph. There’s so much within the pages. There’s even a bathtub scene with Björk.
As a fellow bipolar person, I think mania can feel like spring, and getting medicated and going to therapy to help manage emotions can feel like I’m losing that manic magic. These poems, the fact that Shira wrote them and all they contain, feel like they disprove that notion. Coming out of the constant manic-depressive roller coaster and into a world where I can feel joy and sadness as wholes and not halves, that’s magic.
The poem “Side Effects II” ends with the penultimate refrain of “I make a plan for tomorrow” and isn’t that spring? To have a dream of tomorrow, to know that another day is waiting for you beyond today’s challenges. There is a life after everything, even the things we thought we couldn’t conquer. This book proves that for me.
High Ground Coward by Alicia Mountain
My desires are berries because they are small and many
We are not to judge books by their covers but I love the cover of this book, it is the sun, it is marigolds and turmeric. That alone makes me think of spring.
The quote above is the first line of the first poem, and that poem ends with the lines
I am the snake and I am the silence,
an animal’s rib picked clean.
It is impossible to encounter a snake in a poem and not think of the Garden of Eden, so I do. Alicia also conjures sin, so I’m doubled with thoughts of the Garden, what it means, who was there, what they did.
The biggest word in this poem is “forgiveness” and makes me think of a God that expects mercy but who is merciless. There are many poems in this book that revisit forgiveness, like “Drive Thru,” one of my favorite poems in the book.
All your desires are sacred.
All you need is to speak them aloud.
I think to forgive is to pass toward spring. Forgiveness not in the biblical sense of absolving evils, but forgiveness in the sense of moving forward yourself, without the extra weight of resentment for wrongs done to us. I say that as someone who holds many grudges, but would like to be a more forgiving person as I have been forgiven many times in my life.
This Strange Land by Shara McCallum
If I am not an ocean
I am nothing
This collection explores motherhood. The acts of being mothered and mothering equally. I read it in college when I was going through a time of reexamination of my relationship with my own mother. It was my first time away from her, and I struggled without the weight of her gaze on me.
My relationship with motherhood is complicated and so colors my relationship with this book, when I read it I’m reminded of the trope of the oppressive mother, the one I grew up with, and it takes everything in me not to cry.
These poems stew, and in her own examination of herself as a mother, McCallum leads me to spring. I think to bring life into this world is the most profound thing, it is a miracle, and we don’t think enough of the mothers we know, especially Black mothers.
In “Dear History” McCallum writes:
so I could not tell
if silence was the sound
darkness made
fall over the earth
or if silence was within me
and I was the dark.
and those lines bring me back to childhood, wondering if I was evil because of the way people treated me. Raising a child is a tender thing, and there are so many ways to fuck up that relationship, but McCallum’s poems really rejoice in pregnancy and motherhood. The imagery she uses to describe it is sweet and bright.
I find spring in that, and also forgiveness which appears in this collection as well. Despite the heavier poems there is still so much that rises in this collection, so much that lifts you up in a world that often does the opposite.
Kingdom Animalia by Aracelis Girmay
Whole years will be spent, underneath these impossible stars,
Kingdom Animalia contains many poems dealing with loss and grief, which at first glance may not bring anything like spring to mind.
I think you could argue that there is spring in grief. I don’t think grief ends in the traditional sense, there isn’t a full stop where you pass over from grieving to not grieving, but there is reprieve. In this collection, those moments of reprieve come when the speaker recognizes the connection between natural life and that of human existence.
In “Dear Minnie, Dear Ms.” Girmay writes
Trust the queen is you
Trust the mud is you,
& the soft, silver afro of the dandelion.
If you trust that you are in everything, even in the natural world, that the people you love that have gone are also in everything, that brings a certain comfort with it. I read this collection for the first time while on vacation, in the Florida sun, so maybe that’s where the idea of spring comes to mind for me. But I do believe it is also in the poems and in the language as well.
Dunce by Mary Ruefle
You loved and were loved
said the bee to the lily.
This collection wins the award for the most times I have smiled while reading a book of poetry. I wanted to end on this one because there is so much love bursting through these pages. So much exaltation and appreciation for life. These poems are funny and comforting, it’s probably one of my favorite collections I’ve read over the last five years.
Ruefle writes of ‘convulsive tenderness” in “Grandma Moses” and orders that
Real snow glitters,
so add glitter to the paint
when painting snow.
I read this book in bed overnight and went to sleep smiling, it is really that good. This book contains one of my favorite lines of a poem: “I have made cautious/inquiries, and finally learned it is/ Thursday.”
I don’t know why that line makes me feel giddy, many lines in these poems do. They just feel me up with lightness and air. They are playful and silly and sometimes there is a pain in them but the prevailing emotion is one of gratitude.
I think the speaker in this poem is thankful for Thursday, for breakfast, for the color purple, which in turn makes me grateful as a reader. this book gave me a new way of seeing and experiencing poetry. I have yet to find another collection that has made me feel like this one, but luckily for me, I can revisit these poems when I want to. And so can you.
I hope the rest of your spring is filled with poetry. I hope you find something beautiful and warm within these poems, the way I did. Happy reading friends!
In Verse: Poetry Collections for Sexual Assault Awareness Month
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Hey.
This month’s In Verse is about something very important to me, and very close to my heart. April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. I am a survivor of sexual assault, and while I have written about it a lot in poems and essays, I won’t go into the details here.
When I was going through therapy in the months and years after the assault, I craved poetry that would help me understand what had happened to me. I wanted someone to tell me what to do, how to behave, how to recover. No healing journey is that simple or universal. My own was messy and often fraught with retraumatization.
I did find solace in poetry though, as I do with almost everything I’ve ever been through. If you are in the months or days or years after an assault and looking for something to help you process how you feel, I hope these poets help you. Whether you’re ready to heal or just want to hear someone else’s story, these poets are experts at examining grief, loss, and recovery.
I hope you find what you need here
x
Dani
The Renunciations by Donika Kelly
What I wanted: a practice that reassured
that what was cracked could be mended
If you are a survivor of abuse, this collection might be one you pick up and put down a lot. In the early days of my healing, someone recommended I read “The Body Keeps The Score,” and because of the intensity of the stories in that book, it took me over a year to read. I read The Renunciations in about a day and a half. I was stunned but also very hungry for these poems. They spoke to things that had never been uttered in me, even silently.
The above quote comes from a poem near the end of the book: “A dead thing that, in dying, feeds the living.” For me, the quote speaks to how after surviving an assault all you want is to know that one day you’ll be okay, that the feeling that you are ruined will subside. That you’ll eventually come back to yourself.
My favorite poem in the collection comes last: “The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings.” The lines
The home I’ve been making inside myself started
with a razing, a brush clearing, the thorn and nettle,
the blackberry bush falling under the bush hog.
speak to the way that survivors often have to “clean house” in the process of healing. You have to get into the thicket of yourself, pull weeds, and get your skin snagged on thorns. It’s a bloody and taxing process, but you do come out on the other side of it.
It’s hard for me to talk about this book without crying. I didn’t make it through it without shedding a few tears. I used to think that was a show of weakness but I’ve come to let tears mean a sort of cleansing for me now. If you find yourself crying while reading this book I hope you can let the tears flow too.
Build Yourself A Boat by Camonghne Felix
am I allowed to disrespect the form.
I first listened to this as an audiobook after listening to an episode of VS with Camonghne Felix talking about this book. I fell in love instantly. I immediately bought a physical copy of the book so I could hold it in my hands and read it. Once I got a physical copy I read it again and again. I often taught it in workshops with teens who were interested in poetry. This book, and the above poem “Mirror Talk” spoke to the power of speaking, of telling the truth.
In “Contouring the Flattening” the speaker states:
but I keep my sob stories to myself. I keep my
smile white and my fists closed. I let survival be
survival.
And those words screamed at me. There is definitely a push to silence survivors when we try to talk about our stories. When we speak up, it’s for attention or money. No one wants to believe us because a world in which there are no rapists is a safe world. It allows people that deny assaults to either 1. not interrogate their own sexual experiences where they may have caused harm and 2. blame the victim and position themselves as strong enough to not be assaulted. This is especially true for Black women who are raped and abused at staggering rates and not believed or silenced when they try to speak up.
While the speaker in these poems struggles with divulging their trauma to the reader, they do allow us a glimpse into the ways they have been hurt. It is an incredibly vulnerable act, and a gracious one. To let someone else hold your pain or see their own similar pain reflected is an act of love. For the self and for the reader.
Hot with the Bad Things by Lucia LoTempio
Listen: if nothing goes to plan, imagine it as bad as possible
From what I as a reader can tell, this book is centered around two events. One is the murder of a woman by her ex-boyfriend in the speaker’s college town. The second is the speaker’s own assault. These two events or often bent or blurred together.
In one of the poems, the speaker asks:
If telling a story is the mark of victory, what does that make me? Maybe power
is like language— hard to nail down and relentless; smiling at a man who is
waving to someone behind you.
For me, this question makes me think that sometimes telling our stories isn’t this big, triumphant thing. Sometimes it is a sore, a painful thing still. I know the first time I wrote about being raped and it got published, it felt like I had let the world in on this incredibly traumatic thing, and for what reason? I knew I had to get it out of me, but why?
This book is just bursting with great language, To write a poem is to manipulate language into something else, usually pretty, even if the subject is ugly. What I like about these poems is that the beauty isn’t what is compelling you to read the poems. It’s the story, the parallel drawn between two women and their lives, not dissimilar.
Reading these poems helped me feel permission for my anger. I felt like I was allowed to have the rage I felt in my body. I was scared of rage, I thought it meant doing harm. Poetry chiefly gives both the speaker and the reader permission to feel in whatever way they see fit. If it is hard to decipher or doesn’t make sense right off.
If you do get your hands on this book, allow it to give you permission as well.
Wound From the Mouth of a Wound by torrin a. greathouse
Forgive me. I cannot find the poem in all of this
Many of these poems deal with the violence forced on trans and disabled people. The stories range from street harassment to sexual assault. These poems are sound, strong, not heavy. I often feel that describing poems as heavy makes them sound like a burden to the reader, which they are not.
In one of the earlier poems in the book “Phlebotomy as Told by the Blood,” we get this rich imagery and language:
Maybe I too am read for all the slaughter carried within me, bastard child of water, lake swelled with rotting fish.
Red is obviously a color very much associated with anger, so for me, this line in particular reads as being colored with rage at the trauma the speaker has been made to endure. There are other poems in the book that reflect this reading to me. Like I said earlier, feeling rage and anger can be scary, but the speaker in these poems seems to carry it well.
These poems also deal with familial abuse, which is a subject that is very tender for me. I crave reading poems like these because they help me to see that I’m not the only person that has been hurt or abused by a parent. It is of course very common, but people don’t talk about it publicly out of fear of “shaming” the parent or parents who did the abusing. There is an impulse to protect the family that I understand all too well.
These poems are sharp and unflinching, they carry a history of abuse that often is not talked about, especially for trans and disabled people. When you live in a body that is not considered the norm, so much of outside people’s fears and insecurities are projected onto you, and often violently. Trans people should not be made to carry this violence delicately, and that’s what I like about these poems, they refuse that notion.
My Heart But Not My Heart by Stephanie Cawley
the end of grief is [ ]. This is my question.
This book isn’t about abuse like the others. It instead deals with the grief around losing a parent. The reason I chose it is because of how it talks about and examines grief. It is very similar to the way I felt about my assault, a kind of loss in its own right.
In the book, the speaker writes:
IIs this what I feel like. Is this my central image, that of an absence flanked
by two feather appendages, two useless mechanisms for flying kept
groundward by the loss of a heart, the musculature of the abdomen, the
shiny beak and eyes.
This meditation comes after the speaker finds the wings of a bird with no body between them. I was struck specifically by “the loss of a heart” because for me, being assaulted was very much about a betrayal. It was always by someone I trusted to not hurt me. I tried to deny what happened to me but the loss still lingered. I had been robbed as something that I couldn’t name or feel or touch any longer.
The image of the wings lingers for me as a reader. To be robbed of flight by forces unknown speaks to the experience of abuse. You are always mourning the self you could have been had you not known the brunt of someone else’s sorrow and rage.
That’s why grief is so poignant, it doesn’t just let you go. It can subside or feel assuaged at some points but it never lets you go. I think this book perfectly illustrates this relationship.
I really like how this book handles grief, and I hope you can connect to it as well.
In Verse: Poetry Collections for Impressing the One You Love
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Hey.
Welcome to the second installment of In Verse. Happy you’re here.
Sometimes we get our hearts broken, and sometimes we fall in love. Being in love is to be full of swell, all bells, and tinkles. At its best, it is enough to make you believe in the good of the world again. Poems are so good for when we fall in love, and when we are trying to impress our new lovers.
I scoured my dense poetry collection and have found five beautiful collections for those of you that are trying to impress a new beau, or trying to keep your everyday love interested.
Like a Beggar by Ellen Bass
Didn’t we shoulder
our way through the cleft in the rock of the everyday
and tear up the grass in the pasture of pleasure?
Bass is a powerhouse of a poet, I love the way she puts words to lesbian love, the thing that has been the muse for many of us. The quote above is taken from the poem “The Morning After” in which the speaker is marveling at her lover as she goes about her day the morning after they’ve been intimate with each other.
The details of the poem, the silk kimono, the lunch being packed, all these things plant you gently into the atmosphere of the poem expertly. What’s satisfying about the speaker in these poems is that she is still madly in love with the love she’s been with for years. The dedication, the appreciation, and the passion are still ever-present. Poems like “Prayer” and “Let’s” paint the picture for the reader that love can still flourish years into a relationship.
I’ve had the pleasure of taking classes with Bass, and she is rigid in her respect for the genre. One of the things I learned from her teachings is that you as the writer are not in charge of the poem. The poem moves through you, you have to set aside your ego and let it come as it sees fit. I think the same can be said for love. You aren’t in charge of the way love comes to you. Yes, you choose love as an action every day, but who your heart clings to and how fast and how long is not in your control.
I imagine you reading this collection to your lover. You both pass the book to the other after reading one poem until the entire book is read. Then you kiss. Then you let whatever comes come.
Remnants of Another Age by Nikola Madzirov
Closeness will escape our hands like a drop
from the body of a fish just caught
This book is not an obvious choice. Mostly because it is chiefly about the effects of empire and war. The poet, Madzirov, is Macedonian and writes in his native language, which you can see printed on the left side of the book.
I think works of translation are important to read. I will try to describe here why I’ve chosen this book to read to someone you love. I believe it is because there is so much tenderness in the book, even in the face of violence, the speaker still talks of falling snow, the vastness of the universe, the small, slippery fish.
In the poem which this quote comes from, “An Involuntary Conquest of Space,” the speaker notes:
When the sun and moon eclipse with a touch
they are still apart, and everything
becomes night, a false falling asleep of the leaves
the shadows, the wild animals.
This poem is a lot about a love that is fading, but there is still so much in the image of the touch. That not-touching touching, that mirage of touch. And there is peace in that. In the false night that it creates.
I imagine you reading this poem to the one you love and talking about the bigger themes in the book, discussing the metaphor, really pushing yourselves to understand the images and allowing that to draw you closer. After all, there’s nothing sexier than someone who may not be a poet but who can engage with poetry in a critical way.
These are poems you want to take care with because they do deal with war. I don’t want to sound like I’m diminishing the work in any way. I believe that even poems that aren’t love poems have a love in them and can be shared with the ones we love.
The Undressing by Li-Young Lee
I loved you before I was born
it doesn’t make sense, I know
In this book is one of Lee’s most celebrated poems, “I Loved You Before I Was Born.” This poem is one of the most beautiful poems I’ve ever read, so touching and surreal. It really captures the grandness of love as the rest of the book grapples with fleeting and selfish love.
The Undressing contains masterful love poems. The speaker in these poems is writing to a lover, writing to a father, writing to so many loves. In “Changing Places In The Fire,” the speaker states:
The body of the beloved
is the lover’s true homeland, she says
and whether or not this is true, whether or not it is believed, there is beauty in it. There is recognition of the power of love and the beloved. How we often run and escape into the bodies of the ones we love, for comfort and for protection.
Like many collections of poetry, The Undressing gives voice to many different topics, but its the complexity of love that rises out and sustains the reader.
Bestiary by Donika Kelly
I am tired of mounting
this hill alone
Sprinkled throughout Bestiary are these love poems that are gut-punching, as I like to refer to them. The quote comes from “Love Poem: Donika” and does see the speaker calling on a lover in the end (Love, how do I gain/ what was lost in winter?)
The first Love Poem that appears is “Love Poem: Chimera” in which the speaker imagines themselves as a beast, the lover as a beast. There is a making in the way we love that can often be destructive or uncontrollable, it can take on a life of its own.
Most of the poets on this list have struck the balance between pain and love. Writing about the things that haunt them alongside the love that keeps them alive. I think Kelly is one of the strongest voices for this in modern poets. It’s just so easy to get lost in the world of her poems. The poems in Bestiary also deal with the trauma of abuse and how that affects the way we love, how we can be cruel to who we love when we haven’t shaken out the sheets where our trauma is laid.
My favorite Love Poem in the book is “Love Poem: Minotaur’ because it addresses the love we have for ourselves, or the love we try to have for ourselves when we’ve been hurt. It’s a poem that makes me cry. So much of the writing in this book is in commune with nature, the good and the ugly. In “Minotaur” there is a gentleness to the nature, to the salt of the sea that seems to nurture the speaker. It’s really profound.
I hope you get this book and read it with your love and take so so so much time with these poems.
Post Colonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz
At night your legs, love, are boulevards
leading me beggard and hungry to your candy house
I did a full review of this book already, so you can get deep into my thoughts there. But I want to mention it again because it is so profoundly loving and lovely.
The above quote comes from “Ode to Beloved’s Hips,” probably the gayest poem ever written. It’s dark, it’s sweet, it’s sexy. I love every beat of it. There are so many poems to the beloved in this book that make you want to fall in love, to touch someone, to be touched.
Diaz is one of my favorite poets and one of my favorite people to learn from as I read her work or attend readings she performs at our listen to interviews she is a part of. I highly recommend her VS interview with Franny Choi and Danez Smith. It made me aroused in the middle of the day and also made me write a poem at work. That’s power.
In “Waist and Sway,” the speaker muses:
Wanting her was so close to prayer—
I should not. But it was July,
and in a city where desire means, Upstairs
we can break each other open,
the single blessing I had to give was Mouth
so gave and gave I did.
I’m a little flushed just from typing that! These poems are so rich, they are truly a mouthful. They’ll make you tingle. Which is why you should read them to someone you love, so you can both feel that spark together, and then feast on each other in whatever way it makes sense to you.
In Verse: Poetry Collections for Broken Hearts
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If you have followed my writing on Autostraddle, you know the one subject I feel the most comfortable writing about is poetry. I read it, I write it, I listen to it, I consume it so many ways, through so many avenues. More than that, I love listening to poets talk about what they have said and written. I don’t demand that they explain themselves to me, but I love when they do, I love when they muse and wander.
There’s nothing like being punched in the gut by a poem. That punch can be devastating, for love, for grief, for sheer exploration. There is no other mode of expression like poetry. I find myself delighted at every new collection coming out, pining after books for months on end before they release.
People come to poetry for a number of reasons, but I think one of the main reasons is the desire to not feel alone. To know that someone once waded in the same murky waters as you, to feel like less of an outlier because of your own experiences. People have been where you are before you, and fortunately for us, some of those people were poets.
This new series, In Verse, is about bringing you the collections of poetry that meet you where you are at. This first installment is for the person dealing with a broken heart.
Pale Colors in a Tall Field by Carl Phillips
you broke it, now wear it broken
Pale Colors in a Tall Field is a collection of poems that I listened to after following Phillips on twitter for awhile. Phillips is a prolific poet, with works that have inspired other LGBTQ poets who’s work I’ve followed for a few years. I believe this book was the first one I read from him, and its full of gems. The quote that appears above is taken from the poem “Dirt Being Dirt,” a poem that is more about the self than a lover, but it still pertains to the way we can break our own hearts.
In another poem, “Since When Shall Speak Of It No More,” Phillips writes:
“I’m/no one’s horse. I’m not what waves like a/bit of ocean down/and to either side of its brindled neck/ I’m not a thing I know.”
Again, we’re talking more about the self here, but there’s something so desperate in the line “I’m not a thing I know.” Which, for me, rings with such clarity because it speaks to the way we betray ourselves in relationship with others. I recommend this collection because so much of the poems are deeply grounded in the self, and sometimes, no matter the nature of your heartbreak, it can be good to stay in that realm and really learn about who you are, why you feel the things you feel, and what you can do with that feeling.
Geography III by Elizabeth Bishop
How many years did I
beg it, implore it, not to break?
I did a report on Elizabeth Bishop in college and spent a lot of time with her poems. What struck me about her writing was her sense of place, and the way she made sure the reader also had a deep sense of place. Not only that we could see what she was seeing, but how that sight enabled us to be grounded in our own realities even more.
Most of the poems in Geography III have to do with place. Bishop was a well traveled poet, spending time in Nova Scotia, Massachusetts, and Brazil, among others. The excerpt I shared above is from the poem “Crusoe in England,” a long persona poem that references Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. The lines that I quote are not about the heart, but the poem itself speaks to a kind of displacement, and what is heartbreak if not displacement?
I mostly recommended this collection because it contains one of her most famous poems, “One Art.” The repetition of the line “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” has become famous for its poignancy. Heartbreak is as much loss as it is displacement, and to think that loss is something that can be mastered suggests a sort of control over something that makes us feel absolutely uncontrollable. The final stanza of the poem mentions a “you” that is lost, which could be a lover or a friend. Either reading carries weight, losing as a disaster and an art. When you’re heart is broken, it helps to remember other heartbreaks you have survived just as Bishop reflects on other losses in the poem. Even when we are inconsolable, we survive.
mad girl’s crush tweet by Summer Jade Leavitt
(you are washing old words
right out of me)
A lot of my love for this collection comes from the first poem in it, titled “(carol)”. The ending lines:
(You’re like my mother)(you give birth to me)
(you give birth to me) (I forget that)
(I carry your baby) (Would’t it be great
if I carried your baby)
absolutely stun me. This is a book full of longing and unrequited affection. About being a lover to someone that doesn’t know how to care for you. It’s complex and beautiful. the poems in it are awash with that longing. It’s a book that will make you reflect on all the lovers in your life, especially the ones you would have given anything for, the ones who were probably withholding but who you pined after anyway.
In heartbreak, there is a time to wallow, to wade in it. I think these poems wade in it. Not every collection of poems leads us to a point of resolution and repair. I like when there is no answer, only the truth of experience. The lines that conclude this book align the speaker with a prophet. The speaker emerges as prophetess, but even in that power, she is still able to feel pain and be hurt. There is such humanity in these poems that often gets lost in other books. There is that aforementioned desire to emerge unperturbed and “healed.” But sometimes all a poet can show you is a snapshot of the journey — that is often the most real thing of all.
Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds
Had a sow twin, had a reap twin
Had a husband, could not keep him
This one is probably an obvious choice if you know poetry, are a poet, or have heard of Sharon Olds before. It’s quintessential reading if you’ve ever been divorced or had your heart broken in a major way. “Left-Wife Goose” is written like a nursery rhyme, but the repetition of “had a husband, could not keep him” is a visceral gut punch.
Stag’s Leap reads as both linear and nonlinear, charting the emotional and physical course of a divorce, starting in winter and ending in a section titled “Years Later.” The emotional life of these poems are rich, making it a famous collection that many people arrive at to be devastated. At least, that’s how I came to the book, I heard it would devastate me and after a string of failed romances I was ready to be devastated.
The final lines of “Known to Be Left” call that to mind:
“But look! I am starting to give him up!
I believe he is not coming back. Something
has died, inside me, believing that,
like the death of a crone in one twin bed
as a child is born in the other. Have faith,
old heart. What is living, anyway,
but dying.”
The final lines call on this regenerative loop, if living is dying, than dying is living, and so on and on its goes ad infinitum. But the call toward faith is one that we need when our hearts are broken. If we live in a cycle of living and dying, we have to have faith when we are dying that living is on the way.
One Above One Below by Gala Mukomolova
A year is a skeleton made of twelve bones
Many of the poets on this list are LGBTQ, which is in part why I chose them. I also chose them because LGBTQ poets have a way of thinking and writing about heart break in a way that resonates a little more. Maybe that’s because I’m a dyke and I like to think about how other people who identify similar to me have gotten through their private and public heartbreaks. These poems, the first poem in particular, jump out to me because of their voraciousness, their sexiness, their pain. Mukomolva writes
“Dear Would-be Wife, I wish for you a wound as un-healing as the one in me.”
The naming of the Would-be Wife indicates a severance here, and earlier in the poem, the speaker announces that “once I was as good as married.” once being a crucial word in the poem. The hurt enacted by this Would-be Wife has manifested as a call for vengeance.
The figure of the year is very important in these poems. In a later poem, we see:
“When your year-long lover who will not hold your hand in public calls you
too eager, erase eagerness from your heart. Put your phone away.”
The year as a milestone for a romantic relationship, the year as a skeleton of something long dead. It’s ghastly and haunting.
I chose this book of poems because it resonated with an old heartbreak I thought I had gotten over. There’s so much desire pulsating through these poems, a whole life inside them. There of course is heartbreak, but there is also the call of the body. I believe in pleasure, and so do these poems, suggesting there is something on the other side of heartbreak. Even if it’s just a fling with another hot poet.
There is a poem for everything, I firmly believe that. Sometimes, when your heart is broken all you want to feel is that brokenness, sometimes you want to push through and reach toward a different emotion. I hope you find that in these books I’ve selected.