Staff Picks: Celebrate National Poetry Month!

Mon, 03/27/2023 - 3:28pm by eapearce

Every year, April is National Poetry Month. We like to highlight some of our favorite collections of poetry on displays, through programs, and in the newsletter! Read on for some recommendations of excellent, varied collections of poetry that you can check out from AADL. And stop by our Downtown Library throughout the month of April to browse several staff-curated displays with more great poetry recommendations. 

Musical Tables, by Billy Collins | Request Now

Beloved American poet Billy Collins has been writing for decades. His newest collection, Musical Tables, just published this year, features poems in a new style that he has become interested in: extremely short poems. Many are just three or four lines, evoking simple feelings or fleeting moments in stark, relatable words. Many are wry or witty, as with “The Code of the West”: Say what you want/about me/but leave the horse/I rode in on out of it. Others still manage to be heartbreaking and deeply thoughtful, despite their brevity, as in “Divorce”: No more heavy ball, just the sound/of the dragged chain/with every other step. Collins was the Poet Laureate of the US from 2001 to 2003 and later the New York State Poet from 2004 through 2006. Born in 1941, he has published close to twenty volumes of poetry over the course of his prolific career.

Something Bright, Then Holes, by Maggie Nelson | Request Now

Published back in 2007, Nelson’s Something Bright, Then Holes continues to offer readers the opportunity to meditate on love and loss and the spaces in between those two most powerful of feelings. The title of the collection comes from the way one of Nelson’s friends, critically injured in a car accident, described to Nelson how their sight was affected after the crash. Nelson extrapolates this description into how her own recent heartbreak at the time of writing many of the poems felt after the brightness of love and infatuation. Many of the poems are set along the dirty urban canal that Nelson often walks along, thinking. While it may not seem like a particularly poetic setting, in fact, it offers an oddly fitting backdrop for the cycles of loss and renewal that the poems evoke. 

The Hurting Kind, by Ada Limón | Request Now

Current US Poet Laureate Limón published her most recent collection, The Hurting Kind, in 2022. Independent publisher Milkweed, which published the collection, describes the questions the poems ask: “What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world’s pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own?” Because loss is so universal an experience many of Limón’s poems touch on it, but they also resonate with delight in the natural world and in the relationships that we have with others, and with ourselves. The Hurting Kind received many accolades when it was published, including making it onto a wide variety of “best books of 2022” lists. 

Alive at the End of the World, by Saeed Jones | Request Now

Saeed Jones uses his poetry to critique expectations about Blackness, sexuality and socioeconomics in American society. Though often funny, there is a deep undercurrent of grief throughout this collection, which readers sense Jones himself cannot escape as a Black man living in the United States. Still, the undercurrent of Alive at the End of the World is truly the first word of the collection’s title: the idea that we are all alive, moving through the world, that every day life and work and love go on despite trials, challenges, and unexpected hardships. Jones is also the author of a previous book of poetry, Prelude to Bruise, and a 2019 Memoir, How We Fight For Our Lives, which won the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction.