Family Poetry

In this middle grade novel-in-verse by the Newbery Medal-winning and Coretta Scott King Honor Award-winning author of The Crossover, soccer, family, love, and friendship take center stage as 12-year-old Nick learns the power of words when he wrestles with problems at home, stands up to a bully, and tries to impress the girl of his dreams. Helping him along are his best friend and sometimes teammate, Coby; and The Mac, a rapping librarian who gives Nick inspiring books to read.

The Life of a Wannabe Mogul: Mental Disarray, Bella Thorne’s collection of illuminating and inspiring poems chronicles her personal struggles, relationships, and wild-child lifestyle, all with her trademark wit and wisdom.

She Walks in Beauty draws on poetry’s eloquent wisdom to ponder the many joys and challenges of being a woman. Caroline Kennedy has divided the collection into sections that signify to her the most notable milestones, passages, and universal experiences in a woman’s life, and she begins each of these sections with an introduction in which she explores and celebrates the most important elements of life’s journey.

Confronting loss, historical intersections with race and family, and the threshold between childhood and adulthood, Smith gathers courage and direction from the many disparate selves encountered in these poems, until, as she writes, "I was anyone I wanted to be."

As people, we are capable of both love and hate; amazement and disgust; fun and misery. So why do we live in a world that is constantly telling us to hate, both ourselves and others? We are told constantly to be repulsed by our own bodies, bodies that let us laugh and sweat and eat toast, amongst other activities; to be ashamed of pleasure; to be embarrassed by fun. In this collection, Hollie McNish brings her inimitable style to the question of what have been taught to hate, and if we might learn to love again.

Performance poet Sabrina Benaim presents Depression & Other Magic Tricks, a collection of poems that explores themes of mental health, love, and family. It is a documentation of struggle and triumph, a celebration of daily life and of living.

There were many things that Hollie McNish didn't know before she was pregnant. How her family and friends would react; that Mr Whippy would be off the menu; how quickly ice can melt on a stomach. These were on top of the many other things she didn't know about babies: how to stand while holding one; how to do a poetry gig with your baby as a member of the audience; how drum'n'bass can make a great lullaby. But Hollie learned. And she's still learning, slowly.

From brave and bold to creative and clever, Emily Winfield Martin's rhythmic rhyme expresses all the loving things that parents think of when they look at their children.

Twelve-year-old Victoria Reeves is all set for her “First Magnificent Summer with Dad,” even though it’s been more than two years since she last saw him. She’s ready to impress him with her wit, her maturity, and her smarts—at least until he shows up for the long road trip to Ohio with his new family, The Replacements, in tow. But that’s not the only unpleasant surprise in store for Victoria. As Victoria captures every moment of her less than magnificent summer in her journal, she discovers that the odds are stacked against her in the contest-no-one-knows-is-a-contest.

Tears For My Father: Outlaw Thoughts & Poems explores not only Madsen's remarkable life and experiences in and out of Hollywood, but also his familial influences that have participated in crafting and shaping him, including thoughts on his father; his mother and the rumor that he was born without a left hand; ghosts, whiskey, and payback; Robert Mitchum, James Cagney, and "sensitive sons of bitches"; the mentality of actors and growing up to be a man; his first audition; drunken behavior; epic drinkers; and much, much more.

I Had A Brother Once is a brilliant, genre-defying work - both memoir and epic poem - about the struggle for wisdom, grace, and ritual in the face of unspeakable loss. Adam is forced to re-remember a brother he thought he knew and to reckon with a ghost, confronting his unsettled family history, his distant relationship with tradition and faith, and his desperate need to understand an event that always slides just out of his grasp.

What is Autism? is a collection of poems that explains what Autism is as well as other things associated with it. The book takes a lot of information and condenses and simplifies it making it easier for people to understand. You can use this book to help with autism training.

Hush, Little Bunny is a heartwarming, lyrical love letter from a papa bunny to his little one - from David Ezra Stein, Caldecott Honor-winning creator of Interrupting Chicken and Leaves. "Hush Little Baby" is a lullaby that parents have sung to their children for generations. Now Caldecott Honor winner David Ezra Stein has reimagined the classic featuring an irresistible papa bunny and his little one.

Radiant and tender, My Baby First Birthday is a collection that examines innocence, asking us who gets to be loved and who has to deplete themselves just to survive. It's about existence and nonexistence, about being born - without consent. Jenny Zhang writes about accepting pain, about the way we fetishize womanhood and motherhood, and reduce women to their violations, traumas, and body parts.

In this third book from Maddox, the reigning king of Internet satire delivers a collection of humorous, unapologetic essays in the same voice that propelled him into comedic stardom. With all-new material, F-ck Whales doesn't fail to deliver on his personal brand of satire, complete with self-promotion, petty rants, and brilliant essays on anything and everything Maddox deems worthy of his ire.

“Marigold was absorbed in her book; she had gotten as far as the V.” So begins Marigold and Rose, Louise Glück’s astonishing chronicle of the first year in the life of twin girls. Imagine a fairy tale that is also a multigenerational saga; a piece for two hands that is also a symphony; a poem that is also, in the spirit of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, an incandescent act of autobiography. Here are the elements you’d expect to find in a story of infant twins—but more than that, Marigold and Rose is an investigation of the great mystery of language and of time itself.

Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes, in the first powerfully elegiac section, a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the US border with Mexico. The poems of the third section - a moving transcription of Gander’s efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer’s - rise like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation.

Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility—“What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?”—and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: “Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal.” And still Limón shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives.

You gotta know the rules to play the game. Ball is life. Take it to the hoop. Soar. What can we imagine for ourselves? What if we were the star players, moving and grooving through the game of life? What if we had our own rules of the game to help us get what we want, what we aspire to, what will enrich our lives? The Playbook is intended to provide inspiration for kids ages 10 and up to help them succeed on and off the court.

From one of the most-viewed spoken word poets of all time, a poetry collection exploring themes of loneliness, anxiety, and longing, while also celebrating the gifts that come with being alone - the chance to live on your own terms, to learn to love yourself without any distractions, and to become your own biggest champion.