Family Poetry

Henry has been deaf from an early age. He's intelligent and aware of language, but by age six, he has decided it's not safe to speak to strangers. When the time comes for him to start school, he is labeled "unteachable." Because his family has very little money, his parents and older sister, Molly, feel powerless to help him. Henry's sent to Riverview, a bleak institution where he is misunderstood, underestimated, and harshly treated. Victor, a conscientious objector to World War II, is part of a Civilian Public Service program and arrives at Riverview to serve as an attendant in 1942.

In his award-winning memoir Free Lunch, Rex Ogle’s abuela features as a source of love and support. In this companion-in-verse, Rex captures and celebrates the powerful presence a woman he could always count on—to give him warm hugs and ear kisses, to teach him precious words in Spanish, to bring him to the library where he could take out as many books as he wanted, and to offer safety when darkness closed in.

A girl discovers a connection between her home in the Philippines and her new home in the U.S. through a special garden in this middle grade novel that celebrates nourishment and growth. Twelve-year-old Isabel is the new kid in her San Francisco middle school. It’s the first time in many years that she’ll be living with her mother again. Mama's job in the US allowed Isabel and her grandparents to live more comfortably in the Philippines, but now Isabel doesn't really know her own mother anymore.

This anthology of twenty poems was Yeats's first major collection after he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923.

Following in the footsteps of such category killers as Milk and Honey and Whiskey Words & a Shovel I, Fariha Róisín's poetry book is a collection of her thoughts as a young, queer, Muslim femme navigating the difficulties of her intersectionality. Simultaneously, this compilation unpacks the contentious relationship that exists between Róisín and her mother, her platonic and romantic heartbreaks, and the cognitive dissonance felt as a result of being so divided among her broad spectrum of identities.

The first collection of poetry from Bunmi Laditan, best-selling author of Confessions of a Domestic Failure and creator of The Honest Toddler, capturing the honesty, rawness, sheer joy, and total madness of motherhood. With the compassion and wit that have made her a social media sensation among mothers around the world, Bunmi Laditan puts into evocative and relatable words what so many of us feel but can’t quite express.

The Only Worlds We Know is a nuanced and tactile look at both sobriety and what comes after. Patient meditations on loss and the land where the people we love live and are also buried.

Lloyd Jones was seven years old the first time he climbed high into a grandstand to watch rugby with his father. The experience was baptismal. From his new elevated perspective Jones believed he could see everything that mattered – a field of play that rolled out, green with promise, from suburban New Zealand to the wider world. The grandstand is a guiding metaphor for these questing narrative poems that reach back into childhood and forward into the life of a writer constantly experimenting with form and voice.

In her legendary career, artist and activist Nikki Giovanni has established herself as a writer who can entertain and challenge, and a voice for social justice who can inform and inspire in times of national crisis. Controversial, revolutionary, ethereal, or illuminating, her poems about race, Black lives, violence, gender, and family move readers of all ages and backgrounds.

Anna Dewdney's Llama Llama is growing up, but he still loves to play with all his toys! When Mama Llama says it's time to clean up, Llama responds like any child more interested in playing than cleaning...by ignoring her! But Mama has an imaginative response of her own. What if she never cleaned? What would happen then? Well, Llama Llama is going to find out! Here is a truly funny take on a childhood chore that all children will relate to and laugh at! And it is sure to be helpful to get kids cleaning up!

"Enoch Arden" is a long narrative poem that is built on a theme that has been widely explored in literature and on film. A man is separated from his family due to shipwreck and marooned on an island. After several years of absence from his home, it is assumed that he has died, and his wife remarries and starts a new family. After 10 years, the man finally makes his way home and has to deal with the trauma of discovering his wife and family happily established in a new relationship.

This collection of pieces that I have written is, in my opinion, some of my best writing thus far in my short endeavor into being an author. They are poems and quotes about relationships that I have had over my lifetime, and though most I will never see or hear from again, they still are and will always be very much alive in my ink and memories. With that being said, there are always those that stand out in my heart, mind, and soul more than all the others and today are a very big part of my life in one way or another.

A little over a year of living with bipolar type one. I ended a year off of medications deeply in love and with a stay in jail for joy-riding and fleeing and eluding. My family suffered, my friends suffered, and I suffered. This is a journal starting after my stay in jail. I respond to the journal entries all the following year, surprised mostly by the degree of my mental illness. This is not a self-help audiobook, and I struggle most of the time, not really coming up with many good solutions to my issues. Nothing about the past couple years has been easy.

In What Lies Within by CBA best-selling author Karen Ball, something is missing from the life of the successful owner of Justice Construction Co. But Kyla Justice doesn’t realize what it is until she begins building a center for inner-city kids. She’s now undeterred by supply problems or gang opposition. She won’t be stopped by her boyfriend’s suggestion to sell her businessand marry him. And she certainly won’t be sidetracked by that disagreeable Rafael Murphy.

It is May 1634 when Jonathan and Elizabeth Pratt arrive in the Massachusetts Bay Colony from England. They are unaware of the beauty and dangers that they will encounter in this wilderness as they embark on their journey of faith.

In the collection of prose and poetry Letter to My Wife & Other Tales, his sequel to the successful The Time of Our Lives: Memories and Fantasies of a Blissful Nonagenarian, 96-year-old Elliot Schubert etches incisive portraits of the family members, friends and colleagues. These are the stories of those who helped shape his extraordinary journey through the 20th and 21st centuries as an athlete, Naval officer, scholar, scientist, writer, husband, and father.

A world-bending, lyrically rich poetry collection that reimagines the U.S.-Mexico border as both a real place and a living simulation—and tells the story of a pair of siblings trapped between the two.

"How can I teach a prayer / I only know how to recite?" "America, whose death / didn't you come from?" These are some of the questions that poet Joshua Gottlieb-Miller wrestles with in his beautiful, gripping new collection. By turns experimental and documentary, Dybbuk Americana draws out the questions around Jewish identity in the United States, and what it means to pass on Jewish identity to one's child. This hybrid text draws on art, mysticism, and history, taking the dybbuk, a figure from Jewish folklore, as its central metaphor.

Poetry created for Astrid, my grandchild.

Sometimes in your life, you meet someone special that changes everything you thought you knew about love. They may be younger or older from different religions or races. It does not matter how, why, or when. They bring a smile to your face when you had none before lighting up the darkness that you're living in. Your heart will race and your mind opens up to the distinct possibilities of anything you may have wished for or dreamed of.