Family Poetry

Peter Coyote’s first collection of poetry takes us on a whirlwind tour of an eclectic and exciting life as an actor and Zen Buddhist priest, meandering from love affairs to marriage to divorce to the '60s to psychedelic spirituality and beyond. Written over several decades, these poems sound like a collage, each piece distinct and contributing to a cohesive lyric narrative.

Across three sequences, Joshua Bennett’s new book recalls and reimagines social worlds almost but not entirely lost, all while gesturing toward the ones we are building even now, in the midst of a state of emergency, together. Bennett opens with a set of autobiographical poems that deal with themes of family, life, death, vulnerability, and the joys and dreams of youth.

This poetry collection is extraordinary in the way it interweaves the author’s emotions towards family, partner, and life. It will find its way into the ears of the listeners, and open up a whole new world.

Frank, unsparing, often violent, and disturbing, these poems speak in the voice of a young man trying to navigate the city he loves as he lives in the long shadow of its decline with a sense of grace and hope. With the city of Baltimore as his backdrop, accomplished poet, author, and editor Dean Bartoli Smith offers a wrenching examination of our troubled attachments to place and the deepest wounds of the American psyche.

From “Portrait of the artist, gaslit” to “Portrait of the artist’s ancestors” to “Portrait of the artist reading a newspaper,” the poems in Harbinger reflect the many facets of the artistic self as well as the myriad influences and experiences that contribute to that identity.

From a visionary writer praised for her captivating work on Black history and experience, comes a poetry collection exploring personal, political, and artistic frontiers, journeying from her family's history as "Afropioneers" in the American West to shimmering glimpses of transcendent, liberated futures.

"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.

Te soñé es un poema de amor, un testimonio del regalo que cada niño es para quienes lo cuidan y del vínculo inquebrantable entre ellos. Te soñé da voz a los sentimientos tan difíciles de expresar y tan importantes de compartir. La galardonada y querida autora de libros infantiles, Justine Avery, expresa pensativa y reverentemente los sentimientos detrás de dar la bienvenida a un niño a nuestras vidas, ya seamos abuelos, padres adoptivos, padrastros, hermanos o cualquier otra persona bendecida con un niño querido.

I am open; these words are my sutures. Shades is an attempt to reconcile who I am as a man, with a society that seems to be fluctuating and struggling at every turn. I show my encounters with family, religion, queerness, heartbreak, COVID-19, and politics. This is a look at my life in 2021, shown through poetry.

Walking Gentry Home tells the story of Alora Young’s ancestors, from the unnamed women forgotten by the historical record but brought to life through Young’s imagination; to Amy, the first of Young’s foremothers to arrive in Tennessee, buried in an unmarked grave, unlike the white man who enslaved her and fathered her child; through Young’s great-grandmother Gentry, unhappily married at fourteen; to her own mother, the teenage beauty queen rejected by her white neighbors.

Fans of Colm Tóibín’s novels, including The Magician, The Master, and Nora Webster, will relish the opportunity to re-encounter Tóibín in verse. Vinegar Hill explores the liminal space between private experiences and public events as Tóibín examines a wide range of subjects—politics, queer love, reflections on literary and artistic greats, living through COVID, and facing mortality.

The poems of Dear October chronicle the evolution of the natural world and a daughter caring for her mother during the last year of her life. Months of the final year act as the scaffolding for the collection as they reflect on the 12 moons. The spirit of home, family, and mother-daughter relationship intertwine with the diversity of culture and ecology in Northern New Mexico.

Our experiences are arrows on our backs to draw upon in the heat of life’s journey. They will always be with us. To collect arrows is to live in gratitude for every step along the way. No matter what happens, we’ll always have a quiver of experience and our spirit as a bow. Each day is a memory we get to shape and craft. We’re sharpening the arrows to stow on our backs with every second we appreciate life for the gift that it is. The beauty of California and the Pacific Northwest serve as the backdrop of this uplifting and often humorous tale.

D. Nurkse’s immigrant parents met on a boat out of Europe in 1940; he was a child of the generation whose anxieties were forged in the shadow of Hiroshima and the aftermath of WWII. His poems extend that child’s dignified ignorance into an open encounter with the cataclysms of the latter twentieth century and with family structures.

The title poem, a series of sonnet-sized Zoom meetings - a classroom, a memorial service, an encounter with a new baby in the family - finds humor and pathos in our age of social distancing and technology-induced proximity. Salter shows too how imagination collapses time and space: In “Island Diaries”, the pragmatist Robinson Crusoe meets on the beach a shipwrecked dreamer from an earlier century, Shakespeare’s Prospero.

Babies to age seven love this rhyming drawing book. A perfect gift! "I hug you when a baby with your cute cuddly self, so soft and sweet-smelling and cuter than an elf." Hugs grabs kids' attention, and they love hearing the poem that matches their age.

Honeybee is a collection of raw, honest, and intimate conversations with oneself that lead you on a journey of reflection. By writing truthfully about the intricacies of her experiences, Rideau’s first collection of work is one that will speak to the very depths of those who read it, inspiring a will to question, heal and empower.

In this radiant debut collection, Cathryn Shea constructs a world as delicate, colorful, and sharp as an autumn leaf yet as stable as the ancient tree it’s fallen from. Harnessing evocative imagery that illuminates the inherent spirituality within even the frailest human gestures, these poems reach across generations, genders, and cultures to give voice to the kind of unabashed gratitude that lights up our darkest edges.

A letter to my child about their beauty. Reflecting their spirit, voice, laugh and more in the wonders of nature. We are nature. I think its important to notice the beauty in the sound of rain or a wild flower, while also understanding that beauty is them. I did my best in this poem to express how much they mean to me and how much they are loved and admired.

From 2013 to 2019, J. Anton Davis served as a North Carolina Magistrate Judge in Raleigh, North Carolina. From his ninth-floor courtroom in the towering Wake County Justice Center, he performed nearly 6,000 civil wedding ceremonies. While there are countless stories Davis could share from his tenure as a magistrate, Love Is focuses on the most memorable aspect of the many ceremonies he officiated: Love.