Grief Poetry

Celebrating James Tate’s work as it transcends convention, time, and everything that tells us, “No, you can’t do that,” Hell, I Love Everybody gives us the poet at his best, his most intimate, hopeful, inventive, and brilliant. John Ashbery called Tate the “poet of possibilities,” and this collection records forays into possibilities for American poetry’s future. With a foreword by Terrance Hayes, it is sure to give listeners new and old a lasting collection of favorites.

After the death of her husband, Jay, Nancy wrote poems as a way of expressing her pain and dealing with her overwhelming loss.

I recorded this the day after we lost one of our beloved pets. Rainbow Bridge is the theme of several works of poetry written in the 1980s and 1990s that speak of an other-worldly place where pets go upon death, eventually to be reunited with their owners. It brings a lump to my throat, and often a tear to my eye but also comfort as I recall good times with Pongo.

Innermost is a collection of both free-verse and fixed-verse poetry written over a period of half a decade about every emotion felt inside the human heart. These poems will transport you to a whole other world within the innermost depths of the human soul.

When I lost my brother suddenly in September 2018, I felt as though my world had ended. Grief brings so many raw emotions, and trying to move on from a loss like that is truly a powerful and difficult journey. In this collection, I bring you along on that journey with me, opening my soul and sharing all the deep emotions that I felt at each step of the way. These poems are honest, and express how I experienced the stages of grief, and I hope through my words you can find something to connect to.

Wraith Like Me is the journey of a woman from childhood through her mid-30s. These strange poems chronicle her experiences with trauma, abuse, anxiety, and a bottomless rage. The words begin the trails of healing, hope, and self-acceptance (a story that will continue in future poetry collections).

With Love, Grief and Fury contains love poems, for people and the planet; grief poems brimming with compassion, sharing tears and mourning what was and contemplating what could be; and poems of fire and fury that will kick some ass, tell the truth and inspire change and hope. Over thirty years after she first stormed the UK poetry scene, the trailblazing and award-winning writer Salena Godden has produced her most audacious and definitive collection to date. Like a big sister’s arm around your shoulder, With Love, Grief and Fury is important and nourishing for the soul.

This poetry collection deals with life, death, love, and the loss of a beloved, albeit complicated, parent.

A collection of Ella Wheeler Wilcox poems that I found to be a comforting distraction during the grieving process. Poems about death, life, existing, and coping.

In these exquisitely rendered poems, people fall in and out of love, in and out of religious belief and in and out of accepting the distance between their imagined lives and the lives they live. They look back as much as forward and pick mercilessly at the open wounds of failed relationships. They inhabit geographies that are both their emancipators and captors. And they find joy, or succumb to sorrow, amid life’s inescapable ephemerality and fragility.

"Through Grief's Tender Heart" is a heartfelt exploration of grief, offering a compassionate collection of narratives, reflections, and poems that delve into the depths of loss and healing. This book provides a sincere and intimate look at the grieving process, resonating with anyone who has faced the pain of loss. It is a literary embrace that explores the myriad emotions of grief, from the initial shock to the gradual journey toward healing.

In pursuit of his brother, a man traverses the fantastical and grotesque landscape of Hell, pondering their now fractured relationship.

Quietly reflective, the beautifully written poems in this slim volume offer a welcome respite from the noisy insistence of modern life. The language, now simple and direct, now rich in associations, double-meanings, and imagery, has its own natural rhythm and appeal regardless of subject and rhyme.

This is a book of poetry to encourage people that have been through heartbreak, pain, grief and the ending of a relationship. It's honest, real talk about the feelings we have after experiencing this sort of death after losing someone we have deeply loved.

Steph Catudal is beloved for her poignant meditations on loss, uncertainty, and illness, and the raw, wise reflections of her “brilliant, unflinching, lyrical” (Matt Haig) New York Times bestselling memoir Everything All At Once. Now, Catudal brings her trademark wisdom and strong lyrical voice to bear in her first collection of verse, delving into the challenging yet often rich parts of life people often lack the courage to face.

I wrote most of these poems when I was in a bad place, a dark state of mind that eased its hold when I wrote them down, and so these poems were created, they maybe disturbing for most and very intense, but if you have been in a dark place too, you may understand.

Attending to one's mother while she succumbs to cancer is no easy feat as this poetry chapbook will attest to.

Stephen C. Pollock's poetry collection Exits explores the beauty and frailty of life, the cycles of nature, and the promise of renewal. Musical and multilayered, the poems in Exits have drawn comparisons to the poetry of Seamus Heaney and the sonnets of William Shakespeare.

With electrifying boldness and fearlessness of vision, Holland-Batt confronts what it means to be mortal in an astonishing and deeply humane portrait of a father’s Parkinson’s Disease, and a daughter forged by grief. Opening and closing with startling elegies set in the charged moments before and after a death, and fearlessly probing the body’s animal endurance, appetites and metamorphoses, The Jaguar is marked by Holland-Batt’s lyric intensity and linguistic mastery, along with a stark new clarity of voice.

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to the poem Femicide: When Friendship Meets Brutality today.