Grief Poetry

Take a look into the mind of the undead bohemian Jack Townson, an artist who found himself trapped in a world of nightmares, a life without sunlight, never to feel the warmth of day or the permanence of true love. Jack dives inward to put pen to paper, filling each minute with forbidden secrets—from the loves he's lost, to the friends he's made, to the villains who have plagued him, and the dreams of tomorrow. Step into the shoes of a child of dusk trying to find his way back into the dawn.

indigo is the joy and lament of a father, theologian, human being, fashioning new ideas about the divine within the painful loss of his daughter, within the constraints of his own intelligence, within the constraints of what religion had been telling him his whole life—some of which was good and some of which wasn't.

Following on his exquisite Stones, Young's new collection shapes stories of familial and familiar love, inspired in part by other lives. A central sequence, “The Two-Headed Nightngale,” is spoken by Millie-Christine McCoy, the famous conjoined African American “Carolina Twins.” Born into slavery and ill treatment as a “freak” sensation in 1851 and later free women, their alto and soprano voices harmonized, and Young's poem explores their evolving selfhood and self-understanding: “As one we sang, /we spake— / She was the body / I the soul / Without one / Perishes the whole.”

From acclaimed poet Franny Choi comes a poetry collection for the ends of worlds—past, present, and future. Choi’s third book features poems about historical and impending apocalypses, alongside musings on our responsibilities to each other and visions for our collective survival.

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.

Francesco Petrarch’s Canzoniere (translated in English as ‘Scattered Rhymes’) is a collection of 14th century poems famed for their exploration of love, grief, spirituality and nature. Peter Thornton's accessible new translation brings Petrarch to the 21st century in direct, rhymed, English verse - for academics and poetry enthusiasts alike.

Deeply personal but also expansive in its imaginative scope, Nouns & Verbs brings together 35 years of writing from Campbell McGrath, one of America’s most highly lauded poets. Offering a hint of where he’s headed while charting the territory already explored, McGrath gives us startlingly inventive new poems while surveying his previous work - lyric poems, prose poems, and a searing episodic personal epic, “An Odyssey of Appetite”, exploring America’s limitless material and spiritual hungers.

Courage is a common hope that we can cultivate together. These prayers and poems can be listened to in group settings—among friends, families, and worshipping communities—and are also ideal for personal reflection.

Heartbreak and grief touch every soul at least once in a lifetime, and Ranata Suzuki translates those raw emotions into words. The Longest Night combines strikingly poignant quotations, powerfully emotive poetry, and captivating silhouette imagery to form a mournful lover's journal that explores a side of love that is deep, dark, and hauntingly beautiful.

James Brown. John Brown's raid. Brown v. the Topeka Board of Ed. The prize-winning author of Blue Laws meditates on all things "brown" in this powerful new collection. Divided into "Home Recordings" and "Field Recordings", Brown speaks to the way personal experience is shaped by culture, while culture is forever affected by the personal, recalling a black Kansas boyhood to comment on our times.

From the Inside of Corners by Taran Ailey is a poignant collection of poetry and prose that delves into the raw and intricate emotions of being human. Through vivid and heartfelt verse, Ailey explores the depths of grief, heartbreak, loss, life, and love, capturing the nuances of our most profound experiences.

With his dazzling ability to set words spinning, Amit Majmudar brings us poems that sharpen both wit and knives as he examines our "life in solitary". Equally engaged with human history and the human heart, Majmudar transfigures identity from a locus of captivity to the open field of his liberation....

Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics - of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience.

Alcools (1913) est un recueil de poèmes de Guillaume Apollinaire qui illustre la transition entre tradition et modernité. Riche et varié, le recueil mêle des formes classiques et des innovations audacieuses, telles que l'absence de ponctuation. Les thèmes abordés oscillent entre amour, mélancolie, souvenirs et quête d'un idéal.

A gorgeous collection of poems exploring womanhood, sisterhood, love, loss, and longing, for people who find catharsis in poems, or people who have always wanted to read or listen to poetry, but don’t know where to start.

The world can feel like a lonely place, especially at night, when you're staying up till three in the morning, unable to sleep and with your thoughts running wild. D. R. Nguyen captures the feeling of isolation, depression, and chasing a dream through poetry and prose in his captivating collection of poems book Dark Days Lonely Nights read by the author.

A Sand Book is a poetry collection in 12 parts, a travel guide that migrates from wildfires to hurricanes, tweety bird to the president, lust to aridity, desertification to prophecy, and mother to daughter. It explores the negative space of what is happening to language and to consciousness in our strange and desperate times.

In 2013, Neil Hilborn's performance of his poem "OCD" went viral. To date, it has been watched over 100 million times. Our Numbered Days is Neil’s debut full-length poetry collection, containing 45 of Neil's poems including "OCD", "Joey", "Future Tense", "Liminality", "Moving Day", and many, many never-before-seen poems.

Fragments of a Dying Dream is a profound journey through the emotional and spiritual landscape of trauma, healing and self-discovery. This collection of evocative prose poems captures the rawness of grief and the beauty of transformation. The author explores themes of pain, resilience, and inner strength, weaving together memories of personal loss and triumph with deep reflections on the soul’s journey. Each fragment is a window into the complexity of the human experience, where moments of sorrow intersect with glimmers of hope and healing.

Grief. An emotion we all experience at one time or another, but there is no grief greater then the loss of a loved one. In this short poem by William Hope Hodgson, the narrator is alone with his grief and the realization that what had been will never be again.