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April Theme: National Poetry Month

Join us in celebrating creativity! Choose from this curated selection of physical titles within Pfeiffer Library that celebrate poetry, all readily available on our display case:

The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo

Call Number: PS3601.C475 P64 2018 CCU

ISBN: 0062662805

Publication Date: 2018-03-06

Winner of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, and the Pura Belpré Award!  Fans of Jacqueline Woodson, Meg Medina, and Jason Reynolds will fall hard for this astonishing New York Times-bestselling novel-in-verse by an award-winning slam poet, about an Afro-Latina heroine who tells her story with blazing words and powerful truth.  Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking.  But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers--especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about.  With Mami's determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. So when she is invited to join her school's slam poetry club, she doesn't know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out. But she still can't stop thinking about performing her poems.  Because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent.  "Crackles with energy and snaps with authenticity and voice." --Justina Ireland, author of Dread Nation  "An incredibly potent debut." --Jason Reynolds, author of the National Book Award Finalist Ghost  "Acevedo has amplified the voices of girls en el barrio who are equal parts goddess, saint, warrior, and hero." --Ibi Zoboi, author of American Street

Shake Loose My Skin by Sonia Sanchez; Deborah Chasman (Editor)

Call Number: PS3569 .A468 S53 1999 CCU

ISBN: 9780807068502

Publication Date: 1999-01-21

Covering over thirty years of work, Shake Loose My Skin is a stunning testament to the literary, sensual, and political powers of the award-winning Sonia Sanchez.  "This world is a better place because of Sonia Sanchez: more livable, more laughable, more manageable. I wish millions of people knew that some of the joy in their lives comes from the fact that Sonia Sanchez is writing poetry." -Maya Angelou

Hard Love Province by Marilyn Chin

Call Number: PS3553.H48975 A6 2014

ISBN: 9780393240962

Publication Date: 2014-06-09

Marilyn Chin is a poet acclaimed by Adrienne Rich for her "powerful, uncompromised, and unerring" poems. Dancing brilliantly between Eastern and Western forms, fusing ancient Chinese history and contemporary American popular culture, she is one of the most celebrated Asian-American poets writing today.  Chin's fourth volume of poems, Hard Love Province, is composed of erotic elegies in which the speaker grieves for the loss of her beloved. In "Void" she writes with the imagistic, distilled quietude of a solitary mourner: "It's not that you are rare / Nor are you extraordinary // O lone wren sobbing on the bodhi tree / You are simple and sincere." In "Formosan Elegy," by contrast, she is that mourner, beyond simplicity or quietude, crying out for a lover: "I sing for you but my tears have dried in my gullet / Walk the old dog give the budgies a cool bath / Cut a tender melon let it bleed into memory."  Here, too, are poems inspired by Chin's poetic forbearers and mentors--Dickinson, Plath, Ai, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tu Fu, Adrienne Rich, and others--honoring their work and descrying the global injustice they addressed. "Whose life is it anyway?" she asks in a poem for Rich, "She born of chrysalis and shit / Or she born of woman and pain?"  Emotionally nuanced and electric with high-flying verbal experimentation, image after image, line by line, Chin's spectacular reinventions, her quatrains, sonnets, allegories, and elegies, are unforgettable.

In the Language of My Captor by Shane McCrae

Call Number: PS3613.C385747 A6 2017

ISBN: 9780819577115

Publication Date: 2017-02-07

Finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry    Winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry (2017)    Acclaimed poet Shane McCrae's latest collection is a book about freedom told through stories of captivity. Historical persona poems and a prose memoir at the center of the book address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. In the book's three sequences, McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, he confronts the myth that freedom can be based upon the power to dominate others, and, in poems about the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis in the last year of the Civil War, he interrogates the infrequently examined connections between racism and love. A reader's companion is available at wesleyan.edu/wespress/readerscompanions.

Olio by Tyehimba Jess

Call Number: PS3610.E874 A6 2016

ISBN: 9781940696225

Publication Date: 2016-04-05

Part fact, part fiction, Tyehimba Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.  So, while I lead this choir, I still find that  I'm being led...I'm a missionary  mending my faith in the midst of this flock...  I toil in their fields of praise. When folks see  these freedmen stand and sing, they hear their God  speak in tongues. These nine dark mouths sing shelter;  they echo a hymn's haven from slavery's weather.  Detroit native Tyehimba Jess' first book of poetry, leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TEDxNashville Conference. Jess is an Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

The Aeneid of Virgil, 35th Anniversary Edition by Virgil; Allen Mandelbaum (Translator, Introduction by); Barry Moser (Illustrator)

Call Number: PA6807.A5 M23 2007

ISBN: 9780520254152

Publication Date: 2007-09-03

This deluxe edition of Virgil's epic poems, recounting the wanderings of Aeneas and his companions after the fall of Troy, contains an introduction by Allen Mandelbaum and fourteen powerful renderings created by Barry Moser to illustrate this volume.

Paradise Lost by John Milton; Gordon Teskey

Call Number: PR3560.A2 T47 2005

ISBN: 9780393924282

Publication Date: 2004-12-15

Gordon Teskey's freshly edited text of Milton's masterpiece is accompanied by a new introduction and substantial explanatory annotations. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized, the latter, importantly, within the limits imposed by Milton's syntax. "Sources and Backgrounds" collects relevant passages from the Bible and Milton's prose writings, including selections from The Reason of Church Government and the full text of Areopagitica. "Criticism" brings together classic interpretations by Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, Victor Hugo, and T. S. Eliot, among others, and the most important recent criticism and scholarship surrounding the epic, including essays by Northrop Frye, Barbara Lewalski, Christopher Ricks, and Helen Vendler. A Glossary and Selected Bibliography are also included.

Beowulf by Seamus Heaney; Daniel Donoghue

Call Number: PR1583 .H43 2002

ISBN: 0393975800

Publication Date: 2001-12-18

The translation that "rides boldly through the reefs of scholarship" (The Observer) is combined with first-rate annotation. No reading knowledge of Old English is assumed. Heaney's clear and insightful introduction to Beowulf provides students with an understanding of both the poem's history in the canon and Heaney's own translation process.

Edgar Allan Poe Complete Tales and Poems by Edgar Allan Poe

Call Number: PS2600 .G02 2002

ISBN: 0785814531

Publication Date: 2009-11-29

In Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales and Poems, fans may indulge in all of Poe's most imaginative short-stories, including The Fall of the House of Usher, The Murders in Rue Morgue, The Tell-Tale Heart, Ligeia, and Ms. In a Bottle. His complete early and miscellaneous poetic masterpieces are here also, including The Raven, Ulalume, Annabel Lee, Tamerlane, as well as select reviews and narratives.        The life of American writer Edgar Allan Poe was characterized by a dramatic series of successes and failures, breakdowns and recoveries, personal gains and hopes dashed through, despite which he created some of the finest literature the world has ever known. Over time, his works have influenced such major creative forces as the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Andre Gide, filmmaker D.W. Griffith, and modern literary legend Allen Ginsberg. Best known for his poems and short fiction, Poe perfected the psychological thriller, invented the detective story, and rarely missed transporting the reader to his own supernatural realm. He has also been hailed posthumously as one of the finest literary critics of the nineteenth century.

The Latin Deli by Judith Ortiz Cofer

ISBN: 9780820336213

Publication Date: 2010-06-01

Reviewing her novel, The Line of the Sun, the New York Times Book Review hailed Judith Ortiz Cofer as "a writer of authentic gifts, with a genuine and important story to tell." Those gifts are on abundant display in The Latin Deli, an evocative collection of poetry, personal essays, and short fiction in which the dominant subject-the lives of Puerto Ricans in a New Jersey barrio-is drawn from the author's own childhood. Following the directive of Emily Dickinson to "tell all the Truth but tell it slant," Cofer approaches her material from a variety of angles. An acute yearning for a distant homeland is the poignant theme of the title poem, which opens the collection. Cofer's lines introduce us "to a woman of no-age" presiding over a small store whose wares-Bustelo coffee, jamon y queso, "green plantains hanging in stalks like votive offerings"-must satisfy, however imperfectly, the needs and hungers of those who have left the islands for the urban Northeast. Similarly affecting is the short story "Nada," in which a mother's grief over a son killed in Vietnam gradually consumes her. Refusing the medals and flag proferred by the government ("Tell the Mr. President of the United States what I say: No, gracias."), as well as the consolations of her neighbors in El Building, the woman begins to give away all her possessions The narrator, upon hearing the woman say "nada," reflects, "I tell you, that word is like a drain that sucks everything down." As rooted as they are in a particular immigrant experience, Cofer's writings are also rich in universal themes, especially those involving the pains, confusions, and wonders of growing up. While set in the barrio, the essays "American History," "Not for Sale," and "The Paterson Public Library" deal with concerns that could be those of any sensitive young woman coming of age in America: romantic attachments, relations with parents and peers, the search for knowledge. And in poems such as "The Life of an Echo" and "The Purpose of Nuns," Cofer offers eloquent ruminations on the mystery of desire and the conflict between the flesh and the spirit. Cofer's ambitions as a writer are perhaps stated most explicitly in the essay "The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria." Recalling one of her early poems, she notes how its message is still her mission: to transcend the limitations of language, to connect "through the human-to-human channel of art."

 

Heaven by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

ISBN: 9780374168520

Publication Date: 2015-06-16

Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry Winner of the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award Finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize Long-listed for the National Book Award Long-listed for the PEN Open Book Award One of The Washington Post's Best Poetry Collections of 2015 One of NPR's Best Books of 2015 One of Flavorwire's Best Poetry Books of 2015 "Who the hell's heaven is this?" Rowan Ricardo Phillips offers many answers, and none at all, in Heaven, the piercing and revelatory encore to his award-winning debut, The Ground. Swerving elegantly from humor to heartbreak, from Colorado to Florida, from Dante's Paradise to Homer's Iliad, from knowledge to ignorance to awe, Phillips turns his gaze upward and outward, probing and upending notions of the beyond. "Feeling, real feeling / with all its faulty / Architecture, is / Beyond a god's touch"--but it does not elude Phillips. Meditating on feverish boyhood, on two paintings by Chuck Close, on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, on a dead rooster by the side of the road in Ohio, on an elk grazing outside his window, his language remains eternally intoxicating, full of play, pathos, and surprise. "The end," he writes, "like / All I've ever told you, is uncertain." Or, elsewhere: "The only way then to know a truth / Is to squint in its direction and poke." Phillips--who received a 2013 Whiting Writers' Award as well as the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award--may not be certain, but as he squints and pokes in the direction of truth, his power of perception and elegance of expression create a place where beauty and truth come together and drift apart like a planet orbiting its star. The result is a book whose lush and wounding beauty will leave its mark on readers long after they've turned the last page.