10 Poetry Book You Should Read & Also Can Be Perfect Gift

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One of my goals for this year is to practice slowing down when I get home from a grinding work day. Specifically, disconnecting from my phone, television, computer, camera basically anything with a screen.

Make my favorite loose-leaf tea and cuddle up with my read-of-the-week. And with Valentine’s Day around the corner, poetry is at the top of my radar.

10 Poetry Book You Should Read & Also Can Be Perfect Gift

10 Poetry Book You Should Read & Also Can Be Perfect Gift

1.The Sun and her flowers

The stunning new poetry collection from Rupi Kaur, worldwide bestselling author of milk and honey.From Rupi Kaur, the top ten Sunday Times bestselling author of milk and honey, comes her long-awaited second collection of poetry.

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Illustrated by Kaur, the sun and her flowers is a journey of wilting, falling, rooting, rising and blooming. It is a celebration of love in all its forms. this is the recipe of life said my mother as she held me in her arms as i wept think of those flowers you plant in the garden each year they will teach you that people too must wilt fall root rise in order to bloom

2. Don't Call Us Dead: Poems

Finalist for the National Book Award for PoetryWinner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection“[Smith's] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy.”―The New Yorker Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power.

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Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality―the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood―and a diagnosis of HIV positive.

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“Some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America―“Dear White America”―where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.

3. Olio

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.

4. When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Range of Possibilities

In this ferocious and tender debut, Chen Chen investigates inherited forms of love and family – the strained relationship between a mother and son, the cost of necessary goodbyes – all from Asian American, immigrant and queer perspectives. Holding all accountable, this refreshingly candid and entertainingly provocative collection fully embraces the loss, grief, and abundant joy that come with charting one’s own path in identity, life and love. Foreword by Jericho Brown.

5. Calling a Wolf a Wolf

Tracking the joys and pains of the path through addiction, and wrestling with desire, inheritance and faith, Calling a Wolf a Wolf is the darkly sumptuous debut from award-winning poet Kaveh Akbar. These are powerful, intimate poems of thirst: for alcohol, for other bodies, for knowledge and for life.

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'The struggle from late youth on, with and without God, agony, narcotics and love, is a torment rarely recorded with such sustained eloquence and passion as you will find in this collection'

6.The Nightlife

In Elise Paschen’s prize-winning poetry collection, Infidelities, Richard Wilbur wrote that the poems “. . . draw upon a dream life which can deeply tincture the waking world.” In her third poetry book, The Nightlife, Paschen once again taps into dream states, creating a narrative which balances between the lived and the imagined life.

Probing the tension between “The Elevated” and the “Falls,” she explores troubled love and relationships, the danger of accident and emotional volatility. At the heart of the book is a dream triptych which retells the same encounter from different perspectives, the drama between the narrative described and the sexual tension created there.

The Nightlife demonstrates Paschen’s versatility and formal mastery as she experiments with forms such as the pantoum, the villanelle and the tritina, as well as concrete poems and poems in free verse. Throughout this poetry collection, she interweaves lyric and narrative threads, creating a contrapuntal story-line. The book begins with a dive into deep water and ends with an opening into sky.

7. i hope this finds you: to the ones that could never belong

I close My eyes putting My most beautiful dream of watching you sleep to an end I hold you, because I Can, and let My Body whisper -you make self-love look so easy and beautiful.- you gave a face to my future and My dreams you gave My direction a path My calls of hope a voice to reach My eyes a sight to see -you've got sad eyes with a hint of braveness, - is all she said, that moment changed My life I still think I just needed to be kissed, or hugged, or talked to about ordinary dreams, failures, about bridges and red rare bushes. About souls and personalities - broken personalities - and how they are fixable.

How sadness isn't here to stay but it might take a while. How some days you need to be on your own and just make it to the end of the day or cry it all out on your own because friends aren't always there beside you. I just feel so deeply for everything, and I'm not sure if there's anything scarier than that. Because this is life. Its cold and harsh with cracks of warmth and softness. <Br> I slept. I dreamed of words. Can you mend me? <Br> I hope this finds you is the question of all the answers you've been searching all your life.

8. WHEREAS: Poems

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don’t worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father’s language.

To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics.―from “WHEREAS Statements”WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations.

“I am,” she writes, “a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation―and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.” This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.

9. voice notes i never sent to you

A collection of poetry and prose, this book travels through stages of love and healing, shedding a burden of unspoken words, raw and unfiltered. A ballad of romantic experience.

10. Rumi

Marked by lyrical beauty and spiritual insight, a deep understanding of human suffering that coexists with rapturous abandon, the poems of Jalaluddin Rumi continue to be relevant almost eight centuries after they were composed, with contemporary audiences finding new meanings in them. Rumi's poems bring together the divine and the human, the mystical and the corporeal to create a vivid kaleidoscope of poetic images.

While many recent 'translations' have sought to give Rumi's poetry a certain hippy sensibility, robbing it of its true essence, Farrukh Dhondy attempts to bring out the beauty and sensibility of the verses whilst imitating the metre of the original. Dhondy's translations provide a modern idiom to the poems, carefully keeping intact their religious context.