Narrative theme: Death, grief, loss Books

The Glimmer is a many-voiced meditation on the time-span of life and purpose of art.In an artists' colony in Mexico, a taxidermist tends animals in their after-life, contemplating what remains of us after death. Among the artists she encounters are a...

For half a century of ever-broadening vision, award-winning poet Harry Clifton has addressed what the Irish Times calls 'his large concerns and his angular relationship to Ireland, one that produces extraordinary verbal and emotional effects'. This, his...

Grounded in protest and solidarity, Subhaga Crystal Bacon's Isabella Gardner Award-winning Transitory is a collection of elegies memorializing 46 transgender and gender-nonconforming people murdered in the US and Puerto Rico in 2020.Epistolary in nature,...

Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit explores disability, storytelling, and the process of mythologising trauma. Jen Campbell writes of Victorian circus and folklore, deep seas and dark forests, discussing her own relationship with hospitals - both as a...

Tale of Ahmedis a gripping fictional account of the dangerous journey of a teenage boy, Ahmed, who travels from Afghanistan, across the Middle East and Europe, to seek refuge in England.Author Henry Cockburn lives at one end of a long trail stretching...

Winner of the 2024 LAMBDA Literary Award for Outstanding Bisexual PoetryConsumed with the accumulation of lost time and unfulfilled longing, Desire Museum by Danielle Cadena Deulen is an intricate exploration of things left unfinished or unsatisfied...

As labyrinthine as its namesake, Dorothea Lasky'sThe Shiningis an ekphrastic horror lyric that shapes an entirely unique feminist psychological landscape.Here, Lasky guides us through the familiar rooms of the Overlook Hotel,both realized and imagined,...

Nobel Prize-winner Tomas Transtrmer explores the personal and political, the ecological and existential, through poems that expand like the widening scope of a telephoto lens. With slow strokes and subtle, rich lines, The Blue House: Collected Works of...

Confessional and immersive, Michael V. Smith's latest collection is a broad tapestry that explores growing up queer and working class, then growing into an urban queer life.In these poems, we are immersed in the world of a young Smith as he shares the...

America's Tony Hoagland (1953-2018) was known for provocative poems which interrogate human nature and contemporary culture with an intimate and wild urgency, located somewhere between outrage, stand-up comedy, and grief. The poems in his final...

In a country where violence and the threat of violence is a constant weather for queer Black people, where can the spirit rest?With lush language, the meditative poems in the Isabella Gardner Award-winning Tenderness examine the fraught nature of...

A series of poetic remixes, WAR IS NOT MY MOTHER might be considered a form of spirit possession.Each poem in this manuscript takes up another poet's work- a selection that ranges from Lorca to CD Wright, H Xun Hng to Sappho, Agha Shahid Ali to Ishrat...

Winner of The Laurel Prize 2023 Best UK First Collection, Burning Season is a book about fire and survival, climate change and nature's defiance.The book combines poems with nature diaries and lyric essays to trace an intriguing family history. This...

Five Fifty-Five quizzical poems concerned with time and mortality which ask fundamental questions about our lives, such asWhere have you gone?andWho were you anyway?In her first new collection since The Silveringtries to find out through conversations...

Adrian Ernesto Cepeda, author of La Belle Ajar, brings you a horror death themed collection with mortality, murder, and muerte oozing from every one of these terrifying verses.Inspired by NightWorms, Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties...

56k dial-up. Ouija boards. Crushes.Internet Girlfriend explores the intersection of the internet, the occult, and sexuality.These poems mirror the abyss: divination, webcamming, myth, instant messages, queerness, witchcraft-all in the name of trying to...

A complex and entangled text that explores inherited trauma, the presence of ghosts, interspecies communication, the dream world, grief, and human/animal separation.Weaving wisdom from her shamanic practice and the interstices of language, and in the...

A primer serving to facilitate dialogue between those who have experienced the crushing arms of war and those who have not, at its foundation Black Snowflakes Smothering a Torch presupposes that many issues veterans face when reintegrating come not from...

Traveling the nation, Matt Donovan examines the paradox of a country plagued by gun violence yet consumed with protecting the right to bear arms.Matt Donovan's The Dug-Up Gun Museumconfronts our country's obsession with guns to explore America's...

In Michael Earl Craig's sixth book, poems resonate with an inscrutable logic that feels excitedly otherworldly and unsettlingly familiar.Whether he be writing about the cadaver that Hans Holbein the Younger used as a model, Montana as the "Italy of God,"...

In her latest book,New Life, Lambda Awardwinning poet Ana Boievi writes, "For my birthday I want a cake/revealing the color of my soul." Never saccharine, these poems are by turns cheeky and heartfelt, grounded and wistful, and above all-surprising. New...

Sandra Simonds's Triptychs is a brilliant intersection of poetic form and the passage of time.Crafted initially in strips handwritten on rolls of receipt paper obtained at a dollar store, then assembled into three textual columns that sit side-by-side on...

Winner of the 2023 CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative NonfictionWinner of the Pegasus Award for Poetry CriticismOptic Subwoof is a collection of talks that poet and National Book Award finalist Douglas Kearney presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture...

In her new collection, renowned publisher and poet Rebecca Wolff voyages in the myopia of American consumer consciousness-erotic regard, spiritual FOMO, gentrification, branding-without destination.Labyrinthine in their paradoxical musings and incisive...

Former United States Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith wrote in the New York Times, "CAConrad's poems invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and...

2022 WINNER OF THE GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRY Eschewing series and performative typography, Douglas Kearney's Sho aims to hit crooked licks with straight-seeming sticks. Navigating the complex penetrability of...

A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021 An NPR Best Book of 2021 An Electric Literature Best Poetry Book of 2021 A Dennis Cooper Best Book of 2021In Hoardersreality television as a medium, Durbin conjures an uncanny space of attachments that reflects our...

A haunting ossuary of tiny poems covering a wide range of topics such as love, romance, relationships, queer sexuality, religion, death, demons, ghosts, bones, gender, and darkness.The Smallest of Bones guides those on an intimate journey of body...

An Exhalation of Dead Things explores the intersections of mental illness, poverty, queerness, sexual assault, and resilience.

Sylvia Plath once said, "I want someone to mouth me."La Belle Ajar is a collection of poems inspired by Plath's 1963 novel that reimagines the journey of Esther Greenwood within the empowering odyssey of these 20 scintillating cento poems that honor the...

In his fifth collection of poems, Christopher Kennedy sifts through the detritus of the past to uncover the memories, images, and symbols that shape an individual's consciousness. Looking to animals and their instincts for inspiration, drawing shape from...

Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile explores the role of silence in a time of war.The war Hussain Ahmed accounts here is both physical and psychological, and the survivor within these poems uses his voice as a way to tell the stories of those who were lost...

With global climate disasters in the news every day, Glazova offers riveting insights into the natural world and is an important voice for ecopoetry.Readers see the Russian and English poems on facing pages.Glazova received the Andrei Bely Prize, one of...

A major avant-garde feminist poet and essayist, and a "successor" to Kim Hyesoon ("Autobiography of Death") and other groundbreaking Korean feminist poets;Bilingual (Korean and English) on facing pages;Blurbs by Don Mee Choi and Joyelle McSweeney;Yi Won...

Teapot in the Fridge is a collection of poems written in love, rage and despair by a wife caring for her husband as he descends into the no-man's-land of dementia.The tone of the poems range from the desolate to the furious, and from nostalgia to...

'Here on the shore, twenty years later, my message in a bottle has reached dry land. Words about our life, his death but mostly love and our journey to the end.' - Olivia HarrisonOlivia Harrison presents Came the Lightening a book of...

The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day...Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard has been loved and admired throughout the centuries. First circulated to a select group of friends, it was rushed to official publication in 1751 in order to...

This collection of poetry interrogates the impact of grief and partner violence on a family lineage, as well as the connections between sorrow and joy as they relate to poetry, women's writing, and the process of the "confessional."Inextricably woven...

Winner of the 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award for poetryWinner of the Wren Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limn, Caitlin Scarano's collection wrestles with family violence, escaping home, unraveling relationships, and the complexity of sexuality.The...

Lyrical poems that engage with grief and loss and the toll of overdose and addiction with an activist bent.The title of Cry Perfume is an imperative to bottle sorrow in a beautiful vessel and shed the chemicals that cloud your sight. Written over a...

Recent books translated by the translators have won or been finalists for the Man Booker International Prize, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the PEN Poetry in Translation Award, the Northern California Book Award, and other notable prizes...

A comprehensive selection of poetry from a poet whose worknothing is what it seems to be. Modern spaces are haunted by the past and the unreal. We cannot tell the encroacher from the encroached. Discontinuities in time and space and playful...

The Hopeful Hat is a posthumous collection from a poet whose work is informed by her keen eye for social injustice and, equally, by the breadth of her compassion.Poignantly, these late poems are also Satyamurti'snuanced poetic response to having her...

A Broken Man in Flower presents new versions of work by one of the most significant Greek poets of the last century, translated by one of the UK's most renownedcontemporary poets.The life ofYannis Ritsoswas, to say the least, troubled. From an early age,...

A Tower Built Downwards is the latest instalment of poetry from one of the most innovative and influential poets from China.idely hailed in America and Europe as a highly individual voice in world literature, he has been translated into many languages...

After Lorca's murder at the hands of Fascist partisans in 1936, with his work suppressed, he became a potent symbol of the martyrdom of Spain. This new edition of Merryn Williams' iconic translation of Lorca was the first to include English translations...

Anne Rouse is a keenly observant writer of spiky satirical portraits and shapely lyrics of the ordinary and the bizarre.Her perspective in Ox-Eye the term for a small cloud presaging a storm is one of apprehension in poems relating to personal and social...