Narrative theme: Death, grief, loss Books

Fairoz is a book-length poetry sequence in which Moniza Alvi explores an imagined teenage girl's susceptibility to extremism. The book's fragmented, collaging narrative draws together fairytale elements, glimpses of Fairoz's thoughts, and pieces of...

An exquisite collection from a poet at the peak of her powers, A God at the Door spans time and space, drawing on the extraordinary minutiae of nature and humanity to elevate the marginalised. These poems, taken together, traverse history, from the...

In The Conversation, Stephanie Norgate explores relationships between nature and the city, the past and present and character and writer. Shaped through both speech and storytelling, these visual, sensuous and imaginative poems celebrate friendship, even...

Second collection by young Scottish poet whose debut collection was shortlisted for four major first collection awards. These new poems concern witches, outsiders, and women who do not fit into society. The settings range from London buses and Edinburgh...

A collection of three distinct parts, the poems in Rebecca Perry's Stone Fruit nonetheless speak across their many common preoccupations: memory, grief, the fallibility of the physical form, our connection to and place in the world, natural and otherwise...

The submerged land of Lyonesse was once part of Cornwall, according to myth and the oral tradition, standing for a lost paradise in Arthurian legend, but now an emblem of human frailty in the face of climate change. And there was indeed a Bronze Age...

Ana Blandiana is one of Romania's foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism. Her numerous international awards include the Lgion d'Honneur in 2009 and the Griffin Trust Lifetime Recognition Award in 2018 (she traveled to Canada to...

Imtiaz Dharker was born in Pakistan, grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow, was adopted by India and married into Wales. Her main themes are drawn from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement,...

This anthology features poems by Mark Doty, Ross Gay, Donald Hall, Marie Howe, Naomi Shihab Nye and many others.These poets, from all walks of life, and from all over America, prove to us the possibility of creating in our lives what Dr. Martin Luther...

A timely reissue, the typographical experiments of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven make visible the hidden experience of chronic pain and illness. During uninsured and ineffectual medicalization, Teare turns to the work of writer and abstract...

FINALIST for the 2023 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature A kaleidoscopic debut collection of poems performing queer excess and lyric ecstasy.This flirty collection traces unruly paths of becoming; its sprawling poems build...

Finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize in PoetryAn incisive poetic sequence that tracks the relationship between migration and complex traumas in this unsparing critique of the unjust conditions that brought us the global pandemic.Ante body is a poetics...

Shifting the Silence does just that, breaks the social taboo around writing and speaking about our own deaths. In short unrelenting paragraphs, Adnan enumerates her personal struggle to conceptualize the breadth of her own life at 95, the process of...

Mama Phife Represents is an arresting document of the body's lowest depth of hurt, from a poet and mother who suddenly loses her son to Type 1 diabetes at the height of his musical career. It is a love letter from a grieving mother to her child.

Finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry A New York Times Book Review "New & Noteworthy Poetry" Selection A Library Journal "Poetry Title to Watch 2021" A Chicago Review of Books "Poetry Collection to Read in 2021" A Reader's Digest "14...

A devastating, vulnerable collection tracing high-risk pregnancy and new motherhood amid grief."All my life all I've wanted was to be myself / and someone else," writes Elizabeth Metzger. From the shadowy perspective of confinement, where the presence of...

In A Fire in the Hills, Afaa focuses on one of the central threads in his body of work. His ongoing project of an articulation of self in relation to the external landscape of the community and the world and the writing of spirit through those...

Following her husband's massive heart attack, Cynthia Hogue began writing poems based on dreams and memories that he, born during WWII in occupied France, had as a child growing up in a time of vast postwar food shortages. Hogue embarked on a quest to...

Eloise Klein Healy's A Brilliant Loss is a poetic journey into the loss of language and the reclaiming of it. Healy had Wernicke's aphasia in 2013 when she was the first poet laureate of the City of Los Angeles, and the virus hit her the night of her...

In her award-winning second book, Anna V. Q. Ross transforms motherhood into a lens, examining narratives of girlhood, migration, trauma, and inheritance. Compassing home and horizon, this tightly woven, image-rich collection plumbs the political within...

In Epilogue: Selected and Last Poems, Frederick Morgan reworks and amplifies, in his extraordinary poetic range, the fundamental human themes that preoccupied him-love, death, pain, the nature and transcendence of the Self. In interweaving his many...

2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist! Kim Dower's poetry has been described by the Los Angeles Times as "sensual and evocative . . . seamlessly combining humor and heartache," and by O Magazine as "unexpected and sublime." Acclaimed for combining the...

In these moving and meditative poems, Adam Kirsch shows how the experiences and recognitions of early life continue to shape us into adulthood. Richly evoking a 1980s childhood in Los Angeles, Kirsch uses Gen X landmarks-from Devo to Atari to the...

Poet Emily Wall began collecting birth stories after the birth of her third child, Lucy. She realized that women were always quietly sharing their stories-in living rooms with a mug of tea, or whispered at the preschool playground. She saw the intensity...

Since her early poems, Katharine Coles has been known as a poet who isn't afraid to tackle big subjects that occupy the intersections of art and science, including how we know what is true (if we do). Driven by her insatiable curiosity and relying on a...

The five sections in Kim Stafford's Singer Come from Afar hold poems that summon war and peace, pandemic struggles, Earth imperatives, a seeker's spirit, and forge kinship. The former poet laureate of Oregon, Stafford has shared poems from this book in...

*HONORABLE MENTION for the 2022 International Latino Book Awards, Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award - One Author - English* American Quasar is a visual-textual collaboration between poet David Campos and artist Maceo Montoya. What began as an...

Somewhere between elegy and memoir, poetry and prose, Ed Pavli's Call It in the Air follows the death of a sister into song.Pavli's collection traces the life and death of his elder sister, Kate: a brilliant, talented, tormented woman who lived on her...

Winner of the 2022 Levis Reading Prize Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's 2021 John Leonard Prize for Best First Book "Top Ten Pick" for Fall 2021 Poetry Titles "Poetry Title to Watch" for 2021 "Must-Read Book of September 2021"Selected by...

Kathryn Cowles's Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World is a collection that lingers in memory and place, in the unsettled distance between reality and its transcriptions. "I take seven photographs turning / in a circle, a panorama, / but how will I...

"Wesley McNair, an unassuming, avowedly regional pastoral poet from Western Maine, is writing the best poetry of his life-poetry uniquely capable of, and interested in, addressing our larger moment."-Los Angeles Review of BooksWesley McNair's story-like...

"Old Poets is an indispensable jewel." -Washington Post"An astonishing array of encounters...Hall's observations are shrewd and generous." -Boston GlobeIntimate portraits of great poets in old age, giving new insight into their work and their lives, and...

Part poetry collection, part soundscape, Village uses dark humor and keen observation to explore the roots of memory, grief, and estrangement.In propulsive and formally inventive verse, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs examines how trauma reshapes lineage,...

The Wet Hex is Sun Yung's fourth book of poetry with CHP. She is beloved and respected for her own award-winning writing as well as for her work as the editor of several anthologies, including A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota (Minnesota...

Winner of the 2018 US National Book Award for PoetryIntricate, intimate, difficult, and confrontational poems that push at the boundaries of selfhood, skin, culture, sexuality, and blood. Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and...

Praise for Greg Hewett:2010 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Poetry2003 Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry WinnerIn poems that are full of wit, touching, and introspective, as well as formally inventive, we find the poet losing his...

It is rare to find in one collection an entire skyline burning and the quiet to follow a single worm, to hear soil breathe-in Jorie Graham's fifteenth poetry collection, you do.Jorie Graham's fifteenth poetry collection, To 2040louder than speech, and...

Witty and glam, Skeletons is a prismatic collectionwhich shrugs off even the most disillusioned nihilist with humor and intimacy.Existentialism takes on a glamorous flair in Deborah Landau's dazzling new collection. Through a series of poems preoccupied...

With poems that contemplate the everydayerrands, gardening, dog walksor confront the white-body supremacy of local sunbathers, Cate Marvin reckons with the hurt of our patriarchal world, facing her own past, toxic relationships and pondering what we can...

New York Times "100 Notable Books of 2022"NPR "Best Books of 2022""Levin's luminous latest reckons with the disorientation of contemporary America. . . . Through the fog of doubt, Levin summons ferocious intellect and musters hard-won clairvoyance...

A lover of strict form, best-selling poet Victoria Chang turns to compact Japanese waka, powerfully innovating on tradition while continuing her pursuit of one of life's hardest questions: how to let go.In The Trees Witness Everything, Victoria Chang...

**Winner of the 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Award** "This book is an overwhelming feast, a treasure, and more than enough proof that Sze is a major poet." -NPR National Book Award winner Arthur Sze is a master poet, and The Glass...

Written during the trial for a close friend's murder, Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod exposes that the whimsical, horrible, and absurd all sit together. In this ambitious fourth collection, Traci Brimhall corresponds with the urges of life and...

"Bitsui's poetry returns things to their basic elements and voice in a flowing language rife with illuminating images. A great reading experience for those who like serious and innovative poetry." -Library JournalDrawing upon Navajo history and enduring...

"Rollins' debut is a book of dissonance, with race and women's bodies proving two unyielding concerns throughout this four-part work. In poem after poem, Rollins demonstrates that she is finding her own way, shining a light, making darkness apparent."...

"Jean Valentine has a gift for tough strangeness, but also a dreamlike syntax and manner of arranging the lines of . . . short poems so as to draw us into the doubleness and fluency of feelings."-The New York Times Book ReviewQuietly marked by elegy and...

"The big event in poetry for 2015 will likely be the long-awaited resurrection of Frank Stanford."-NPR.orgNational Book Critics Circle Award Finalist"What About This... introduces to a broader audience an important and original American poet - sensitive,...

Jim Harrison's final book of poems, published only a few months before his death"[Jim Harrison] is still close to the source...Dead Man's Float is, as its title would suggest, a flinty and psalmist look at mortality and wonder."-Los Angeles Times"Mr...