Browse the gallery below to see a selection of poetry books from the Hoffman Family Library's poetry collection. Search the library's catalog to explore all of our holdings!
#1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning. Call Us What We Carry reveals that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.
A brilliant and faithful rendering of the Anglo-Saxon epic from the Nobel laureate. Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the end of the twentieth century, Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface.
Drawn to what he has called the "four-squareness of the utterance" in Beowulf and its immense emotional credibility, Heaney gives these epic qualities new and convincing reality for the contemporary reader.
This rich and intricate collection of poems chronicles the various experiences of American slaves. Drawn together through imagery drawn from quilting and fiber arts, each poem is spoken from a different perspective: a house slave, a mother losing her daughter to the auction block, a blacksmith, a slave fleeing on the Underground Railroad.
This moving and eloquent set of poems, brought to life by vivid and colorful artwork from Michele Wood, offers a timeless witness to the hardship endured by America's slaves. Each poem is supplemented by a historical note.
In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer created one of the great touchstones of English literature, a masterly collection of chivalric romances, moral allegories and low farce. A story-telling competition between a group of pilgrims from all walks of life is the occasion for a series of tales that range from the Knight's account of courtly love and the ebullient Wife of Bath's Arthurian legend, to the ribald anecdotes of the Miller and the Cook.
This award-winning poetry collection includes sixteen poems that tell of love and the simple joys of everyday life seen through the eyes of a child, by legendary author Eloise Greenfield with illustrations by Caldecott Medal-winning illustrators Diane and Leo Dillon. Each of these sixteen poems is spoken straight from the perspective of a child. Riding on a train, listening to music, playing with a friend...each poem elicits a new appreciation of the rich content of everyday life. The poems are accompanied by both portrait and panorama drawings that deepen the insights contained in the words. This beloved book of poetry is a Reading Rainbow Selection, an ALA Notable Children's Book, and the winner of George C. Stone Center for Children's Books' Recognition of Merit Award.
This Coretta Scott King Award-winning photography book based on Langston Hughes's classic poem is perfect for kids and moving and powerful for readers of all ages. Langston Hughes's spare yet eloquent tribute to his people has been cherished for generations. Now, acclaimed photographer Charles R. Smith Jr. interprets this beloved poem in vivid sepia photographs that capture the glory, the beauty, and the soul of being a black American today.
Tenderly, joyously, sometimes in sadness, sometimes in pain, Maya Angelou writes from the heart and celebrates life as only she has discovered it. In this moving volume of poetry, we hear the multi-faceted voice of one of the most powerful and vibrant writers of our time.
"Where are you from . . . ? No--where are you from from?" It's a question every Asian American gets asked as part of an incessant chorus saying you'll never belong here, you're a perpetual foreigner, you'll always be seen as an alien, an object, or a threat. Monica Youn's From From brilliantly evokes the conflicted consciousness of deracination. If you have no core of "authenticity," no experience of your so-called homeland, how do you piece together an Asian American identity out of Westerners' ideas about Asians? Your sense of yourself is part stereotype, part aspiration, part guilt. In this dazzling collection, one sequence deconstructs the sounds and letters of the word "deracinations" to create a sonic landscape of micro- and macroaggressions, assimilation, and self-doubt. A kaleidoscopic personal essay explores the racial positioning of Asian Americans and the epidemic of anti-Asian hate. Several poems titled "Study of Two Figures" anatomize and dissect the Asian other: Midas the striving, nouveau-riche father; Dr. Seuss and the imaginary daughter Chrysanthemum-Pearl he invented while authoring his anti-Japanese propaganda campaign; Pasiphaë, mother of the minotaur, and Sado, the eighteenth-century Korean prince, both condemned to containers allegorical and actual.
From From is an extraordinary collection by a poet whose daring and inventive works are among the most vital in contemporary literature.
One of the most famous poems in the English language, "The Raven" first appeared in the January 29, 1845, edition of the New York Evening Mirror. It brought Edgar Allan Poe, then in his mid-30s and a well-known poet, critic, and short story writer, his first taste of celebrity on a grand scale. "The Raven" remains Poe's best-known work, yet it is only one of a dazzling series of poems and stories that won him an enduring place in world literature. This volume contains "The Raven" and 40 others of Edgar Allan Poe's most memorable poems, among them "The Bells," "Ulalume," "Israfel," "To Helen," "The Conqueror Worm," "Eldorado," and "Annabel Lee." Together they reveal the extraordinary spectrum of Poe's personality -- his idealism; his visionary qualities; his responsiveness to beauty, to love, and to women; and his susceptibility to the eerie and the morbid. They reveal, too, his virtuoso command of poetic language, rhythms, and figures of speech -- command that would make his one of the most distinctive voices in all of poetry. A selection of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
"Cheryl Savageau is a rare poet: a commanding storyteller with a strong sense of irony and a gift for the haunting image, who manages the feat of giving voice to her two cultures--Abenacki Indian and French Canadian--in words that makes those worlds sing. She pages homage to family, nature, identity, but does not romanticize. By confronting the struggles of working people through a vivid language grounded in the sense, Savageau is writing real history, which we urgently need in this age of quincentenary-style history. She leads us back to the Home Country." --Martin Espada, author of Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands
Louise Glück is one of the finest American poets at work today. Her Poems 1962-2012 was hailed as "a major event in this country's literature" in the pages of The New York Times. Every new collection is at once a deepening and a revelation. Faithful and Virtuous Night is no exception.
You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it's the same place but it has been arranged differently. You were a woman. You were a man. This is a story of adventure, an encounter with the unknown, a knight's undaunted journey into the kingdom of death; this is a story of the world you've always known, that first primer where "on page three a dog appeared, on page five a ball" and every familiar facet has been made to shimmer like the contours of a dream, "the dog float[ing] into the sky to join the ball." Faithful and Virtuous Night tells a single story but the parts are mutable, the great sweep of its narrative mysterious and fateful, heartbreaking and charged with wonder.
The Winning volume in the 1972 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is a collection of richly anecdotal, lyric poems. Robert Hass writes about the California coast, about birds, fish, books, friends, presents sensations, and the impingements of the past upon the present. Running through the book is a core of love poems, mainly domestic, which muse on the natural order that the affections try to establish even within the wilderness of history and political violence.
Stanley Kunitz, the judge of the competition, calls this year’s selection “a big, strong-hearted, earthy book, in the America epic tradition of Whitman and Neruda. Hass is a wonderfully informed young man, a waking history, with abounding affection for the natural universe, including some humans, and with an imagination that spans the whole continent, from Buffalo to the Pacific.”
Wilfred Owen was twenty-two when he enlisted in the Artists' Rifle Corps during World War I. By the time Owen was killed at the age of 25 at the Battle of Sambre, he had written what are considered the most important British poems of WWI. This definitive edition is based on manuscripts of Owen's papers in the British Museum and other archives.
"And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout; But there is no joy in Mudville-mighty Casey has struck out." Those lines have echoed through the decades, the final stanza of a poem published pseudonymously in the June 3, 1888, issue of the San Francisco Examiner. Its author would rather have seen it forgotten. Instead, Ernest Thayer's poem has taken a well-deserved place as an enduring icon of Americana. Christopher Bing's magnificent version of this immortal ballad of the flailing 19th-century baseball star is rendered as though it had been newly discovered in a hundred-year-old scrapbook. Bing seamlessly weaves real and trompe l'oeil reproductions of artifacts-period baseball cards, tickets, advertisements, and a host of other memorabilia into the narrative to present a rich and multifaceted panorama of a bygone era. A book to be pored over by children, treasured by aficionados of the sport-and given as a gift to all ages: a tragi-comic celebration of heroism and of a golden era of sport.
This highly respected anthology presents the works of 70 poets who have shaped the contours and direction of mainstream American poetry from 1960 to the present. Designed to provide a rich reading experience for both undergrad and graduate courses, more than 500 selections illustrate the variety and vitality of American poetry over the last few decades. For each poet, the collection features a generous sampling of their work along with a photo, biographical sketches, and bibliographies.
A chronologically arranged anthology of British and American poetry from Chaucer on.
Refreshing poems by an American poet who died while still very young.
A brilliant new collection by Elizabeth Alexander, whose "poems bristle with the irresistible quality of a world seen fresh" (Rita Dove,The Washington Post) Too many people have seen too much and lived to tell, or not tell, or tell with their silent, patterned bodies, their glass eyes, gone legs, flower-printed flesh . . . -from "Notes From" In her fourth remarkable collection, Elizabeth Alexander voices the outcries, dreams, and histories of an African American tradition that goes back to the slave rebellion on the Amistad and to the artists' canvases of nineteenth-century America. In persona poems, historical narratives, jazz riffs, sonnets, elegies, and a sequence of ars poetica, American Sublime is Alexander's most vivid and varied collection and affirms her place as one of America's most lively and gifted writers. "Alexander is an unusual thing, a sensualist of history, a romanticist of race. She weaves biography, history, experience, pop culture and dream. Her poems make the public and private dance together." --Chicago Tribune
Part antiphonal rant, part rhythmic whisper, Nathaniel Mackey's new collection of poems, Splay Anthem, takes the reader to uncharted poetic spaces. Divided into three sections--"Braid," "Fray," and "Nub" (one referent Mackey notes in his stellar Introduction: "the imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United States has become, the shrunken place the earth has become, planet Nub")--Splay Anthem weaves together two ongoing serial poems Mackey has been writing for over twenty years, "Song of the Andoumboulou" and "Mu" (though "Mu no more itself / than Andoumboulou"). In the cosmology of the Dogon of West Africa, the Andoumboulou are progenitor spirits, and the song of the Andoumboulou is a song addressed to the spirits, a funeral song, a song of rebirth. "Mu," too, splays with meaning: muni bird, Greek muthos, a Sun Ra tune, a continent once thought to have existed in the Pacific. With the vibrancy of a Mira painting, Mackey's poems trace the lost tribe of "we" through waking and dreamtime, through a multitude of geographies, cultures, histories, and musical traditions, as poetry here serves as the intersection of everything, myth's music, spirit lift.
This compelling selection of recent work by internationally celebrated poet Keith Waldrop presents three related poem sequences--"Shipwreck in Haven," "Falling in Love through a Description," and "The Plummet of Vitruvius"--in a virtuosic poetic triptych. In these quasi-abstract, experimental lines, collaged words torn from their contexts take on new meanings. Waldrop, a longtime admirer of such artists as the French poet Raymond Queneau and the American painter Robert Motherwell, imposes a tonal override on purloined materials, yet the originals continue to show through. These powerful poems, at once metaphysical and personal, reconcile Waldrop's romantic tendencies with formal experimentation, uniting poetry and philosophy and revealing him as a transcendentalist for the new millennium.
Clint Smith's vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions. There are poems that revel in the wonder of discovering the world anew through the eyes of your children, as they discover it for the first time. There are poems that meditate on what it means to raise a family in a world filled with constant social and political tumult. Above Ground wrestles with how we hold wonder and despair in the same hands, how we carry intimate moments of joy and a collective sense of mourning in the same body. Smith's lyrical, narrative poems bring the reader on a journey not only through the early years of his children's lives, but through the changing world in which they are growing up--through the changing world of which we are all a part. Above Ground is a breathtaking collection that follows Smith's first award-winning book of poetry, Counting Descent.
A literary coming-of-age poetry collection, an ode to the places we call home, and a piercingly intimate deconstruction of daughterhood, Black Girl, Call Home is a love letter to the wandering black girl and a vital companion to any woman on a journey to find truth, belonging, and healing. From spoken word poet Jasmine Mans comes an unforgettable poetry collection about race, feminism, and queer identity. With echoes of Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez, Mans writes to call herself - and us - home.
Check out these websites to read free poetry online. Try using the search options to find poems about a certain theme, written in a certain style, or written by a particular poet.
"The Poetry Foundation recognizes the power of words to transform lives. We work to amplify poetry and celebrate poets by fostering spaces for all to create, experience, and share poetry."
Users can search for poems and poets, as well as browse by theme.
This website is run by the Academy of American Poets, whose mission is to support American poets and connect the public to poetry. You can find poems, poets, essays, articles, lesson plans, and more on poets.org.
This website focuses on contemporary poetry from recently published books, magazines, and journals. They feature a new poem every day.
The website is where you can find poems written by famous poets, including Maya Angelou, E. E. Cummings, and Langston Hughes. You can search for poems by theme or browse the site's lists of popular and enduring poetry.