Books of Poetry I Read in 2021
Please by Jericho Brown challenges the perception of life that says if we do all the right things, life will work out right. Brown unapologetically explores the way love and violence can get too mixed up in our minds leading us to equate love with violence until we stop fighting back. Brown explores expectations, conformity, and power in this examination of society, family, relationships, and culture. With poems that often feel voyeuristic, Please is more of a demand than an apology that requires the readers to examine their perceptions of the world around them.
When Love Rises by Michelle G. Stradford combines poetry and sketches to paint a story of love, loss, and rediscovering love. Filled with short poems that pack a punch, Stradford examines how love begins, progresses, and ends. She finds hope in the journey while remaining honest to the joys and the pain, the highs and lows, the fantasy and reality of love.
Erotic Poems by E. E. Cummings wasn't exactly what I expected but was quite an enjoyable read. While the erotic was obvious in most poems, I had to stretch my imagination a bit to find the eroticism in a few. The sketches in the book left little to the imagination and were well done. I enjoyed the poetry, the word play, and the artwork even more than I expected to.
The Sun and Her Flowers by Rupi Kaur holds within it a sweet erotic empowerment. Kaur writes boldly simple poetry that defies expectations and challenges preconceptions. She writes about life and life's challenges in short simple poems punctuated by sketches that illustrate her poems. She embodies feminine power, intelligence, and struggle with equal devotion. While some of these poems felt oddly familiar, they still worked in the context of this book.
Love and Leftovers by Sarah Tregay (also fiction) is a novel written as a series of poems. Tregay does an excellent job pulling the reader into the life of Marcie. Marcie's mother moves the two of them across the country when Marcie's father leaves for another man. Marcie is devastated to learn they're not returning to Idaho at the end of the summer. As she seeks to feel connected to someone, anyone, she makes some questionable decisions as many teens do when faced when suddenly having to be the adults when a parent is unable to be a parent. The reader is taken along as Marcie faces her life, her parents, her decisions, and the consequences of expectations and conformity. This story contains elements of a love story but on a far deeper level is about how to embrace being one's self in a world that often tells us who we are is unacceptable.
Spiritchilism by Definition by Tony Haynes uses language in both simple and complex ways to explore philosophy, religion, politics, and belief systems. Haynes's love of word play lends an air of lightheartedness to often intense topics while never minimizing those topics. The poems explore a worldview that strives to be inclusive without losing track of the individual. The poems thought provoking, belief challenging, and emotion eliciting.
The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country by Amanda Gorman offers the written version of the poem Gorman presented at the 2020 inauguration of Joe Biden. The poem was powerful when presented live. The words on the page gave me the time to savor them and revisit them. The foreword by Oprah Winfrey didn't really add anything in my opinion. Gorman's poem stands on its own and didn't need a foreword at all.
Gimme Your Lunch Money: Heartland Poets Speak Out Against Bullies by Heartland Poets, Edited by Dennis Etzel, Jr. and Lindsey Martin-Bowen compiles myriad poems by a variety of poets exploring bullying from many aspects. The poems represent the dynamics of bullying from the bullied to the bullies in ways that are thoughtful, thought provoking, and genuine. Some poems resonated more deeply with me than others, but all of the poems included made me at least think about the perspective presented.
Healing HER by Sez Kristiansen is filled with poems that explore self-love, self-healing, and self-empowerment in language that pushes one to look at one's own life as well as the world around them to find both the questions and answers one seeks in building the life one desires. Woven throughout the books are ideas that remind the reader they are enough as is.
Let Us Compare Mythologies by Leonard Cohen is filled with interesting poems that tell a multitude of stories using few words. The religious undertones are more obvious in some poems than others, but all the poems explore morality in some way or the other. The poems speak to a universal human experience that could in and of itself be a mythology we've created just to survive.
I Am the Rage by Martina McGowan grabbed my attention and refused to let go. The poems made me questions my perceptions, my beliefs, my understandings of the world I navigate on a daily bases. I Am the Rage pushed my buttons in some parts and comforted my heart in other parts. McGowan spoke to my yearnings for a more connected world while also pointing out why that connection is so incredibly hard to find and keep.
I Saw You As A Flower: A Poetry Collection by Ellen Everett is similar in basic form to several other books of poetry I've read lately. I wish I'd waited to read it at a different time when my mind was in a different place, but once I'd started I didn't want to stop. The poems are often short but impactful. Everett punches a lot of power into few words and leaves a lot of white space for the reader to ponder those words. Overall, I enjoyed most of the poems very much, except some of the religious ones, but that's a personal preference and not a reflection on the poet.
I'm Rising: Determined. Confident. Powerful by Michelle G. Stradford is a books of self love poetry. Stradford concentrates on the power of loving one's self in this book of poetry with sketches scattered throughout to enhance her point. She pushes the reader to confront and examine their own moments of self doubt and self hate and to look for the moments of self love in their lives. Filled with many inspiring and empowering poems, Stradford doesn't shy away from the challenges life can present to people loving themselves unconditionally.
Trees and Truths by Anntonette Jackson grabbed me from the moment I saw the cover. When I started reading, I felt like I wanted to rush through the poems and had to slow myself down. Jackson explores the connection between nature and man in thought provoking words that elicit an emotional reaction. She demonstrates the pain of humanity through analogies of trees and the pain humanity inflicts on nature through analogies of human pain. Trees and Truths brings together humanity and nature in a way that demonstrates clearly the impact each has on the world in which they exist.
Works of Edgar Allan Poe by Edgar Allan Poe (also fiction) is a compilation of Edgar Allan Poe's fiction and poetry. Here I will discuss the poetry, to see my thoughts on the fiction, see that post. I read two books of compilations of Edgar Allan Poe's work simultaneously because while both claimed to be complete, there were works not in both books. The works were also in different orders. This one was chronological with the poetry in a separate section. The main take-away I had as I finished the was that I enjoyed the poetry far more than the fiction.
The Complete Stories and Poems by Edgar Allan Poe (also fiction) was the longer of the two Poe books I read, and I do believe the two contained all the same fiction and the only thing that varied was the poetry. I read the poetry in this book and only read poems in the other book that didn't appear in this one. I liked the arrangement of the poetry in this book. As I read the poetry, I admired all over again how Poe could use words to create an image, portray a message, capture the imagination, and create a mood. There were moments in the poems I knew that I had forgotten and others that felt like coming home. I think I would recommend this book over the other one simply because the print was easier on the eyes when I read the poetry in it.
You'll Come Back to Yourself by Michaela Angemeer felt like the gentle push I needed as I read it. Gentle push toward what I don't know, but I enjoyed the poems. As I read, I found myself enjoying the words and journey without feeling the need to sit and ponder their meaning. This little book of poetry felt genuine and quite refreshing.
Verseweaver: The OPA Anthology contains a variety of poems from contest winners. I found many of the poems quite enjoyable, some more so than others.
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