Aednan
The moment Ædnan landed in my hands, I was excited to read it. And friends, I was not disappointed. This novel in verse is absolutely stunning and deeply moving, with a translation that’s both accessible and musical.
About the book
Author: Linnea Axelsson, translated by Saskia Vogel
Publisher: Knopf
More info:
The StoryGraph | Goodreads
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the review.
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My Review
The moment Ædnan landed in my hands, I was excited to read it. And friends, I was not disappointed.
This translated novel in verse examines the impact of colonization of the Indigenous Samí people in Sweden over 100 years, through the eyes of three members of different generations. It’s absolutely stunning and deeply moving, with a translation that’s both accessible and musical. It’s about grief, the loss of history, the loss of language, the loss of home, and the rebuilding of identity. But it’s also about love and strength. Heartbreak and hope.
As you might expect, this is a great candidate for a simultaneous audiobook/print experience — just don’t take it too fast and don’t be afraid to pause and process!
If this is outside your usual wheelhouse (translated, in verse, set in Sweden) but still piques your interest, please give it a shot. You won’t be disappointed.
Content and Trigger Warnings
Death of one’s child
Grief
Colonization
In Springtime
In Springtime is a narrative book of poetry that meditates on caregiving, identity, grief, and nature. It’s a quick but moving read, and I enjoyed it very much.
Author: Sarah Blake
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
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Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
Lost in the woods with a horse, a mouse, and the ghost of a dead bird, you will discover if you're meant to live
In Sarah Blake's epic poem of survival, we follow a nameless main character lost in the woods. There, they discover the world anew, negotiating their place among the trees and the rain and the animals. Something brought them to the woods that nearly killed them, and they're not sure they want to live through this experience either. But the world surprises them again and again with beauty and intrigue. They come to meet a pregnant horse, a curious mouse, and a dead bird, who is set on haunting them all. Blake examines what makes us human when removed from the human world, what identity means where it is a useless thing, and how loss shapes us. In a stunning setting and with ominous dreams, In Springtime will take you into a magical world without using any magic at all--just the strangeness of the woods.
TL;DR Review
In Springtime is a narrative book of poems that meditates on caregiving, identity, grief, and nature. It’s a quick but moving read, and I enjoyed it very much.
For you if: You like poetry, or you’re looking for an accessible entry into poetry.
Full Review
I loved Sarah Blake’s novels, Naamah and Clean Air, so I was delighted to receive an early copy of her new narrative book of poems, In Springtime. I love the was Blake’s mind works, and she’s a word artist. This was a quick but moving read, and I really enjoyed it.
In Springtime is about an unnamed narrator lost in the woods with a dead bird (and its ghost), a small mouse, and a pregnant horse. Over the course of four days, we get a meditation on caregiving, identity, grief, nature, and more. It’s really quite beautiful. There are a lot of layers here to ruminate on, and I’m sure I only barely scratched the surface of them myself. I’m going to have to reread for sure.
One of the best parts of this book, in my opinion, is that it has plenty for people who love poetry and read a lot of it, but also for people who have very little experience with poetry. The narrative, plot-like structure draws you in and really lets you settle into the rhythm of it all.
If you like poetry — or you’re looking for an accessible entry into reading more poetry — pick this one up!
Content and Trigger Warnings
Animal death
Pregnancy and childbirth
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head is a masterful collection of poems by a master poet on womanhood, trauma, and the refugee experience. They’re heavy, but hard-hitting and moving.
Author: Warsan Shire
Publisher: Random House
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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
Poems of migration, womanhood, trauma, and resilience from the celebrated collaborator on Beyonce's Lemonade and Black Is King, award-winning Somali British poet Warsan Shire.
Mama, I made it
out of your home,
alive, raised by the
voices in my head.
With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a young girl, who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own stumbling way towards womanhood. Drawing from her own life and the lives of loved ones, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women, and teenage girls. In Shire's hands, lives spring into fullness. This is noisy life: full of music and weeping and surahs and sirens and birds. This is fragrant life: full of blood and perfume and shisha smoke and jasmine and incense. This is polychrome life: full of henna and moonlight and lipstick and turmeric and kohl.
The long-awaited collection from one of our most exciting contemporary poets, this book is a blessing, an incantatory celebration of resilience and survival. Each reader will come away changed.
TL;DR Review
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head is a masterful collection of poems by a master poet on womanhood, trauma, and the refugee experience. They’re heavy, but hard-hitting and moving.
For you if: You want to read poetry that adds to your view of the world and humanity.
Full Review
Thank you, Random House, for the advanced electronic copy of this book! It’s the first full-length poetry collection from Warsan Shire, the award-winning Somali British poet who worked with Beyonce on Lemonade and Black is King. So yes, it’s as good as you’re expecting.
The poems draw from her own experiences, loved ones’ experiences, headlines, etc. to shape a journey through womanhood, motherhood, daughterhood, being a refugee and immigrant, abuse, trauma, and defiant hope.
I feel like I need to reread this to get the full effect, but I was especially impressed with how Shire merges pop culture and poetry to make the collection feel not only modern but current and timely. She has something to say here, and you’re certainly going to hear it. And, of course, there are lines and couplets and stanzas that come out of nowhere punch you in the gut.
It’s a quick read, but worth it if you are a fan of poetry (and maybe even if you’re not).
Content and Trigger Warnings
Sexual assault / rape
Child abuse
Grief
Xenophobia
The Renunciations: Poems
As you can expect, this collection is raw and moving. But I also loved the way these poems were simultaneously layered and accessible.
Author: Donika Kelly
Publisher: Graywolf Press
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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
An extraordinary collection of endurance and transformation by the award-winning author of Bestiary
The Renunciations is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift one’s sense of self in the face of trauma. Moving between a childhood marked by love and abuse and the breaking marriage of that adult child, Donika Kelly charts memory and the body as landscapes to be traversed and tended. These poems construct life rafts and sanctuaries even in their most devastating confrontations with what a person can bear, with how families harm themselves. With the companionship of “the oracle”—an observer of memory who knows how each close call with oblivion ends—the act of remembrance becomes curative, and personal mythologies give way to a future defined less by wounds than by possibility.
In this gorgeous and heartrending second collection, we find the home one builds inside oneself after reckoning with a legacy of trauma—a home whose construction starts “with a razing.”
Review
I read The Renunciations as part of Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club with Literati. I’ve been trying to read more poetry (or, rather read poetry *in general*) this year, so I was really excited to see it in the lineup. I liked it very much, and I’m glad I read it.
This collection is heavy — it’s about the poet’s experiences with both childhood sexual abuse and the recent dissolution of her marriage to her wife. As you can expect, it’s raw and moving. But I also loved the way these poems were simultaneously layered and accessible — each of them begs to be read twice, three times. Give them that attention, though, and they’ll unfold in front of you beautifully.
Content and Trigger Warnings
Childhood sexual abuse
Incest
The Naomi Letters
The Naomi Letters is a fantastic collection with so, so many layers, and I loved reading it.
Author: Rachel Mennies
Publisher: BOA Editions
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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
The Naomi Letters is a collection of epistles, mostly love letters, written from one woman to another over the span of a year (& some); it’s a book about insomnia and suicide, about love and distance, about women poets and the role of poetry in articulating and shaping desire.
TL;DR Review
The Naomi Letters is a fantastic collection with so, so many layers, and I loved reading it.
For you if: You like epistolary works and/or poetry collections with a narrative thread.
Full Review
Thank you to BOA Editions and Rachel Mennies for sending a copy of this collection my way — I loved it. I picked it up and after only a few pages found myself completely immersed; I read the whole thing over the course of just a few hours. And what a journey.
The Naomi Letters is a collection of poems-as-letters written by the narrator to the woman she loves, Naomi. They’re separated by distance, and over the course of a year’s time, we watch the narrator ride down deep into depression (TW: suicidal thoughts), and then come back up and out a bit. Throughout, Naomi is her muse, her despair, her hope, her mirror.
There are so many layers at play here, and so many themes carefully explored. Sexuality, of course. Discomfort in and with one’s body, from both conventional beauty standards and also not knowing or admitting your own desire. Judaism. Depression and anxiety. Hope and healing.
It does get quite heavy, but there’s light at the end of its tunnel, too. It feels emotional and real and human. And along the way, the words are artwork. What more do we want than that?
Content Warnings
Suicidal thoughts and attempt
Severe depression
Body hatred
Angel & Hannah
I have nothing but so much praise for Angel & Hannah. From the first page, I was hooked, and by the last, my heart had left my body.
Author: Ishle Yi Park
Publisher: One World
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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
This sweeping, unforgettable reimagining of Romeo and Juliet tells the story of an interracial couple in 1990s New York City who are determined to protect their love against all odds
Hannah, a Korean American girl from Queens, New York, and Angel, a Puerto Rican boy from Brooklyn, fall in love in the spring of 1993. Hannah, who comes from a strict Korean home, meets Angel, a free and beautiful boy, at a quinceañera.
Told in seasons, Angel & Hannah holds all of the tension and cadence of blank verse while adding dynamic and expressive language, creating new kinds of engrossing and magnetic forms. The hip-hop sonnets and poems are dynamic, arresting, observant, and magical, conveying the intimacies and sacrifices of love and addiction and the devastating realities of struggle and loss.
Committed to cultural details and the vernacular of Queens and Brooklyn, this is a hip-hop love story, not of the Capulets and the Montagues, but two New York City kids trying to survive and grow within their families and communities, driven by an all-consuming love.
TL;DR Review
I have nothing but so much praise for Angel & Hannah. From the first page, I was hooked, and by the last, my heart had left my body.
For you if: You like emotional books and/or want to reading more (or try reading) novels in verse.
Full Review
Thank you to One World for granting me a review copy via NetGalley. I was blown away.
Beyond flushed, sweating bodies pushed,
pushing like cattle below black & buzzing speakers, under a torn pink streamer
loose as a tendril of hair—lush—
his eyes. Darkluminous. Warm. A blush floods her.
Hannah sucks in her breath, but can't pull back.
Music fades. A hush
he's a young buck in the underbrush,
still in a disco ball dance of shadow & light
Their forbidden love instantly and wildly blooms along the Jackie Robinson Expressway.
Angel & Hannah, a novel in verse, is a Romeo and Juliet retelling about a Korean-American girl from Queens and a Puerto Rican boy from Brooklyn in the 1990s. Yes, it sounds incredible. And yes, it is incredible.
First, let’s talk about the story — emotional, beautiful, heartbreaking. Hannah comes from a lonely, strict home with a secret ugliness, and Angel lives the reality of NYC in the 90s, where drug trade and violence are part of everyday life. Then the two meet at a quinceañera, and their whole worlds are turned upside down. The story is broken into four sections for the four seasons, but it moves fluidly through time across the span of several years as we watch the rise and fall of their great love. There is a lot of pain in this book — addiction and loneliness and loss and heartbreak. But there is also so much beauty, and not a little bit of hope. And I so loved the fire inside Hannah and the softness inside Angel.
Now let’s talk about this novel being in verse. Ishle Yi Park breathes life into language, with poetry that’s both gritty and gorgeous. This isn’t the kind of poetry that leaves you scratching your head, feeling like you missed something — it’s the kind with rhythm and subtle rhyme that feels inevitable, that carries you forward while demanding you slow down, that breaks your heart wide open, that wants you to read it again and this time out loud. It’s the kind of poetry that will appeal to those who read a lot of poetry just as much as it will appeal to those who barely ever read poetry.
By the end, my heart had completely left my body. I wanted to flip back to page one and start all over. And I wanted to tell everyone that they should read it immediately.
Content Warnings
Pregnancy and abortion
AIDS/terminal illness
Drug and alcohol use/abuse
Domestic abuse (from the perspective of a child)
Violence
Racism and racial slurs
Sexual assault (mentioned)
Resistencia: Poems of Protest and Revolution
Resistencia is a collection of political- and social-themed poems by Latinx poets, presented in English and Spanish. It’s incredible.
Author: Mark Eisner and Tina Escaja (Editors), Julia Alvarez (Introduction)
Publisher: Tin House
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Cover Description
With a powerful and poignant introduction from Julia Alvarez, Resistencia: Poems of Protest and Revolution is an extraordinary collection, rooted in a strong tradition of protest poetry and voiced by icons of the movement and some of the most exciting writers today. The poets of Resistencia explore feminist, queer, Indigenous, and ecological themes alongside historically prominent protests against imperialism, dictatorships, and economic inequality. Within this momentous collection, poets representing every Latin American country grapple with identity, place, and belonging, resisting easy definitions to render a nuanced and complex portrait of language in rebellion.
Included in English translation alongside their original language, the fifty-four poems in Resistencia are a testament to the art of translation as much as the act of resistance. An all-star team of translators, including former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera along with young, emerging talent, have made many of the poems available for the first time to an English-speaking audience. Urgent, timely, and absolutely essential, these poems inspire us all to embrace our most fearless selves and unite against all forms of tyranny and oppression.
TL;DR Review
Resistencia is a collection of political- and social-themed poems by Latinx poets, presented in English and Spanish. It’s incredible.
For you if: You like poetry with a purpose.
Full Review
Big thanks to Tin House for granting me an advanced review copy of this poetry collection on NetGalley. I loved it, and I think that I will be purchasing a finished copy when it comes out on September 15 (which is also, btw, the start of National Latinx Heritage Month).
This is an incredibly powerful collection. Allow me to list its merits: An introduction by Julia Alvarez. 54 incredible poems by incredible Latinx poets, “icons of the movement and some of the most exciting writers today.” All translated by equally talented people. The translated versions printed alongside the original Spanish. Comprehensive profiles of the poets and the translators, doing each of them justice.
Yes, you need this book.
If you couldn’t guess from all that, the poems themselves are just so good. They’re beautiful, moving, enraging, heartbreaking — I highlighted so many. There are layers to parse through, re-reads of this collection to be completed in the future. They range in subject matter from feminism, being queer, being Indigenous, the environment, identity, home, family, and so much more. I especially loved “The Earth Is a Satellite of the Moon,” but there are also so many more I could list out here.
Maybe I would list all 54.
In the Dark, Soft Earth
In the Dark, Soft Earth is a poetry collection filled with short but sharp and atmospheric poems rooted in nature.
Author: Frank Watson
Publisher: Plum White Press
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Cover Description
Dig into this delectable journey through the dark, sensual, and ravishing poetry of Frank Watson. Ruminate the searing to the sultry as you absorb this haunting lilt of burning carnality. The poems ignite rapid and surprising shifts in focus and perspective as they twist and turn your preconceptions, allowing the implications to linger in your thoughts.
Vignette verses explore the workings of love, nature, spirituality, and dreams with sprinklings of tarot symbolism and jazzy blues. Together these verses contemplate the subtle underpinnings of a soft earth.
TL;DR Review
In the Dark, Soft Earth is a poetry collection filled with short but sharp and atmospheric poems rooted in nature.
For you if: You want to read some poems that are easy to relax into.
Full Review
I will preface this review by saying that I am not the most skilled reader of poems. I’m reading more of them and trying to get better at it! Also, big thanks to Plum White Press for sending me an ebook copy for review.
In the Dark, Soft Earth is a collection of mostly super-short poems interspersed with visual art that really adds to the reading experience. They’re very atmospheric, very moody, some almost gothic feeling. They contain a lot of imagery about nature and sensuality, often together. It’s broken into ten parts, each of which comes with its own theme and body and mood.
I found the poems easy to sink into and easy to read quickly. I’m not sure if I found them to carry a ton of substance, but again, I’m a beginner poetry reader. But what they did do is skim the surface of my emotions, transport me into a world of shadow and light and green things and sensuality and feeling. And sometimes, I think, that’s just what we need.
Three Poems
This is a small but hard-hitting poetry collection about three stages of life: youth, cyclical aging, and both death and birth. Hannah Sullivan is a master with words.
Author: Hannah Sullivan
Publisher: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
“You, Very Young in New York” paints the portrait of a great American city, paying close attention to grand designs as well as local details, and coalescing in a wry and tender study of romantic possibility, disappointment, and the obduracy of innocence. “Repeat Until Time” shifts the scene to California and combines a poetic essay on the nature of repetition with an enquiry into pattern-making of a personal as well as a philosophical kind. “The Sandpit After Rain” explores the birth of a child and death of a father with exacting clarity.
TL;DR Review
This is a small but hard-hitting poetry collection about three stages of life: youth, cyclical aging, and both death and birth. Hannah Sullivan is a master with words.
For you if: You like to read poetry or want to challenge yourself to get better at it.
Full Review
Now it is April and another summer. As you go past the subway
An older, also shoeless guy leaps out and shouts, “Girl, hey.”He starts to twirl a topless bowler and it dips like an early swallow.
He raps, “I love you, girl,” getting low, and the sky over the Park
Whitens in a punched-out square, as one unlit cab follows
Another down Fifth and, through tears, you are laughing.
Three Poems was a really beautiful collection. I’m not super experienced reading poetry, but I’m trying to do it more often so that I’ll get better every time. This one challenged me a little bit, but it was so worth it. Hannah Sullivan is just so masterful.
As you’d guess from the title, this collection has three long poems in it. Each poem is broken down into subsections of a sort, and the subsections use different forms — couplets, long stanzas, etc. The first poem talks about youth, and feeling stuck in it, and feeling free in it. The second poem talks about how life is cyclical. And the third poem looks at death and birth side by side, after the author’s father died as her first child was born.
The three poems all definitely feel connected to one another, not just because they are in the same book or because Sullivan wrote all three — but because she constantly brings you back and back. A line here, a phrase there, a moment of recall up ahead. There’s a powerful through line that tugs you onward.
It’s amazing how Sullivan triggered feelings of nostalgia in me, even for experiences I’ve never had. I’ll probably be rereading this one very soon — I’m sure I’ll get even more out of it.
Trigger Warnings
Pregnancy / childbirth
Death / grief
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An American Sunrise: Poems
Did you really expect me to give the first Native American to be named Poet Laureate of the United States anything less than five stars? Thank you so much to W. W. Norton for sending me a free finished copy — I enjoyed it so immensely.
In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family’s lands and opens a dialogue with history. In An American Sunrise, Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where her people, and other indigenous families, essentially disappeared. From her memory of her mother’s death, to her beginnings in the native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo’s personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings. Her poems sing of beauty and survival, illuminating a spirituality that connects her to her ancestors and thrums with the quiet anger of living in the ruins of injustice. A descendent of storytellers and “one of our finest — and most complicated — poets” (Los Angeles Review of Books), Joy Harjo continues her legacy with this latest powerful collection.
Author: Joy Harjo | Publisher: W. W. Norton
Rating: 5/5
My mother had the iron pot given to her by her Cherokee mother, whose mother gave it to her, given to her by the U.S. government on the Trail of Tears.
She grew flowers in it.
Did you really expect me to give the first Native American to be named Poet Laureate of the United States anything less than five stars? Thank you so much to W. W. Norton for sending me a free finished copy — I enjoyed it so immensely.
Joy Harjo is, of course, masterful. The way she used not only the words themselves but also the shapes of words, the break of words, but sounds of words — it’s like watching someone paint with language. I was especially impressed with her ability to cut a line at the exact spot where the thought up till then makes sense, but it’s not until you keep reading that the thought completes and you really understand what she meant, and it literally (literally) steals your breath away. Like this:
The children were stolen from these beloved lands by the government.
Their hair was cut, their toys and handmade clothes ripped
From them. They were bathed in pesticides
And now clean, given prayers in a foreign language to recite
As they were lined up to sleep alone in their army-issued cages.
Some of the poems in this collection were much more abstract than others, and it took me a lot longer than I had expected to get through its ~100 pages. Sometimes I read poems three, four times. Sometimes I read a section over and over, peeling it away little by little.
If you are new (or new-ish) to poetry, expect to spend time with it, like I had to. Still, it will be well worth your effort. How truly fortunate we are to live in an age where collections like this reach the masses, tell stories, open our eyes.
No matter — you are born of those
Who kept ceremonial embers burning in their hands
All through the miles of relentless massacre
All the way to sunrise
You will make it through —
The Summer of Dead Birds
Rating: 5/5 | I impulse-purchased this book after seeing it on Feminist Press' Instagram channel. I've never disliked anything they published, and it looked beautiful, so I bought it. A+ DECISION, DEEDI. The Summer of Dead Birds was a heartbreakingly beautiful story told in poems that I will surely lend to many people and read several times over. (Click the post to read more.)
In a chronicle of mourning and survival, Ali Liebegott wallows in loneliness and overassigns meaning to everyday circumstance, clinging to an aging dog and obsessing over dead birds. But these unpretentious vignettes are laced with compassion, as she learns to balance the sting of death with the tender strangeness of life.
Author: Ali Liebegott | Publisher: Feminist Press
Rating: 5/5
I impulse-purchased this book after seeing it on Feminist Press' Instagram channel. I've never disliked anything they published, and it looked beautiful, so I bought it. A+ DECISION, DEEDI. The Summer of Dead Birds was a heartbreakingly beautiful story told in poems that I will surely lend to many people and read several times over.
Ali Liebegott hits the nail on the head with this collection's themes of grief, loss, fear, and love. Each poem is the type that you get halfway through reading and want to start over again, because you know that you need to savor the words and meaning more, but you can't stop halfway because you're so drawn in, and so you finish it and then read it again. And maybe a third time for good measure.
At only about 100 pages, the collection is short and will probably take you about an hour to read. Be prepared for that to be an emotional hour, in the best way. I read it on my commute, the first half in the morning and the second half in the evening. But by the time I got to work, I was emotional and sad and wanted to stay that way for a little while. So when I do it all again, I'll make sure I'm on my couch with a blanket and a cup of coffee or glass of wine (depending on the time of day), and I'll read it straight through.
Give yourself the gift of this collection. You won't regret it.
Milk and Honey
Rating: 4/5 | Wow. I am unsurprised that this collection of poems has received so much acclaim. What a heartbreaking and uplifting journey. (Click the post to read more.)
milk and honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. It is about the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity. It is split into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose, deals with a different pain, heals a different heartache. milk and honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.
Author: Rupi Kaur
Rating: 4/5
Wow. I am unsurprised that this collection of poems has received so much acclaim. What a heartbreaking and uplifting journey.
I am somewhat new to the genre of poetry in my reading, and I feel like this book was a good place to start. You can tell from the experiences portrayed that it was written by a young woman, but it doesn't ever feel juvenile. I found plenty of poems and stanzas that I could relate to, and some of them walloped me in the stomach with emotion. It was a strong reminder that although our experiences are entirely individual, they are also communal; the pain we experience as humans is never unique, and we are not alone. And it passes.