Popular North American Poetry Books

Find poetry books written by authors from North America for the next part of the Read Around The World Challenge. (45)

21.

How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) : Poetry by Barbara Kingsolver EN

Rating: 5 (1 vote)
Description:
In this intimate collection, the beloved author of The Poisonwood Bible and more than a dozen other New York Times bestsellers, winner or finalist for the Pulitzer and countless other prizes, now trains her eye on the everyday and the metaphysical in poems that are smartly crafted, emotionally rich, and luminous. In her second poetry collection, Barbara Kingsolver offers reflections on the practical, the spiritual, and the wild. She begins with "how to" poems addressing everyday matters such as being hopeful, married, divorced; shearing a sheep; praying to unreliable gods; doing nothing at all... continue

22.

Knitting the Fog by Claudia D. Hernández EN

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Description:
A young Guatemalan immigrant's adolescence is shaped by her journey to the US, as she grapples with Chapina tradition and American culture.

23.

Luisa in Realityland by Claribel Alegría, Pedro Caubet, Darwin Flakoll, Erik Flakoll EN

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Description:
Claribel Alegria combines poetry, fiction, and historical narrative about her early childhood in Santa Ana, El Salvador.

24.

Midsummer by Derek Walcott EN

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Description:
Most of the poems in this sequence of fifty where written in close succession during one summer in Trinidad. Their principle themes are the relationship of poetry to painting, the stasis of midsummer in the tropics, and the pull of the sea, family and friendship. Walcott records the experience of middle life - in reality and in memory or the imagination. On the publication of Derek Walcott's previous collection, The Fortunate Traveller, Blake Morrison wrote in the London Review of Books: ' The Forunate Traveller is an impressive collection that moves lucidly and at times brilliantly between ab... continue

25.

Night Vision : Poems by Kendel Hippolyte EN

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Description:
Because we see with history, it is difficult to see through it. And yet we must or we become it, become nothing else but history. It is this challenge, laid down in the powerful title poem of this collection, which Kendel Hippolyte takes up in Night Vision. And the history that Hippolyte penetrates is a history of the change overtaking the island of St. Lucia. As town becomes city and city spreads like a cancer, the poet's searching verse finds among the waste of humanity, nature, and culture a microcosm of the transforming Caribbean-from tradition, community, rooted identity, to social fragme... continue

26.

Noopiming : The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson EN

Rating: 5 (1 vote)
Description:
"Noopiming is Anishinaabemowin for "in the bush," and the title is a response to English Canadian settler and author Susanna Moodie's 1852 memoir Roughing It in the Bush. Set in the same place as Moodie's colonial memoir, this genre-fluid novel is offered as a cure for Moodie's racist treatment of Mississauga Nishnaabeg in her writing. The giant Sabe meditates on the gifts and challenges of their recent sobriety. Migrating geese make a case for coordinated formation as a way to get out of "one's own cycling head." Racoons turn Bougie Kwe's Zen-garden pond into their personal urban spa. This is... continue

27.

Omeros by Derek Walcott EN

Rating: 4 (2 votes)
Description:
A poem of circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, which simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events -- the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslavement -- and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile.

28.

Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi, Yusef Salaam EN

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Description:
From award-winning, bestselling author Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five comes a powerful YA novel in verse about a boy who is wrongfully incarcerated. Perfect for fans of the Noughts & Crosses series and The Hate U Give.

29.

Selected Poems by Octavio Paz, G. Aroul EN

Rating: 5 (1 vote)
Description:
Octavio Paz, asserts Eliot Weinberger in his introduction to these Selected Poems, is among the last of the modernists "who drew their own maps of the world." For Latin America's foremost living poet, his native Mexico has been the center of a global mandala, a cultural configuration that, in his life and work, he has traced to its furthest reaches: to Spain, as a young Marxist during the Civil War; to San Francisco and New York in the early 1940s; to Paris, as a surrealist, in the postwar years; to India and Japan in 1952, and to the East again as his country's ambassador to India from 1962 t... continue

30.

Silk Cotton & Other Trees : Poems by Hazel Simmons-McDonald EN

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Description:
Hazel Simmonds-McDonald, a writer whose works have previously appeared in such notable journals as Savacou, The Literary Review and The Atlanta Review, provides poetry lovers with a rare treat with her debut novel of collected power, Silk Cotton and Other Trees.Artistically inspired, her poems are textured works of sound and rhythm which reveal a true ear for cadence. There is a refreshing experimentation with form and metre, ranging from the skilful manipulation of the traditional sonnet forms to free verse and prose poetry. In content, the themes are occasionally haunting and unsettling, for... continue