Oakland Public Library: It's National Poetry Month!

Press release from the Oakland Public Library:

Rebekah Eppley

April 5th, 2021

April is National Poetry Month and Oakland Public Library has many new poetry books in our collection to help you celebrate. Some of the poets featured below may be familiar to you and others may be new. Some are available in print format and others are e-books that you can access through our catalog. Enjoy diving into these poet's words!

We want it all : an anthology of radical trans poetics / edited by Andrea Abi-Karam & Kay Gabriel Writing in dialogue with emancipatory political movements, the intergenerational writers assembled here imagine an altogether overturned world in poems that pursue the particular and multiple trans relationships to desire, embodiment, housing, sex, ecology, history, pop culture, and the working day

Words like thunder : new and used Anishinaabe prayers / Lois Beardslee Tackling contemporary topics like climate change and socioeconomic equality with a grace and readability that empowers readers and celebrates the strengths of today's indigenous peoples, Beardslee transforms the mundane into the sacred.

Burning sugar : poems / Cicely Belle BlainIn this incendiary debut collection, activist and poet Cicely Belle Blain intimately revisits familiar spaces in geography, in the arts, and in personal history to expose the legacy of colonization and its impact on Black bodies.

Whale day : and other poems / Billy CollinsBilly Collins's thirteenth collection, and first in four years, contains more than fifty new poems that showcase the playfulness, wit, and wisdom that have made him one of our most celebrated and widely read poets.

The breakbeat poets volume 4 [electronic resource] : Latinext / Felicia Chavez Poets speak from an array of nationalities, genders, sexualities, races, and writing styles, staking a claim to our cultural and civic space.

In the lateness of the world / Carolyn ForchéHer first new collection in seventeen years, Forché's In the Lateness of the World is a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders, but also between the present and the past, life and death. The poems call to the reader from the end of the world where they are sifting through the aftermath of history.

Here is the sweet hand : poems / francine j. harris The poems in Here is the Sweet Hand explore solitude as a way of seeing. In particular, the speakers in francine j. harris's third collection investigate the mystique, and myth, of female loneliness as it relates to Blackness, aging, landscape, and artistic tradition.

Bodega [electronic resource] : Poems / Su HwangAgainst the backdrop of the war on drugs and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, a Korean girl comes of age in her parents' bodega in the Queensbridge projects, offering a singular perspective on our nation of immigrants and the tensions pulsing in the margins where they live and work. BLACK GIRL, CALL HOME / Jasmine Mans 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 tofind truth, belonging, and healing.

I am the rage [electronic resource] : A black poetry collection / Martina McGowan From two Black women of two different generations, I am The Rage provides insights that no think piece on racism can; putting readers in the position of feeling, reflecting, and facing what it means to be Black in America.

A heart full of hallways / Greer Nakadegawa-Lee It's at once a rallying cry written in the language of a nature poem, and an earnest look at what it feels like to be lost inside one's own head. Walking the line between external and internal experiences, this collection wants to talk about what it means to be human.

When the light of the world was subdued, our songs came through : a Norton anthology of Native nations poetry / editors, Joy Harjo, LeAnne Howe, Jennifer Elise FoersterUnited States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo gathers the work of more than 160 poets, representing nearly 100 indigenous nations, into the first historically comprehensive Native poetry anthology.

American melancholy : poems / Joyce Carol OatesLoss, love, and memory are investigated, along with the upheavals of our modern age, the reality of our current predicaments, and the ravages of poverty, racism, and social unrest.

Not go away is my name / Alberto Ríos Resistance and persistence collide in Alberto Rios's sixteenth book, Not Go Away Is My Name, a book about past and present, changing and unchanging, letting go and holding on.

A nail the evening hangs on / Monica Sok In her debut collection, Monica Sok uses poetry to reshape a family's memory about the Khmer Rouge regime--memory that is both real and imagined--according to a child of refugees.

All descriptions provided by the publishers.

This press release was produced by the Oakland Public Library. The views expressed here are the author’s own.