Showing titles in Death, Grief & Loss

The story of Belvie Rooks and Dedan Gills, their journey and their transformation, is “as old as eternity and as new as now.” As individuals, Dedan and Belvie were already activists, mentors, and voices for justice, but in their union, they became an even greater force for compassion and love.

Following several of his internationally acclaimed, beloved novels, A Year of Last Things is Michael Ondaatje’s long-awaited return to poetry. In pieces that are sometimes wittily funny, moving, and always wise, we journey back through time by way of alchemical leaps, unearthing writings by revered masters, moments of shared tenderness, and abandoned landscapes we hold onto to rediscover the influence of every border crossed.

This is a poetry collection dedicated to victims of gun violence. It chronicles the families' pain and gives the victims a voice. it is designed to encourage the youth to put the guns down and just enjoy living life.

Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics - of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience.

Moving between glimpses of life in relative peacetime and absurdist poems about surviving in a barely liveable occupation, Forest of Noise invites a wide audience into an experience that defies the imagination — even as it is watched live. This is an extraordinary and arrestingly whimsical book, that brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering.

If you feel like you're running out of time, if you're grieving a relationship or worried you haven't yet experienced one, if you're unsure what to do with your life or if you're making the right decisions, if you find yourself comparing your milestones to everyone else's, if you feel weighed down by the pressure to succeed, if you feel like you're growing one day but feel stuck the next, if you feel lost... this is a poetry collection for you.

Welcome to the world of shadows, cloaked in perpetual starlight; its denizens are a mysterious and frightening breed. And sometimes, just sometimes, their eldritch whispers and murmurs can cross the boundaries of reality and enter our darkest dreams. Richard Groller and his troupe of dead and living poets pull back the veil in The Book of Night, revealing the terrifying denizens of the shadows.

When I was in the fourth grade, we had a map of Vietnam on our kitchen wall. When my mother received an airmail letter, she would walk to the map and move one of the stickpins to a new location to see if one of her brothers was in harm’s way in some new hot spot or battle. I spent a lot of time worrying about that map. I had five uncles in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. This is a book about going off to war, a book about coming back home, and a book about those who are left behind. I dedicate this book to those voices, my family, and every voice calling out at times of war.

Osyp Vasyl'ovych Turyans'kyy—vydatnyy ukrayins'kyy pys'mennyk i literaturnyy krytyk. Tyazhkyy i zhorstokyy zhyttyevyy shlyakh pys'mennyka znayshov svoye vidobrazhennya u yoho tvorchosti, zokrema, u povisti-poemi Poza mezhamy bolyu. Tsey antyvoyennyy psykholohichnyy tvir, napysanyy u 1917 rotsi, opysuye vtechu avstiys'kykh soldativ z viys'koho polonu v period Pershoyi svitovoyi viyny. Povist'-poema Poza mezhamy bolyu vrazhaye realistychnym vidobrazhennyam zhorstokykh umov, v yakykh opynyvsya holovnyy heroy.

The Only Worlds We Know is a nuanced and tactile look at both sobriety and what comes after. Patient meditations on loss and the land where the people we love live and are also buried.

From NPR correspondent and New York Times bestselling author, Kwame Alexander, comes a powerful and provocative collection of poems that cut to the heart of the entrenched racism and oppression in America and eloquently explores ongoing events.

This is an account of a life lived online. Swiping for approval. Scrolling for gratification. Searching for connection. From the glow of a screen in the middle of the night, to the harsh glare of the hospital waiting room, Validate Me, is a raw and honest look at the highs and the lows of a digital life.

In this particular collection, I present to you the darkness and its many forms. Whether it is the darkness around us or within, it manifests in many ways. Arising as shades of fear, melancholy, rage, guilt, or complete emptiness. When the last embers of light have gone out, what then does the darkness dream about? Come inside and see…

In Trace Evidence, the urgent follow-up to his award-winning debut Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, Charif Shanahan continues his piercing meditations on the intricacies of mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the US and abroad. With rich lyricism, power, and tenderness, Trace Evidence centers the racial periphery and excavates the vestiges of our violent colonial past in the most intimate aspects of our lives.

From famous spoken word poet, artistic educator, and founder/CEO of “Called to Move” Brandon Leake comes his debut poetry collection Unraveling. In an era of self love, the ability to love oneself is only as effective as the ability to know oneself. Throughout his collection, Leake asks listeners to look at something beautiful, yet still see its flaws. On the flip side, he encourages listeners to look at something evil, and yet still see the beauty it holds.

In these poems, Kleber-Diggs names delight in the same breath as loss. Moments suffused with love—teaching his daughter how to drive; watching his grandmother bake a cake; waking beside his beloved to ponder trumpet mechanics—couple with moments of wrenching grief—a father’s life ended by a gun; mourning children draped around their mother’s waist; Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. Even in the refuge-space of dreams, a man calls the police on his Black neighbor.

A Sand Book is a poetry collection in 12 parts, a travel guide that migrates from wildfires to hurricanes, tweety bird to the president, lust to aridity, desertification to prophecy, and mother to daughter. It explores the negative space of what is happening to language and to consciousness in our strange and desperate times.

Unlike his more famous fellow war poets, Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon survived the First World War. In this collection of 64 poems, first published in 1920, Sassoon portrays the dehumanizing horror of modern warfare with its staggering death toll, while also satirizing the jingoistic fervour of politicians and armchair strategists.

Many are familiar with teacher and poet Mark Nepo's books on inner transformation, relationship, and the emergence of purpose in our lives. Less well-known is that in 1987 he was diagnosed with cancer, and the revelations during that time would inform every dimension of his work to follow. With Inside the Miracle, Mark Nepo shares what he discovered along this challenging terrain and the insights most essential to those of us who now find ourselves there.

The Perseverance is the remarkable debut book by British-Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus. Ranging across history and continents, these poems operate in the spaces in between, their haunting lyrics creating new, hybrid territories. The Perseverance is a book of loss, contested language and praise, where elegies for the poet's father sit alongside meditations on the d/Deaf experience.