Showing titles in Family

The poems in Yanyi’s latest book suggest that we enter and exit our old selves like homes. We look through the windows and recognize some former aspect of our lives that is both ours and not ours. We long for what we had even as we recognize that we can no longer live there. Yanyi conjures the beloved both within and without us: the beloved we believe we know, the beloved who is never the person we imagine, and the beloved who threatens to erase us even as we stand before them.

The Threads Between Us is a deeply emotional exploration of the human experience—spanning the complexities of love, friendship, family, faith and personal growth. Through a series of poignant moments, the narrative takes listeners on a journey through life's highs and lows, from the warmth of true love to the ache of heartache, from the burdens we bear to the joy in living. Each poem is a thread in the intricate fabric of life, connecting us to those we hold dear and showing us that even in our darkest moments, we are never truly alone.

Following in the footsteps of such category killers as Milk and Honey and Whiskey Words & a Shovel I, Fariha Róisín's poetry book is a collection of her thoughts as a young, queer, Muslim femme navigating the difficulties of her intersectionality. Simultaneously, this compilation unpacks the contentious relationship that exists between Róisín and her mother, her platonic and romantic heartbreaks, and the cognitive dissonance felt as a result of being so divided among her broad spectrum of identities.

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.

Each pair of poems inspires a shift from the old way of thinking to the new: from guilt to gratitude, resistance to surrender, and fear to love. The first poem in each pair is dedicated to the old way. The second poem offers a shift in perspective that lovingly illuminates the new. Each seemingly simple poem instantly elicits a profound reset, and is coupled with beautiful line drawings that awaken not just the mind, but also the heart. The Shift’s unique poem pairings uplift the soul by offering a hopeful salve for our collective burnout.

Peter Coyote’s first collection of poetry takes us on a whirlwind tour of an eclectic and exciting life as an actor and Zen Buddhist priest, meandering from love affairs to marriage to divorce to the '60s to psychedelic spirituality and beyond. Written over several decades, these poems sound like a collage, each piece distinct and contributing to a cohesive lyric narrative.

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.

Phil Kaye’s debut collection is a stunning tribute to growing up, and all of the challenges and celebrations of the passing of time, as jagged as it may be. Kaye takes the listener on a journey from a complex but iridescent childhood, drawing them into adolescence, and finally on to adulthood. There are first kisses, lost friendships, hair blowing in the wind while driving the vastness of an empty road, and the author in the middle, trying to make sense of it all. Date & Time is a welcoming story, which freezes the calendar and allows us all to live in our best moments.

What is Autism? is a collection of poems that explains what Autism is as well as other things associated with it. The book takes a lot of information and condenses and simplifies it making it easier for people to understand. You can use this book to help with autism training.

The title poem, a series of sonnet-sized Zoom meetings - a classroom, a memorial service, an encounter with a new baby in the family - finds humor and pathos in our age of social distancing and technology-induced proximity. Salter shows too how imagination collapses time and space: In “Island Diaries”, the pragmatist Robinson Crusoe meets on the beach a shipwrecked dreamer from an earlier century, Shakespeare’s Prospero.

The work of Carl Dennis has won praise for its “integrity, its substance, and its seemingly effortless craft; and for its embodiment of passionate inquiry” (Times Literary Supplement). The title of his new collection, Earthborn, helps to point the way to its two central concerns: how to find meaning, as creatures of the earth, in lives that are short and frail and destined to be forgotten; and how, as stewards of the earth, to address the need to protect our home from ourselves, from the menace to life posed by our own species.

In a strange twist of kismet, Remica Bingham-Risher's paternal great-great-great grandmother, Minnie Lee Fowlkes, is interviewed for the Works Progress Administration Slave Narratives in Petersburg, Virginia in 1937, and her maternal grandmother, Mary Knight, is sent to Petersburg in 1941, diagnosed with "water on the brain"—postpartum depression being an ongoing mystery—nine days after birthing her first child.

Through poems of immense emotion, and the use of alluring form, Abraham crafts work that examines what we come to own by existing.

Following on his exquisite Stones, Young's new collection shapes stories of familial and familiar love, inspired in part by other lives. A central sequence, “The Two-Headed Nightngale,” is spoken by Millie-Christine McCoy, the famous conjoined African American “Carolina Twins.” Born into slavery and ill treatment as a “freak” sensation in 1851 and later free women, their alto and soprano voices harmonized, and Young's poem explores their evolving selfhood and self-understanding: “As one we sang, /we spake— / She was the body / I the soul / Without one / Perishes the whole.”

It’s that time of year again. With his signature wit, Brian Bilston returns with And So This is Christmas, fifty-one poems in celebration of the festive season: from bizarre family traditions to the office Christmas party; from voting day for turkeys to the impossible art of gift-giving. So hang your stockings, grab your mistletoe and curl up with this heart-warming collection of Christmas crackers.

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.

The Willies, Falkner’s first full-length poetry collection, offers a sharp and vulnerable portrait of the journey into queerhood in America. Departing from a more familiar coming out narrative he centers the stories of dueling selves. Masquerading white boy. Child of an addict. Closeted varsity athlete. At its core, The Willies asks us to consider who we will become if we do not grapple with what scares us most.

An acclaimed poet deepens her exploration of the domestic in a new collection of playful and wise poems The poems in Carrie Fountain’s third collection, The Life, exist somewhere, as Rilke says, between “our daily life” and “the great work” - an interstitial space where sidelong glances live alongside shouts to heaven. In elegant yet colloquial language, Fountain observes her children dressing themselves in fledgling layers of personhood, creating their own private worlds and personalities, and makes room for genuine marvels amid routine.

Softening Time is both autobiography and self-help, poetry and inspiration. Drawing on events in her own life, particularly her experiences as a mother, daughter, sister, and friend, Brower writes poignantly on themes of love, loss, healing, and rebirth.

The first collection of poetry from Bunmi Laditan, best-selling author of Confessions of a Domestic Failure and creator of The Honest Toddler, capturing the honesty, rawness, sheer joy, and total madness of motherhood. With the compassion and wit that have made her a social media sensation among mothers around the world, Bunmi Laditan puts into evocative and relatable words what so many of us feel but can’t quite express.