National Network for Equitable Library Service

Swinging from post-explosion Beirut to a Montreal balcony in summer, the verse and prose poems in THE GOOD ARABS ground the reader in place, language, and the body. Peeling and rinsing radishes. Dancing as a pre-teen to Nancy Ajram. Being drenched in stares on the city bus. The collection is an interlocking and rich offering of the speaker's communities, geographical surroundings both expansive and precise, and family both biological and chosen. THE GOOD ARABS gifts the reader with insight into cycles and repetition in ourselves and our broken nations.

Through lyric and language poetry, this book explores and reimagines archives and histories of transsexuality and gender-from psychoanalysis, sexology, literature, anthropology, and feminism, as well as personal history.

It is not wise to waste the life / Against a stubborn will. / Yet would we die as some have done. / Beating a way for the rising sun wrote Arna Bontemps. In The Day-Breakers, poet Michael Fraser imagines the swords raised and lives lost by the thousands of Black soldiers who fought for the Union during the American Civil War--of whom hundreds were Canadian, fighting for the freedom of their African Brethren.

Woman Without Shame is a moving collection of songs, elegies, and declarations that chronicle her pilgrimage toward rebirth and the recognition of her prerogative as a woman artist. These bluntly honest and often humorous meditations on memory, desire, and the essential nature of love blaze a path toward self-awareness. For Cisneros, Woman Without Shame is the culmination of her search for home--in the Mexico of her ancestors and in her own heart.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Pick  Named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker  “Paul Tran’s debut collection of poems is indelible, this remarkable voice transforming itself as you read, eventually transforming you.” —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel “This powerful debut marshals narrative lyrics and stark beauty to address personal and political violence.” — New York Times Book Review   A profound meditation on physical, emotional, and psychological transformation in the aftermath of imperial violence and interpersonal abuse, fro

Nima doesn't feel understood. By her mother, who grew up far away in a different land. By her suburban town, which makes her feel too much like an outsider to fit in and not enough like an outsider to belong somewhere else. At least she has her childhood friend Haitham, with whom she can let her guard down and be herself. Until she doesn't. As the ground is pulled out from under her, Nima must grapple with the phantom of a life not chosen, the name her parents didn't give her at birth: Yasmeen. But that other name, that other girl, might be more real than Nima knows.

The 115th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, What Noise Against the Cane is a lyric quest for belonging and freedom, weaving political resistance, Caribbean folklore, immigration, and the realities of Black life in America. Desiree C. Bailey begins by reworking the epic in an oceanic narrative of bondage and liberation in the midst of the Haitian Revolution. The poems move into the contemporary Black diaspora, probing the mythologies of home, belief, nation, and womanhood. Series judge Carl Phillips observes that Bailey's "poems argue for hope and faith equally ...

The debut poetry collection from Grammy-nominated recording artist and slam poet Tarriona "Tank" Ball about infatuation, love, and heartbreak. The real-life story of a relationship in the author's past told in verse and short prose pieces. Relatable and honest, with Tank's signature mix of whimsy and realness, Vulnerable AF is about the difference between love and infatuation, the danger and confusion of losing yourself in the idea of someone else, and coming out on the other side of heartbreak with your sense of self-worth--and your sense of humor--stronger for it.

In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, Vuong’s poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.

Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award Jericho Brown's daring book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive.