April is here, and that means it’s time to celebrate National Poetry Month! Whether you’re a lifelong lover of verse or just beginning to explore poetry, this is the perfect opportunity to discover new voices, revisit classic works, and immerse yourself in the power of language. At Seymour Library, we’re highlighting an exciting selection of poetry this month, featuring both celebrated and emerging poets.
Celebrate National Poetry Month at Seymour Library!
No matter what type of poetry speaks to you, we invite you to celebrate with us by checking out our curated list of poetry books. Explore the beauty of verse, attend our Poetry Open Mic Night, or write your own poetry this month – all perfect ways to celebrate! Join us at Seymour Library as we showcase the art of poetry and the incredible voices that shape it.
What better way to kick off than to dive into a book teeming with verse and prose? Here are some of the featured books of poetry available at Seymour Library:
Description: 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
Description: 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. Moving from a Sri Lankan boarding school to Moliere’s chair during his last stage performance, to Bulgarian churches and their icons, to a California coast, and his beloved Canadian rivers, Michael Ondaatje casts a brilliant eye that merges his past and present, in the way memory and the distant shores of art and lost friends continue to influence all that surrounds him.
Description: Barely thirty years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current siege of Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed and destroyed his house, pulverizing a library
Description: Barely thirty years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current siege of Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed and destroyed his house, pulverizing a library he had painstakingly built for community use, he and his family fled for their safety. Not for the first time in their lives. Somehow, amid the chaos, Abu Toha kept writing poems. These are those poems. Uncannily clear, direct, andbeautifully tuned, they form one of the most astonishing works of art wrested from wartime. Here are directives for what to do in an air raid; here are lyrics about the poet’s wife, singing to his children to distract them. Huddled in the dark, Abu Toha remembers his grandfather’s oranges, his daughter’s joy in eating them. Moving between glimpses of life in relative peacetime and absurdist poems about surviving in a barely livable occupation, Forest of Noise invites a wide audience into an experience that defies the imagination–even as it is watched live. Abu Toha’s poems introduce readers to his extended family, some of them no longer with us. This is an urgent, extraordinary, and arrestingly whimsical book. Searing and beautiful, it brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering.
Description: Vincent Toro’s third collection of poetry is a work of Latinxfuturism that confronts the relationship human beings have with technology. The poems are meditations on social media and
Description: Vincent Toro’s third collection of poetry is a work of Latinxfuturism that confronts the relationship human beings have with technology. The poems are meditations on social media and surveillance culture, satires on science fiction and the space race, interrogations of artificial intelligence, cyborg economics, and biohacking, and tributes to women and queer and BIPOC people who have contributed and are contributing to human survival and progress in a technology obsessed world.
Description: Bypass is the third collection of poetry by John Queor. Featuring love letters, vintage photographs, and more, this one-of-a-kind collection of poetry is a medical journal that details memories, dreams, journal entries, battles, hopes, deep thoughts, wars, and most of all love.
Description: This epic narrative begins with Rupert Brooke, “the handsomest young man in England” and perhaps its most famous young poet in the halcyon days of the Edwardian Age, and ends five years later with Wilfred Owen, killed in action at twenty-five, only one week before the armistice.
Description: This epic narrative begins with Rupert Brooke, “the handsomest young man in England” and perhaps its most famous young poet in the halcyon days of the Edwardian Age, and ends five years later with Wilfred Owen, killed in action at twenty-five, only one week before the armistice. With bitter irony, Owen’s mother received the telegram informing her of his death on November 11, just as church bells tolled to celebrate the war’s end. Korda’s dramatic account, which includes anecdotes from his own family history, not only brings to life the soldier poets but also paints an unforgettable picture of life and death in the trenches and the sacrifice of an entire generation. His cast of characters includes the young American poet Alan Seeger, who was killed in action as a private in the French Foreign Legion; Isaac Rosenberg, whose parents had fled czarist anti-Semitic persecution and who was killed in action at the age of twenty-eight before his fame as a poet and a painter was recognized; Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, whose friendship and friendly rivalry endured through long, complicated private lives; and, finally, Owen, whose fame came only posthumously and whose poetry remains some of the most savage and heartbreaking to emerge from the cataclysmic war.expanded when the show more button is clicked by the visitor.
Description: Elegant, profound, and intoxicating–this is the author’s first major collection of poetry after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Digest. Moving fluidly between considerations of the hip-hop group NWA
Description: Elegant, profound, and intoxicating–this is the author’s first major collection of poetry after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Digest. Moving fluidly between considerations of the hip-hop group NWA, Tituba, the only Black woman to be accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials, MOVE, the movement and militant separatist group famous for its violent stand-offs with the Philadelphia Police Department (“flames rose like orchids . . . blocks lay open like egg cartons”) and more-Pardlo ponders the development of his own identity and sense of self as it was shaped against the glaring forces of whiteness. At times challenging and at other times warm, inviting, and deeply personal (“Only by loving every child of this earth / can we be worthy of loving our own”), Spectral Evidence forces us to consider how we think about devotion, beauty and art, about the criminalization and death of Black lives, about justice and how these have been inscribed into our present, our history, and the Western canon.
Description: A. B. Spellman is an acclaimed American poet, music critic, and arts administrator. He is widely recognized as a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a cultural and literary movement that emphasized Black identity, pride, and artistic expression.
Description: A. B. Spellman is an acclaimed American poet, music critic, and arts administrator. He is widely recognized as a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a cultural and literary movement that emphasized Black identity, pride, and artistic expression. Between the Night and Its Music brings together A. B. Spellman’s early work with a collection of powerful new poems. Spellman’s literary career took flight in 1965 with his debut poetry collection, The Beautiful Days, which introduced his distinctive voice blending elements of jazz, blues, and African oral traditions. In 1966, Four Lives in the Bebop Business established Spellman as a respected music critic and scholar. It was a groundbreaking work that chronicled the lives and struggles of four influential jazz musicians. Spellman held senior positions at the National Endowment for the Arts for thirty years, with a lasting impact on arts funding for inner cities and rural and tribal communities. In addition to poems from The Beautiful Days (1965) and Things I Must Have Known (2008), this book contains a trove of new and uncollected poems, confirming Spellman’s continued centrality to contemporary American literature. This is an essential volume for readers already familiar with Spellman, and an excellent introduction for new readers. Lauri Scheyer’s introduction situates Spellman’s work within jazz writing, Black Arts, and American poetry broadly.
Description: Jorie Graham’s fifteenth poetry collection, To 2040, opens in a question punctuated as fact: “Are we / extinct yet. Who owns / the map.” In these visionary new poems, Graham is part historian, part
Description: Jorie Graham’s fifteenth poetry collection, To 2040, opens in a question punctuated as fact: “Are we / extinct yet. Who owns / the map.” In these visionary new poems, Graham is part historian, part cartographer as she plots an apocalyptic world where rain must be translated, silence sings louder than speech, and wired birds parrot recordings of their extinct ancestors. In one poem, the speaker is warned by a clairvoyant that “the American experiment will end in 2030.” Graham shows us multiple potential futures–soundtracked by sirens among the ruins, contemplating the loss of those species who inhabited them and those who named them.
Description: The National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet writes a stunning memorial work that excavates the forgotten experience of West Indian soldiers during World War I.
Description: The National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet writes a stunning memorial work that excavates the forgotten experience of West Indian soldiers during World War I. Deeply embedded in language both sensuous and biblical, Ishion Hutchinson’s School of Instructions memorializes the experience of West Indian soldiers volunteering in British regiments in the Middle East during World War I. The poem narrates the psychic and physical terrors of these young Black fighters as they struggle against the colonial power they served; their story overlaps with that of Godspeed, a schoolboy living in rural Jamaica of the 1990s. This visionary collision, in which the horizontal, documentary shape of the narrative is interrupted by sudden lyric effusions, unsettles both time and event, mapping great moments of heroism onto the trials of everyday existence. It reshapes grand gestures of heroism in a music of supple, vigilant intensity. Elegiac, epochal, and lyrical, School of Instructions confronts the legacy of imperial silencing and weaves shards of remembrance–“your word mass / your mix match / your jamming of elements”– into a unique form of survival. It is a masterpiece of imaginative recuperation by a poet of prodigious gifts.
Don’t have the time to stop by the library in person? With the power of your mobile device, you can access some of the best poetry available on eBooks and eAudiobooks! Search for your favorite poets or browse to find a wealth of outstanding poetry!
We hope you will explore and discover these works and many more during National Poetry Month at Seymour Library! Let poetry inspire and motivate you this April.
