Verses to Inspire: Best Poetry Books for National Poetry Month

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. 

On January 20, 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and youngest poet to deliver a poetry reading at a presidential inauguration. Including an enduring foreword by Oprah Winfrey, this remarkable keepsake celebrates the promise of America and affirms the power of poetry. 

From Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück, a stunningly beautiful collection of poems that encompasses the natural, human, and spiritual realms. Bound together by the universal themes of time and mortality and with clarity and sureness of craft, Louise Glück's poetry questions, explores, and finally celebrates the ordeal of being alive.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple works in multiple genres, including poetry. This new collection, in both English and Spanish, ranges from life's simple joys to the importance of bearing witness. From poems of painful self-inquiry, to celebrating the simple beauty of baking frittatas, Walker offers us a window into her magical, at times difficult, and liberating world of activism, love, hope and, above all, gratitude.

In Zoom Rooms, Mary Jo Salter considers the strangeness of our recent existence, together with the enduring constants in our lives.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. 

Autobiography of Red is a deceptively simple narrative layered with currents of meaning, emotion, and the truth about what it's like to be red. It is a powerful and unsettling story that moves, disturbs, and delights. In her first novel in verse, Anne Carson bridges the gap between classicism and the modern, poetry and prose, with a volcanic journey into the soul of a winged red monster named Geryon. There is a strong mixture of whimsy and sadness in Geryon's story

Through this groundbreaking volume, Blanco unravels the very fabric of the American narrative and pursues a resolution to the inherent contradiction of our nation's psyche and mandate: e pluribus unum (out of many, one). Charged with the utopian idea that no single narrative is more important than another, this book asserts that America could and ought someday to be a country where all narratives converge into one, a country we can all be proud to love and where we can all truly thrive.

A collection of more than 125 small poems, all of them new, each a thought or observation compressed to its emotional essence--from the former United States Poet Laureate and New York Times bestselling author of Aimless Love. Here Collins writes about his trademark themes of nature, animals, poetry, mortality, absurdity, and love--all in a handful of lines. Neither haiku nor limerick, the small poem pushes to an extreme poetry's famed power to condense emotional and conceptual meaning.

When it appeared in 1924, this work launched into the international spotlight a young, unknown poet whose writings would ignite a generation. Merwin's incomparable translation faces the original Spanish text in this volume that continues to inspire lovers and poets.