April is National Poetry Month, and everyone is celebrating, even Bill Murray. Obviously, you don’t want to miss out on all the fun, so here are some books of poetry and books about poetry from the New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections.
Books of Poetry
- The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink edited by Kevin Young includes both classic and contemporary poems on food and the experience of eating.
- Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine is a meditation on race and racial aggressions in contemporary American society.
- If the Tabloids Are True What Are You? by Matthea Harvey is a combination of prose poetry and visual artwork.
- Before the Next Bomb Drops: Rising up from Brooklyn to Palestine by Remi Kanazi examines the lives of Palestinians living in the Middle East and around the world.
Books about Poetry
- The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988-2014 by David Lehman is a compilation of forewords from the acclaimed annual series, The Best American Poetry.
- Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures by Mary Ruefle is a compilation of biannual lectures delivered to graduate students studying poetry.
- I Too Have Some Dreams: N. M. Rashed and Modernism in Urdu Poetry by A. Sean Pue explores the work of N. M. Rashed, Urdu’s renowned modernist poet.
- The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter by William Wootten examines the cultural influence of poetry produced in the 1950s and 1960s.
And just in case poetry isn’t your cup of tea, there’s always Anders Nilsen’s sketchbook/graphic novel Poetry is Useless.