Highlighting Diverse Collections: National Poetry Month
Celebrated every April since 1996, National Poetry Month recognizes the importance of poetry and poets’ role in our culture and society. On the heels of both Women’s History Month observed every March, and World Poetry Day on March 21, we would like to share a selection of contemporary women poets from around the globe. While nowhere near exhaustive, the following poetry collections at UT Libraries are a great way to start celebrating and thinking about the impact women, poetry, and women poets from both the US and abroad have had.
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Acclaimed poet and Young People's Poet Laureate Naomi Shihab Nye shines a spotlight on the things we cast away. With poems about food wrappers, lost mittens, plastic straws, refugee children, the environment, connection, community, immigration, time and more, all that we carry and all that we discard, this rich, engaging, moving, and sometimes humorous collection is for readers of all ages.
With her first full-length poetry collection, award-winning Somali British poet, Warsan Shire, introduces us to a young girl, who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own way toward womanhood. Drawing from her own life, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women and teenage girls.
An astonishing collection about interconnectedness--between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves--from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world's pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings--and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they "do not / care to be seen as symbols"?
Schizophrene traces the intersections of migration and mental illness as they unfold in post-Partition diasporic communities. Bhanu Kapil brings forward the question of a healing narrative and explores trauma and place through a somatic, poetic and cross-cultural psychiatric enquiry. Who was here? Who will never be here? Who has not yet arrived and never will? Towards an arrival without being, this notebook-book returns a body to a site, the shards re-forming in mid-air: for an instant.
This volume is a translation of Choi Seung-ja's 1991 anthology titled Portrait of a Suburbanite. Published in the series of "100 Prominent Korean Poets" by Mirae Press, the poems in this volume were selected from four of Choi's previous works. Speaking with a fierce sense of equality and independence, Choi Seung-ja's poetry battled ossified forms of language not only on the political but also the personal front.
Poetry that acts as a fierce and loving resistance to violence. Art can't shield our bodies or stabilize the earth's climate, but Evie Shockley's semiautomatic insists that it can feed the spirit and reawaken the imagination. The volume responds primarily to the twenty-first century's inescapable evidence of the terms of black life--not so much new as newly visible. The poems trace a whole web of connections between the kinds of violence that affect people across the racial, ethnic, gender, class, sexual, national, and linguistic boundaries that do and do not divide us.
Born in Dublin, Eavan Boland was one of the leading voices in Irish literature during her long career. The Lost Land's opening sequence, entitled 'Colony' explores the theme of Irish language and culture. This is followed by a collection of individual poems which open out from autobiography into a sense of larger belonging. 'The Lost Land' of the title, the poet says, is 'not exactly a country and not entirely a state of mind ... the lost land is not a place that can be subdivided into history, or love, or memory. It is the poet's own, single, and private account of the ghostly territory where so much human experience comes to be stored.'
The mechanisms we use to make sense of our worlds, even our direct intimate experiences of it, come under constant scrutiny and a pressure that feels like love in Liz Howard's wild, scintillating debut poetry collection, Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent. What Howard can accomplish with language strikes us as electric, hyper-contemporary, a kind of alchemy of perception and catastrophe.
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