The UT Libraries Poetry Center seeks to gather representative works of renowned contemporary poets of the U.S. and international poets in conversation with the U.S. The collection’s unique identity arises from its focus on the work of local poets and of independent publishers. Browse titles in the collection using the library catalog.
Titles are added to the collection based on the following criteria:
Currently, books from the UT Poetry Center are not available for check out. Ruth Stephan's original intention for the center was for it to be a place where anyone could come in, browse the shelves, and find inspiration. To honor this intention, we keep the collection as non-circulating and permanently available at the PCL.
You'll see the catalog records for Poetry Center books listed as "LIB USE ONLY". We hope this distinction allows for all community members, including those from the broader Austin community, to take advantage of this unique collection.
If you have questions about the collection and its non-circulating status, please contact Gina Bastone, Humanities Librarian at g.bastone@austin.utexas.edu.
Watchnight by
In WATCHNIGHT, we accompany Johnson's unnamed protagonist on a psychedelic quest across myriad forms, places, and times marked by climate crisis, exodus, and Black trans identity-making. In exhilarating lyric poems and chiseled prose blocks, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson charts the history of his family alongside the history of Watchnight--a churchy holiday of messianic tarrying--and steps through portals to render the human faces of American internal migration and mass displacement--from countryside to city and back again. Spanning from 1803 to a near-future rife with class tension and racial anxiety, WATCHNIGHT is a study of Black bonds, Black grief, and Black flight.
[... ] [Ellipsis] by
From one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians. Fady Joudah's powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, "I am unfinished business," articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah's survivance, [...] speaks to Palestine's daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land. Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens--a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be--and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a carousel: the past returns as the future is foretold. But "Repetition won't guarantee wisdom," Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language "before [our] wisdom is an echo." These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time. [...] is a wonder. Joudah reminds us "Wonder belongs to all."
Good Monster by
With an equal dose of fatalism and dark wit, Antigua captures the body's capacity to cage and cradle sadness. Diannely Antigua's Good Monster grapples with the body as a site of chronic pain and trauma. Poignant and guttural, the collection "voyage[s] the land between crisis and hope," chronicling Antigua's reckoning with shame and her fallout with faith. As poems cage and cradle devastating truths--a stepfather's abusive touch, a mother's "soft harm"--the speaker's anxiety, depression, and boundless need become monstrous shadows. Here, poems dance on bars, speak in tongues, and cry in psych wards. When "God [becomes] a house [she] can't leave," language becomes the only currency left. We see the messiness of survival unfold through sestinas, a series of Sad Girl sonnets, and diary entries--an invented collage form using Antigua's personal journals. At the crux of despair, Antigua locates a resilient desire to find a love that will remain, to feel pleasure in an inhospitable body and, above all, to keep on living.
Survived By by
Winner of the Host Publications Chapbook Prize, Spring 2024. Full of lament and wonder in equal measure, Stephanie Niu's poems are maps that guide us to a place of intimate attention where we can hold what is most vulnerable and tender on this planet, to better understand what has already been lost and what is currently at stake. These poems collect fragments of memory to shape an archive of things lost--from the fleeting raptures of childhood to the species nearing and beyond extinction. An "atlas of disappearance," SURVIVED BY animates extinct, endangered, and recovering species of Christmas Island, a remote Australian territory, through visual poems that chronicle the extinction crisis without relenting to its abstraction. Scientific language intertwines with the lyric, and in this fusion "the known easily becomes strange." Even the language of scholarship morphs under Niu's microscope--depth becomes death, then knowing, when names of deep-sea creatures are spoken aloud into something small enough to hold in our hands. In the act of learning to "become a better animal," these poems reach out to us with tender curiosity and deep compassion. Using language as a method of preservation, we discover that we "do not have the words to keep everything alive" but also that "The most powerful things can't be named." Poetry. History. Nature. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies.
Dumb Luck and Other Poems by
Christine Kitano's Dumb Luck & other poems offers a portrait of a thirty-something Asian American woman who finds herself living in the relative safety of upstate New York before and during the pandemic. In one poem the speaker reflects on current events (the ongoing pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests, the surge in anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S.) and contrasts these with the peace of rural New York, wondering, "Is this / the reward for good luck, just a more / comfortable survival?" The poems in this collection orbit around this question, providing both lyric and narrative explorations on luck, guilt, and survival. Ultimately, these poems delve into how the otherwise mundane questions of selfhood and identity for a gendered and racialized body take on greater urgency during times of increased social unrest, panic, and violence.
A History of Half-Birds by
Selected by Maggie Smith for the 2023 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, this debut collection of poems explores the aftermath of history's most powerful forces: devotion, disaster, and us. Rooted in the Gulf Coast, A History of Half-Birds measures the line between love and ruin. Part poet, part anthropologist, Caroline Harper New digs into dark places--a cave, a womb, a hurricane--to trace how violence born of devotion manifests not only in our human relationships, but also in our connections to the natural and animal worlds. Everywhere in these pages, tenderness is coupled with brutality: a deer eats a baby bird, a lover restrains another. "I promised / a love poem," New proclaims, then teaches us about the anglerfish, how it "attracts its mate / and prey with the same lure." In New's exceptional voice, familiar concepts take on a shade of the fantastic. A woman tastes the earth for acidity, buries lemons and pennies for balance. Limestone "sucks the sea / into little demitasse" and hyacinths "sip the sun / black." A lone elephant wanders into the wilderness of rural Georgia, never to be seen again. But perhaps most arresting about New's work are the truths told by its strangeness, like the ancient fish who "carved their shape" in a mountain's peak, or a mother who wears a lifejacket in the bathtub. Crafted by New's voracious mind and carried by her matchless lyricism, A History of Half-Birds is a stunning investigation of love's beastly impulses--all it protects, and all it destroys.
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