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.
Gemini Gospel by
A debut collection by the Spring 2023 Host Publications Chapbook Prize Winner. Moving through grief and memory, this stunning debut collection takes us by the hand to experience all of what is sacred in the process of authentic self-discovery. Pérez's poems boldly explore identity through her lineage of spirituality and Latina roots, even as they move into uncharted territory. In true Gemini fashion, the inherited self is entwined with the one that is discovered, loss is braided with luminous love, and no matter how deep grief runs, it brings us always back to tenderness: 'It's not easy / to remember to water the plants, / to shower and to forgive the body.' In elegizing her father, the poet expresses a tenderness that is so deeply touching to behold, it becomes a lesson in love itself: "The last thing we hope he hears / is the ocean & the sound of his boat's hull / hitting a small wave and the seagulls-- / god, I hope he hears the seagulls." "This is a debut of linguistic and emotional luminosity, surefire craft, and ready-set-go integrity. Relishing this riveting and moving chapbook, I'm reminded that Gemini, the restless third sign of the zodiac, is associated with savvy, variety, and social flair, and it's hard to imagine an up-and-coming writer more fully engaged, more vibrant and alert than Bianca Pérez."--Cyrus Cassells, from the introduction Poetry. Latinx Studies.
Trace Evidence by
In Trace Evidence, the urgent follow-up to his award-winning debut Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, Charif Shanahan continues his piercing meditations on the intricacies of mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the US and abroad. At the collection's center sits "On the Overnight from Agadir," a poem that chronicles Shanahan's survival of a devastating bus accident in Morocco, his mother's birth country, and ruminates on home, belonging, and the mysteries of fate. With rich lyricism, power, and tenderness, Trace Evidence centers the racial periphery and excavates the vestiges of our violent colonial past in the most intimate aspects of our lives. In a language yoked equally to the physical and metaphysical worlds, the poet articulates the need we all share for real intimacy and connection, and proves, time and again, that the true cost of our separateness is the love that our survival requires.
A Working Life by
From "one of the essential voices in American poetry" (New York Times) comes a rich new collection of expansive, light-footed, and cheerfully foreboding poems oddly in tune with our strange and evolving present The first new collection since Evolution from the prolific poet, activist, and writer Eileen Myles, a "Working Life" unerringly captures the measure of life. Whether alone or in relationship, on city sidewalks or in the country, their lyrics always engage with permanence and mortality, danger and safety, fear and wonder. a "Working Life" is a book transfixed by the everyday: the "sweet accumulation" of birds outside a window, a cup of coffee and a slice of pizza, a lover's foot on the bed. These poems arise in the close quarters of air travel, the flashing of a landscape through a train window, or simply in a truck tooling around town, or on foot with a dog in all the places that held us during the pandemic lockdowns. Myles's lines unabashedly sing the happy contradictions of love and sex, spill over with warnings about the not-so future world threatened by climate change and capitalism, and also find transcendent wonder in the landscapes and animals around us, and in the solitary and collective act of caring for one another and our world. With intelligence, heart, and singular vision, a "Working Life" shows Eileen Myles working at a thrilling new pitch of their poetic and philosophical powers.
Unusually Grand Ideas by
Titled after one of the side effects of antidepressants, Unusually Grand Ideas is a poignant account of clinical depression and the complications it introduces to marriage and fatherhood. James Davis May?s poems describe mental illness with nuance, giving a full account of the darkness but also the flashes of hope, love, and even humor that lead toward healing. In pieces ranging from spare lyrical depictions of pain to discursive meditations that argue for hope, May searches for meaning by asking the difficult but important questions that both trouble and sustain us.
To 2040 by
It is rare to find in one collection an entire skyline burning and the quiet to follow a single worm, to hear soil breathe--in Jorie Graham's fifteenth poetry collection, you do. Jorie Graham's fifteenth poetry collection, To 2040, opens in 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 "the American experiment will end in 2030." Graham shows us our potentially inevitable future soundtracked by sirens among industrial ruins, contemplating the loss of those who inhabited and named them. In sparse lines that move with cinematic precision, these poems pan from overhead views of reshaped shorelines to close-ups of a worm burrowing through earth. Here, we linger, climate crisis on hold, as Graham asks us to sit silently, to hear soil breathe. An urgent open letter to the future, with a habit of looking back, To 2040 is narrated by a speaker who reflects on her own mortality--in the glass window of a radiotherapy room, in the first "claw full of hair" placed gently on a green shower ledge. In poems that look to 2040 as both future and event-horizon, we leave the collection warned, infinitely wiser, and yet more attentively on edge. "Inhale. / Are you still there / the sun says to me." And, from the title poem, "what was yr message, what were u meant to / pass on?"
I'm Always So Serious by
Karisma Price's stunning debut collection is an extended meditation on Blackness, on family, on loss. Anchored in New Orleans and New York City, these poems braid personal and public histories into a cultural reckoning of past and present. James Booker speaks to Ringo Starr, a phone "Autocorrects 'Nigga' to Night,'" If Beale Street Could Talk is recast with characters from The Odyssey. In these pages there is grief, there is absence, there is violence--"We know that mostly everything around us / is measured in blood."--but there is also immense love and truth. Karisma Price has created a serious masterpiece, a book "so dark you have no other option but to call it / precious."
Saltwater Demands a Psalm by
In Ghana's Akan tradition, on the eighth day of life a child is named according to the day of the week on which they were born. This marks their true birth. In Kweku Abimbola's rhapsodic debut, the intimacy of this practice yields an intricately layered poetics of time and body based in Black possibility, ancestry, and joy. While odes and praise songs celebrate rituals of self- and collective-care--of durags, stank faces, and dance--Abimbola's elegies imagine alternate lives and afterlives for those slain by police, returning to naming as a means of rebirth and reconnection following the lost understanding of time and space that accompanies Black death. Saltwater Demands a Psalm creates a cosmology in search of Black eternity governed by Adinkra symbols--pictographs central to Ghanaian language and culture in their proverbial meanings--and rooted in units of time created from the rhythms of Black life.These poems groove, remix, and recenter African language and spiritual practice to rejoice in liberation's struggles and triumphs. Abimbola's poetry invokes the ecstasy and sorrow of saying the names of the departed, of seeing and being seen, of being called and calling back.
Flickering by
"Rogers' poems bring an openness of spirit and an almost scientific curiosity to the world at her feet, cataloging unexpected connections everywhere she looks."-New York Times Book Review A new collection from a poet whose"celebrations of science and approachable yet profound spiritual connection to the Earth delight, entertain, and elevate"(The Poetry Foundation) Denise Levertov has called the poet Pattiann Rogers "a visionary of reality, perceiving the material world with such intensity of response that impulse, intention, meaning, interconnections beyond the skin of appearance are revealed." The consistent theme In Flickering, her new collection, is the very breadth and prodigiousness of the universe itself. These wise poems, many inspired by various kinds of flickering actions in plants, animals, and natural processes, move nimbly between inner and outer worlds as Rogers addresses themes ranging from beauty, resilience and creation to the tensions and relationships between humans and wildness.
Ballast by
A poetic sequence using the 1841 slave revolt aboard the brig Creole as a lens through which to view the vitality of Black lives and the afterlife of slavery. In 1841, the only successful, large-scale revolt of American-born enslaved people erupted on the ship Creole. 135 people escaped chattel slavery that day. The event was recounted in US Senate documents, including letters exchanged between US and British consulates in The Bahamas and depositions from the white crew on the ship. There is no known record or testimony from the 135 people who escaped. Their story has been lost to time and indifference. Quenton Baker's ballast is an attempt at incomplete redress. With imagination, deep empathy, and skilled and compelling lyricism, Baker took a black marker to those Senate documents and culled a poetic recount of the Creole revolt. Layers of ink connect readers to Baker's poetic process: (re)phrasing the narrative of the state through a dexterous process of hands-on redactions. ballast is a relentless, wrenching, and gorgeously written book, a defiant reclamation of one of the most important but overlooked events in US history, and an essential contribution to contemporary poetry.
Wound Is the Origin of Wonder by
Award-winning poet Maya C. Popa suggests that our restless desires are inseparable from our mortality in this pressing and precise collection. Rooting out profound meaning in language to wrench us from the moorings of the familiar and into the realm of the extraordinary, the volume asks, how do we articulate what's by definition inarticulable? Where does sight end and imagination begin? Lucid and musically rich, these poems sound an appeal to a dwindling natural world and summon moments from the lives of literary forbearers--John Milton's visit to Galileo, a vase broken by Marcel Proust--to unveil fresh wonder in the unlikely meetings of the past. Popa dramatizes the difficulties of loving a world that is at once rich with beauty and full of opportunities for grief, and reveals that the natural arc of wonder, from astonishment to reflection, more deeply connects us with our humanity.
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