More Poems for the Quarantined Soul

In NYC, we’re going on two months of social distancing, quarantining, and existing on the fumes of what our hometown used to be. During this time, cultural organizations like BPL (and others) across the world have provided digital content to keep some semblance of normalcy in our lives: classes, readings, performances—heck, even Saturday Night Live is cobbling together fresh episodes ‘from home.'

But sometimes, it can help to lean in and embrace the deeper, harsher, raw emotions bubbling up with each day we remain at home.

To close out National Poetry month, here are a handful of poetry collections (available online) that will make you uncomfortable, force you to face harsh truths and release some of the darkness threatening your sanity, courtesy of some of our most lauded poets of color.

Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
"A collection that confronts America where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle."

If They Come for Us by Fatimah Asghar
"Asghar seamlessly braids together marginalized people’s histories with her own understanding of identity, place, and belonging."

teaching my mother how to give birth by Warsan Shire
"What gives these poems their disturbing brilliance, is Warsan Shire’s ability to give simple, beautiful eloquence to the veiled world where sensuality lives in the dominant narrative of Islam."

Homie by Danez Smith
"Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer."

Felon by Reginald Dwayne Betts
"The story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems...and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life."

Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith
"Smith boldly ties America’s contemporary moment both to our nation’s fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit."

The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde
"Refusing to be circumscribed by any simple identity, Audre Lorde writes as a Black woman, a mother, a daughter, a Lesbian, a feminist, a visionary..."

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes
"In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form."

Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir by Lucille Clifton
"Includes the four poetry collections that launched Clifton’s career, as well as her haunting prose memoir, Generations".

S O S: Poems, 1961 - 2013 by Amiri Baraka
"The definitive selection of Amiri Baraka’s dynamic poetry—fusing the personal and the political in high-voltage verse."

What collections have you read during National Poetry Month, cerebral or otherwise?