Help us celebrate National Poetry Month! Every April since 1996, the Academy of American Poets aims to highlight and celebrate all of the amazing poets that have contributed to our lives and cultures. The list we’ve compiled below is only a drop in the bucket of poets to explore this month. Grab your next #tbr, a re-read or something you’ve never heard of before, and Happy Reading!
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Basho: The Complete Haiku
by Matsuo Basho
Translated by Jane Reichhold
Illustrated by Shiro Tsujimura
Basho stands today as Japans most renowned writer, and one of the most revered. Yet despite his stature, Bashos complete haiku have not been collected into a single volume. Until now. To render the writers full body of work into English, Jane Reichhold, an American haiku poet and translator, dedicated over ten years of work. Dividing his creative output into seven periods of development, Reichhold frames each period with a decisive biographical sketch of the poets travels, creative influences and personal triumphs and defeats.
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Citizen: An American Lyric
by Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship.
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Diving into the Wreck
by Adrienne Rich
In this reissue of her seventh volume of poetry, Adrienne Rich searches to reclaim to discover what has been forgotten, lost, or unexplored. Adrienne Cecile Rich’s work has been characterized as confrontational, treating women’s role in society, racism, and the Vietnam War. In addition to many collections of poetry, she has also written several books of nonfiction prose, such as Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, and Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution.
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An American Sunrise: Poems
by Joy Harjo
A stunning new volume from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States, informed by her tribal history and connection to the land.
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Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman, Gay Wilson Allen, Billy Collins, Peter Davison
This 150th anniversary edition of the collection that remains the incomparable achievement of one of America’s greatest poets features a new Foreword by U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins and a new Afterword by Peter Davison.
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Robert Frost’s Poems
by Robert Frost, Louis Untermeyer
Containing all of Robert Frost’s best-known poems–including “Birches, ” “Mending Walls, ” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”–and dozens more–this collection celebrates the New England countryside, Frost’s appreciation of common folk, and his understanding of the human condition.
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The Essential Rumi
by Jalaluddin Rumi
Translated by Coleman Barks
The life of Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273), a brilliant scholar and popular teacher, was forever changed when he met a powerful wandering dervish and began a new plateau of spiritual enlightenment. Now, from the premier interpreter of Rumi comes the first definitive one-volume collection of the enduringly popular spiritual poetry by this extraordinary Sufi mystic.
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The Poems of Marianne Moore
by Marianne Moore, Grace Schulman
At long last, the full treasure chest of Marianne Moore’s poems–including more than 100 that were previously uncollected and unpublished–is available in this stellar edition that has been lovingly edited by poet Grace Schulman.
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