National Poetry Month 2025 - Books for Adults

Updated March 26, 2025
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100 poems to break your heart
Hirsch, Edward
Paper Book
100 of the most moving and inspiring poems of the last 200 years from around the world, a collection that will comfort and enthrall anyone trapped by grief or loneliness, selected by the award-winning, best-selling, and beloved author of How to Read a Poem Implicit in poetry is the...
[...]: Poems
Joudah, Fady
Paper Book
Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry Winner of the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize From one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of...
An American sunrise : poems
Harjo, Joy
Paper Book
In this stunning collection, Joy Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where the Mvskoke people, including her own ancestors, were forcibly displaced. From her memory of her mother's death, to her beginnings in the Native rights movement, to the fresh road...
The annotated Emerson
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Paper Book
A brilliant essayist and a master of the aphorism ("Our moods do not believe in each other"; "Money often costs too much"), Emerson has inspired countless writers. He challenged Americans to shut their ears against Europe's "courtly muses" and to forge a new, distinctly American cultural identity...
Bluff : poems
Smith, Danez
Paper Book
Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith's powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and...
Don't call us dead : poems
Smith, Danez
Paper Book
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection "[Smith's] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy."--The New Yorker Award-winning poet Danez Smith is...
Forest of Noise : Poems
Toha, Mosab Abu
Paper Book
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK * "A powerful, capacious, and profound" (Ocean Vuong) new collection of poems about life in Gaza by an award-winning Palestinian poet. You are alive for a moment when living people run after you.<...
Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology (Loa #382)
Gonzalez, Rigoberto
Paper Book
***Top pick for Hispanic Heritage Month by NYT best-selling author Elizabeth Acevedo for Good Morning America*** This landmark Latinx poetry collection offers "a wondrous journey through the passions, the ideas, and the diversity of a people redefining what it means to be American"...
Life on Mars : poems
Smith, Tracy K.
Paper Book
Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize * Poet Laureate of the United States * * A New York Times Notable Book of 2011 and New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * * A New Yorker, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly Best Book...
The Moon That Turns You Back
Alyan, Hala
Paper Book
From the author of The Arsonists' City and The Twenty-Ninth Year, a new collection of poetry that traces the fragmentation of memory, archive, and family-past, present, future-in the face of displacement and war. A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection--a...
Promises of gold = Promesas de oro
Olivarez, Josae
Paper Book
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Named one of NPR's Books We Love "How many bad lovers have gotten poems? How many crushes? No disrespect to romantic love--but what about our friends ? Those homies who are there all...
So far so good : final poems, 2014-2018
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Paper Book
"Ursula K. Le Guin, loved by millions for her fantasy and science-fiction novels, ponders life, death and the vast beyond in So Far So Good, an astute, charming collection finished weeks before her death in January, 2018. Fans will recognize some of the motifs here--cats, wind, strong women -...
The sun and her flowers
Kaur, Rupi
Paper Book
Watch rupi kaur live now on Prime Video. "Rupi Kaur is the Writer of the Decade." -- The New Republic From rupi kaur, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of milk and honey, comes her long-awaited second collection of poetry....
This is the honey : an anthology of contemporary Black poets
Alexander, Kwame
Paper Book
A breathtaking poetry collection on hope, heart, and heritage from the most prominent and promising Black poets and writers of our time, edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author Kwame Alexander. In this comprehensive and vibrant poetry anthology,...
Wade in the water : poems
Smith, Tracy K.
Paper Book
Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United States Even the men in black armor, the ones Jangling...
Water, Water: Poems
Collins, Billy
Paper Book
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * From the former Poet Laureate of the United States and New York Times bestselling author of Aimless Love comes a wondrous new collection of poems focused on the joys and mysteries of daily life. "Among the best poems that [Billy] Collins has...
Woke up no light / Poems
Mottley, Leila
Paper Book
A poignant, rousing debut book of poetry, full of life, from the former Youth Poet Laureate of Oakland, California woke up no light is a Black girl's saunter turned to a woman's defiant strut. These are the hymns of a new generation of poetry. Young, alive, yearning. A...
You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World
Limon, Ada
Paper Book
NATIONAL BESTSELLER A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection A 2024 NPR "Books We Love" Selection "Whoever you are, you will find yourself and your own world in the expansiveness of this collection." -Margaret Renkl, New York Times ...

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