Contemporary Poetry

Celebrate contemporary poetry with titles selected by RCL editors. Resources for College Libraries (RCL) features core titles for academic libraries, curated by Choice/ACRL subject specialists. In Syndetics Unbound, RCL Librarians recommend a selection of the 90,000+ titles available at rclweb.net.

Updated March 26, 2024
RCL Librarians
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Against heaven : poems
Alabi, Kemi
Paper Book
Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Claudia Rankine. Kemi Alabi's transcendent debut reimagines the poetic and cultural traditions from which it is born, troubling the waters of some of our country's central and ordained fictions--those mythic...
Extinction theory : poems
Lam, Kien
Paper Book
Extinction Theory is a collection of pseudoscience poems that try to provide rationales for some of life's most salient mysteries. Where is God? What does it mean to belong? Who killed the dinosaurs? Kien Lam creates new worlds with new rules to better answer these perennial questions. His...
Ask the brindled : poems
Revilla, Noʻu
Paper Book
Ask the Brindled, selected by Rick Barot as a winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series, bares everything that breaks between "seed" and "summit" of a life--the body, a people, their language. It is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives foisted upon...
Motherfield : Poems and Protest Diary
Cimafiejeva, Julia/ Abdurraqib, Hanif (TRN)/ Mort, Valzhyna (TRN)
Paper Book
A poetry collection where personal is inevitably political and ecological, Motherfield is a poet's insistence on self-determination in authoritarian, patriarchal Belarus. Julia Cimafiejeva was born in an area of rural Belarus that became a Chernobyl zone when she was a child....
Relinquenda
Regalado, Alexandra Lytton
Paper Book
A 4-part poetry collection that explores women's roles in familial dynamics, immigration, and El Salvador's civil war while reflecting on the death of the poet's father A National Poetry Series winner, selected by the celebrated poet Reginald Dwayne Betts When...
Nomenclature : new and collected poems
Brand, Dionne
Paper Book
Spanning almost four decades, Dionne Brand's poetry has given rise to whole new grammars and vocabularies. With a profound alertness that is attuned to this world and open to some other, possibly future, time and place, Brand's ongoing labors of witness and imagination speak directly to...
Today in the taxi
Singer, Sean
Paper Book
Sean Singer's radiant and challenging body of work involves, much like Whitman's, nothing less than the ongoing interrogation of what a poem is. In this way his books are startlingly alive... I love in this work the sense that I am the grateful recipient of Singer's jazzy curation as I move from...
Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems
Dove, Rita
Paper Book
In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding America's, and the world's, experiments in democracy. Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or the contemporary efforts of Black Lives Matter, a girls'...
Quiet : poems
Bulley, Victoria Adukwei
Paper Book
A black British poet making her thrilling American debut explores the importance of "quiet" in producing forms of community, resistance, and love. "Bulley's stunning poems draw you in with their melodious versatility, intellect and dexterity; [they] perfectly embody the...
Howdie-Skelp: Poems
Muldoon, Paul
Paper Book
The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet delivers a sharp wake-up call with his fourteenth collection. A "howdie-skelp" is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. It's a wake-up call. A call to action. The poems in Howdie-Skelp, Paul Muldoon's astonishing...
Sweet movie : poems
Dietzman, Alisha
Paper Book
"What gives us the right to listen to someone else's body?"-Alisha Dietzman, from Sweet Movie A National Poetry Series winner selected by Victoria Chang, Sweet Movie confronts romantic and religious masochism to interrogate spiritual, sexual, and moral agency ...

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