National Poetry Month 2023

Take a chance! Enjoy some poetry during National Poetry Month. Here are some selections from close to home.

Updated March 31, 2023
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A mind like this
Ramsey, Susan Blackwell.
Paper Book
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Susan Blackwell Ramsey's A Mind Like This is a work of humor and wit, unexpectedly delightful and full of surprises as it reflects on the oddness of everyday life, the natural world, literary history, popular culture, and more....
Still life with two dead peacocks and a girl : poems
Seuss, Diane
Paper Book
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Diane Seuss's brilliant follow-up to Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Still life with stack of bills phone...
Saint Peter and the goldfinch
Ridl, Jack
Paper Book
Jack Ridl returns with a collection of poems that mix deft artistic skill with intimate meditations on everyday life, whether that be curiosity, loss, discovery, joy, or the passing of the seasons. An early reader of Saint Peter and the Goldfinch said it best: "Ridl's books are all treasures,...
The Clock of the Long Now
Boyer, Marion
Paper Book
Poetry. Many images here begin with the natural world and end in a human gesture of freedom, of release. Marion Boyer creates a world of imagination. She goes as far as to create a character, Jake, whose life unfolds in the pages of this book. Boyer's elegance ruminates throughout the lyric in these...
Four-legged girl : poems
Seuss, Diane
Paper Book
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry "Diane Seuss writes with the intensity of a soothsayer." --Laura Kasischke For, having imagined your body one way I found it to be another way, it was yielding, but only as the Destroying Angel mushroom...
Begin Empty-Handed
Martin, Gail
Paper Book
Frank : sonnets
Seuss, Diane
Paper Book
WINNER OF THE 2022 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY WINNER OF THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY WINNER OF THE 2022 PEN/VOELCKER AWARD FOR POETRY COLLECTION WINNER OF THE 2021 LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR POETRY A resplendent life in sonnets from...
Insomnia diary
Hicok, Bob
Paper Book
Bob Hicok's poems are often edgy, brazen, and funny. They're just as likely to be soulful, reflective, and provocative. Usually at the same time. As Hicok builds toward the punchline of a poem set up with his characteristic wit, he zigs into seriousness. A thoughtful meditation that builds to a...
A grammar to waking : poems
Eimers, Nancy.
Paper Book
Time is the hour at which a pub closes, the moment we must put our pencils down, a way of paying later for something now. A Grammar to Waking explores moments we wake to the grammar of living time, what Virginia Woolf called "moments of being." In the drift of the present, of song in the throat...
Practicing to walk like a heron poems
Ridl, Jack.
Paper Book
In Practicing to Walk Like a Heron multiple-award-winning Michigan poet Jack Ridl shares lines of well-earned wisdom in the face of a constantly changing world. The familiar comforts of life?a warm fire in winter, a lush garden in summer?become the settings for transcendent and universal...
Jim Harrison : complete poems
Harrison, Jim
Paper Book
Editors'' Choice Selection, The New York Times Book Review ** Starred Reviews ** in Library Journal and Booklist "This robust volume is a testament to the fortitude of a great American poet''s work... [a] landmark collection."--Raul...
When all the world is old : poems
Rybicki, John
Paper Book
At the age of twenty-nine, just five years after they met, John Rybicki's wife, the poet Julie Moulds, was diagnosed with cancer. Here, in poems raw and graceful, authentic and wise, Rybicki pays homage to the brave love they shared during her sixteen-year battle and praises the caregivers-...
No moon
Eimers, Nancy.
Paper Book
No Moon is a book of poems about the powers and misadventures of memory, about chancy intimacies and unquiet departures parceled out as time, loss, death - an almanac of forces that mystify and transform our everyday lives. The landscapes of the poems - now borrowed from the poet's childhood...
Elegy owed
Hicok, Bob
Paper Book
National Book Critics Circle Award finalist "[Elegy Owed is a] fluid, absorbing new collection... Hicok gives readers unexpected conjunctions and oddly offbeat thoughts, most darkly whimsical, and has us embrace them wholeheartedly. If he can survive the scary carnival...
Dominant hand
Kerlikowske, Elizabeth.
Paper Book
Poetry. DOMINANT HAND is a world filled with the pantomime of love, the trickster coyote, and the conflict between widowed father and concerned grandparents. These poems take place in the seemingly ordinary places of life: houses, gardens, sandboxes and especially doctor's offices. But these places...
Traveling at High Speeds: Poems
Rybicki, John
Paper Book
The kinetic energy of John Rybicki's poems is his unmistakable signature. His poem "Traveling at High Speeds" opens with the lines, "Some night my body takes the shape of this city." That urban shape is the shape of John Rybicki's poetry as well. The city in question is, of course, Detroit, but...
Sorting the smoke : new & selected poems
Hilberry, Conrad.
Paper Book
Eighteen of the new meet the best of the rest (from six previous collections) in this cowinner (along with Terese Svoboda's Laughing Africa) of the 1989 Iowa Poetry Prize. Annotation(c) 2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
This clumsy living
Hicok, Bob
Paper Book
Winner of the 2008 Bobbit National Poetry Prize. "Few others in contemporary poetry are so brilliantly able to combine wit and weight, to charge the language so it virtually glows in the dark. Hicok's poems just plain rock. They rock because they are gorgeous. They rock because they are...
Broken symmetry
Ridl, Jack.
Paper Book
Broken Symmetry is a collection drawn from the experiences of daily life and organized through the context of mathematics. Poet Jack Ridl uses remarkably clear and precise language to express a singular awareness of the world around us. Some of the poems in this volume deal with the universal human...
We Bed down into Water: Poems
Rybicki, John
Paper Book
John Rybicki offers up an unafraid set of poems in this charged book of verse. We Bed Down Into Water is rich with imagery of family, love, illness, death, and, indeed, water, which seeps in throughout the pages: rivers, pools, rain, and tears. His moving stories, in both...
It blows you hollow
Seuss, Diane.
Paper Book
With these dark, triumphant poems, Diane Seuss takes us on a journey through the landscape of the soul--and it's a world full of beauty and violence in equal parts. Relentless and incantatory, these poems are charged with an almost religious intensity as Seuss looks for God's presence in nature and...
Still life in Milford : poems
Lynch, Thomas
Paper Book
In Still Life in Milford Thomas Lynch tenders poems on life and death, history and memory, the local and the larger geographies. "[Thomas Lynch's] poems . . . are as stark and graceful as geese lifting off backwater. The poems trace from the rural midwest to London and County Clare, a quiet elegy of...
Stereo(type)
Mixon-Webster, Jonah
Paper Book
A radical, urgent collection of poems about Blackness, the self, and the dismantling of corrupt powers in the fight for freedom.   A PEN America Literary Award Winner Jonah Mixon-Webster works at the intersections of space and the body, race and...
Rowing inland : poems
Daniels, Jim
Paper Book
Rowing Inland, Jim Daniels's fifteenth book of poetry is a time machine that takes the reader back to the Metro Detroit of his youth and then accelerates toward the future. With humor and empathy, the author looks at his own family's challenges and those of the surrounding community where the...
How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan: Poems
Carson, Sarah
Paper Book
Spanning girlhood to motherhood, How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan traces the lineage of four generations of a Flint, Michigan family--from the trailer park to the factory floor to, perhaps, a future far away. These poems examine the wreckage of the American Dream and ask who will answer for...
Harborless
Morgan, Cindy Hunter
Paper Book
Harborless, a collection of poems informed by Great Lakes shipwrecks, is part history and part reinvention. The poems explore tragic wrecks in rivers and lakes, finding and forming artistic meaning from destruction and death. Each poem begins in a real, historical moment that Cindy Hunter...
Chlorophyll : poems about Michigan's Upper Peninsula
Luczak, Raymond
Paper Book
Join me on a journey to the unspoiled forests of Upper Michigan... "A long time ago young men wishing to be tall scaled the mast of my octopus arms and scanned the horizon of Lake Superior for a glimmer of Canada. Usually we were cut down ..." ...
Poetry in Michigan in poetry
Olsen, William
Paper Book
Featuring poetry by: Tom Andrews, James Armstrong, Cullen Bailey Burns, Jackie Bartley, Elinor Benedict, Terry Blackhawk, Gladys Cardiff, Susanna Childress, Patricia Clark, David Cope, Jim Daniels, Mike Delp, Toi Derricotte, Chris Dombrowski, Jack Driscoll, Stuart Dybek, Nancy Eimers, Robert Fanning...
New poems from the third coast : contemporary Michigan poetry
Delp, Michael.
Paper Book
In 1976, Wayne State University Press published The Third Coast: Contemporary Michigan Poetry, an anthology that offered a sampling of the best poetry written by Michigan writers. A second Third Coast anthology was published in 1988 with many new poets and a wider range of styles. New Poems from the...
The way north : collected Upper Peninsula new works
Riekki, R. A.
Paper Book
Michigan's Upper Peninsula is distinct from the rest of the state in geography, climate, and culture, including a unique and thriving creative writing community. In The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works, editor Ron Riekki presents poetry, fiction, and non-fiction from memorable,...
: An Anthology
Publishing, Z.
Paper Book
A primer for poets & readers of poetry
Orr, Gregory
Paper Book
A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry guides the young poet toward a deeper understanding of how poetry can function in his or her life, while also introducing the art in an exciting new way. Using such poems as Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz" and Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays,"...
Green : poems
Boyer, Marion
A book of poems about the envirnment
How a poem moves : a field guide for readers of poetry
Sol, Adam
Paper Book
A collection of playfully elucidating essays to help reluctant poetry readers become well-versed in verse Developed from Adam Sol's popular blog, How a Poem Moves is a collection of 35 short essays that walks readers through an array of contemporary poems. Sol is a dynamic...
Teacher/pizza guy
Kass, Jeff
Paper Book
Teacher/Pizza Guy is a collection of autobiographical poems from the 2016?17 school year in which Jeff Kass worked as a full-time English teacher and a part-time director for a literary arts organization and still had to supplement his income by delivering pizzas a few nights a week. In the...

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