Poetry - Subjects & Themes - Death, Grief, Loss

Burnt Toast At Sunrise by Jessie Raelynn is a poetry collection about sudden loss, survival, and the miracle of finding your way back to joy and hope alongside grief.The collection unfolds across three sections, tracing the shape of grief. It begins with the shock...

John Koethe unravels timeless questions of death, math, meaning, and much more in this mesmerizing collection. John Koethe, one of our most philosophically sophisticated poets, has written a book of pithy, contentious, witty poems about our perennial, never-satisfied search for meaning. The silent mysteries...

Navigating a sightless world with intelligence and dark humor, Close Escapes searches for an answer to our earthly existence by way of visions only the blind can see. "Never 'in' time," Stephen Kuusisto's third poetry collection, Close Escapes, moves through a river of memory....

What do we owe the dead? This is the question at the heart of Cloud Builder, in which Weston Morrow interrogates the burden of legacy and the ever-watchful gaze of our deceased loved ones. His search takes him from the landscapes of the late...

Cold Thief Place speaks of the experiences of an undocumented American, her parents who fled Communist China and found safety in fundamentalist Christianity, and how she tried to understand them and herself by way of confessional poems. This is a family story. It tells...

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST POETRY COLLECTIONS OF 2024 BY LIT HUB AND ELECTRIC LITERATUREFINALIST FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD IN POETRYFINALIST FOR THE 2025 CLMP FIRECRACKER AWARD IN POETRYFINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA AWARD FOR TRANSGENDER POETRYConsider the Rooster serves as...

"Corazón Espinado" de María Iglesias es una obra extraordinaria que entrelaza poesía y prosa para narrar el amor perdido y el dolor que de ello emana. Con maestría y sensibilidad, la autora captura la intensidad de las emociones de una joven mientras procesa el...

How can we memorialize our dead? How can that memorialization rend the veil between the dead and the living? In her debut volume, brittny ray crowell sifts through decades of obituaries, journals, and other ephemera to exhume the generations of her family from her...

mama, am I going to make it, is it going to be okaywill I lose my breasts, my hair, my eyelasheswill I lose my identity, femininity, my dignitywill I recognize myself in mirrors, in photos, in memorieswho will I become if I no longer...

The heartachingly searching, irreverently wisecracking, and stubbornly uncompromising poems that walked a formal tightwire just before Young's death in 2022.Creature Feature is Dean Young's first posthumous collection since his death in 2022. More feisty, hilarious, surreal, and heartbreaking than ever, Young and his tireless...

Snap your fingers, move your hips, step high, then low, then turn around. Keep the rhythm. It all matters. We are all keeping time and so are the trees, the waters, the earth, just a different kind of time than the Doomsday Clock. Rena...

A new book of poetry from internationally acclaimed, award-winning and bestselling author Margaret AtwoodIn Dearly, Margaret Atwood's first collection of poetry in over a decade, Atwood addresses themes such as love, loss, the passage of time, the nature of nature and - zombies. Her...

Formally inventive and conversational, the poems, prose poems, lyric essays, and "notebook entries" in Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? explore our bewildering, increasingly fragmented lives. Unpredictable and unfailingly curious, Donna Masini--in her most compelling, wide-ranging book yet--moves from elegy and intimate...

A heart in extremity-what hungers, urgencies, hardships drive and deliver us? These poems, like fierce midwives who insist on getting life to its necessity of oxygen, restore power to us, recreate us in the process. We feel what lifts the moment, what comforts and...

dormilona is a bilingual book of poetry exploring dream states, distance, and the rituals of sleep in Venezuelan culture. In these poems, the fluidity of living in two languages reflects the elusive nature of time and memory, centering on the speaker's relationship with her...

The first-ever English translation of Rilke's landmark poetry cycle, by Vita and Edward Sackville-West ­- reissued for the first time in 90 years In 1931, Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press published a small run of a beautiful edition of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino...

Early Works collects Alice Notley's first four out of print poetry collections, along with 80 pages of previously uncollected material. A must have for any Notley fan. Includes original collection cover artwork by Philip Guston, Philip Whalen and George Schneeman, among others.Author: Alice NotleyPublisher:...

A heartfelt grief companion - because sometimes the kindest gift isn't advice, it's understanding.There's a before and after to loss. And everything in between can feel like standing still.The world keeps turning, but your reality has changed, and sitting with that kind of ache,...

Philip Schultz is famous for his empathetic explorations of male shortcomings, primarily those of his late father. Enormous Morning, his incisive new volume, reflects on the sacrifices of women in their roles as mothers, wives, and friends, including those of his own mother, who...

In Enter, poet Jim Moore navigates the public spaces of his neighborhood--parks, boardwalks, piazzas, even parking garages--and encounters people negotiating mortality in the pandemic age just as he is coming to terms with his own long story. In his signature lucid and wry voice,...