more books!

More recommendations for your poetry shelf:

• Book Riot – Poetry Books for Beginners, Haters, or the Utterly Confused
• Book Riot again – 8 Poetry Collections and Verse Novels to Get You Into Poetry
• Financial Times – Summer books of 2020: Poetry
• The Guardian – Four new collections up for the Forward poetry prizes
• Medium – 12 Formally Innovative Books by Contemporary Poets of Color
• The Millions – Must-Read Poetry: July 2020
• The Oprah Magazine – All the LGBTQ Books That Are Changing the Literary Landscape in 2020 (includes 6 poetry titles)

Happy reading!

Oregon Book Awards

Congratulations to Portland, Oregon, poet Ashley Toliver, who received the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry for her book Spectra (Coffee House Press).

See the complete list of Oregon Book Award winners and hear all of the OBA finalists reading from their works.

more to read!

June is National Indigenous History Month and CBC invites you to celebrate by reading from their list of books by First Nations, Métis and Inuit authors. Among the 35 titles, many are, or include, poetry.

more to read

Here are more recommendations for your poetry shelf:

• The Guardian – The best recent poetry – review roundup
• Kenyon Review – Poets on Poets: Celebrating New Collections (4 parts)
• The Millions – Must-Read Poetry: June 2020
• The New York Times – New & Noteworthy Poetry, From ‘White Blood’ to the Book of Job
• Publishers Weekly – An Antiracist Poetry Reading List

Good reading to you.

an abundance of riches

We can’t possibly begin to list all of the amazing and important events that are streaming our way, but wanted to share another that’s happening today at 4:00pm Pacific (alas, the same time as the Western C.A.R.E.S. event posted earlier). To mark today’s publication (by Knopf) of TOGETHER IN A SUDDEN STRANGENESS: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic, editor Alice Quinn will visit with Ron Charles and special guests to discuss the new anthology. The event is presented by Politics & Prose Bookstore.

Advance registration is required.

. . . . .
Thanks, Sheila Sondik!

on poetry

“Reading is important — read between the lines. Don’t swallow everything.”
Gwendolyn Brooks
(June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000)

. . . . .
photo

more to read…

More recommendations for worthwhile poetry:

• Epic Reads – 28 Poetry Books Guaranteed to Take Your Breath Away
• The Guardian – The best recent poetry collections (May)
• Library Journal – Finding Self/Finding Home | Top Spring Poetry
• Poetry Books Society – Spring Selections 2020
• Poetry Foundation – Reading List: May 2020
• Small Press Distribution – SPD Poetry Bestsellers
• Time – 45 New Books You Need to Read This Summer (one poetry book, several poet authors)

If you have a recent-book recommendation that isn’t showing up on these (or other recent) lists, please share in Comments!

not-comical comics

Montreal comic book artist and illustrator Julian Peters is one of many people whose book launch has been sidetracked by the coronavirus. In his book, Poems to See By: A Comic Artist Interprets Great Poetry (Plough Publishing), Peters uses a variety of styles to illustrate poems by Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, Maya Angelou, Seamus Heaney, e. e. cummings, Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, Christina Rossetti, William Wordsworth, William Ernest Henley, Robert Hayden, Edgar Allan Poe, W. H. Auden, Thomas Hardy, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Philip Johnson, W. B. Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Tess Gallagher, Ezra Pound, and Siegfried Sassoon. Learn more about Julian Peters and listen to a brief interview.

more to read!

The poetry book recommendations just keep rolling in. Here’s another batch:

• Academy of American Poets
• BookPage
• BuzzFeed
• The Millions, April
• The Millions, May
• Ms.
• Read It Forward
• She Reads

Happy reading!

Pulitzers

Pulitzer Administrator Dana Canedy has just announced the 2020 Pulitzer Prizes.

The finalists in poetry are:
The Tradition by Jericho Brown
Only As the Day Is Long by Dorianne Laux
Dunce by Mary Ruefle

The 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry has been awarded to Jericho Brown. Congratulations!

Watch the video of the announcement and read the full list of winners on the Pulitzer site.