Narrative theme: Death, grief, loss

Sometimes it's difficult to take that first step into your future and embrace the unknown. This illustrated collection of poetry and essays empowers you to embrace your next adventure with confidence and grace, drawing on invaluable lessons from nature...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘Though lovers be lost love shall not;And death shall have no dominion.’As a child growing up in South Wales, Dylan Thomas was obsessed with words. In adulthood his...

A classic in the Bukowski poetry canon, Love Is a Dog from Hell is a raw, lyrical, exploration of the exigencies, heartbreaks, and limits of love.A book that captures the Dirty Old Man of American letters at his fiercest and most vulnerable, on a subject...

‘The best poet in America’ Jean Genet‘He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels’ Leonard CohenThe definitive collection from a writer whose transgressive legacy and raw, funny, acutely observant writing has left an enduring mark Here is...

How do you untangle the real you from the curated you? In this introspective yet whimsical collection, poet Grant Chemidlin takes readers into the thicket of self-discovery.**Finalist for Lambda Literary Award - Gay Poetry   What We Lost in the...

From the author of paper girl and the knives that made her comes unfold, a poetic, aching, and hopeful retelling of realizations made while on the journey to healing from both loss of love and loss of self.Through poetry and short essays, unfold shows...

The fifth collection from poet Blake Auden, To Drown as a Cure for Thirst, is a delicate exploration of grief and how it affects—and is affected by—time and memory. Written in the wake of a global pandemic, the book touches on themes including...

“if you wish to read  the story of my people  look no further  than my body.” Pangaea is a collection of poetry about working through the trauma inflicted on a body, whether the trauma comes from a person, a country, or from within...

"Wear poetry as both perfume and armor."In Turning to Wallpaper, lush, elegant language contrasts with the disturbing and at times gruesome imagery to create a collection that knows exactly how to haunt the reader. Wong’s words and artistry are vibrant...

A lot can happen between the first sip of coffee and the last taste of whiskey.Coffee Days, Whiskey Nights is a collection of poetry, prose, and aphorisms that juxtaposes the hopefulness a brand new day can bring with the lingering thoughts that keep us...

Sad Birds Still Sing is the highly anticipated book of poetry from anonymous author Faraway. In less than a year, he became one of the most recognizable figures on the platform he writes: Instagram (@farawaypoetry).In this book of selected poems and...

A poignant collection of poems written by a dedicated Franciscan sister and the former hospital administrator of Saint Marys Hospital during a lifetime of dedication, this is a work that celebrates the seasons of life and brings insight - and a smile -...

"Poets feed us. They look where there seems to be nothing to see, and they see."-Alberto RosIn times of joy and sorrow, celebration and confusion, people turn to poetry. Amid the initial uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, the staff and interns of...

I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is film noir set in verse, each poem a miniature crime scene with its own set of clues--frosted eye-shadow, a pistol under a horse's eye, dripping window units, an aneurysm opening its lethal trap. In...

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness-between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves-from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limn."I have always been too sensitive, a...

""The big event in poetry for 2015 will likely be the long-awaited resurrection of Frank Stanford, a legendary badass from Arkansas, much of whose poetry has been unavailable since his suicide at the age of 29 in 1978... Stanford was a hell of a...

Covering the most productive period of J.H. Prynne's career, this new volume collects all of the recent poetry of Britain's leading late Modernist poet.Prynne's austere yet playful poetry challenges our sense of the world, not by any direct address to...

Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for PoetryWinner of the 2024 Jackson Poetry PrizeFrom one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians.FadyJoudah's...

Beautifully illustrated in Imtiaz Dharker's distinctive style, Shadow Reader is a radiant criss-cross of encounters, messages and earthy Punjabi proverbs, shot through with the dark thread of an unwelcome prophecy.Imtiaz Dharker's new collection pays...

Through moving and incisive poetry, Crystal traces the arc of one woman's experience after the discovery that her partner is addicted to crystal meth.In a highly original poetic act of reclamation, it plunders the drug itself and makes of it an...

Soul Feast is a companion to the hugely popular poetry anthology Soul Food, offering up a further feast of thoughtful poems to stir the mind and feed the spirit, bringing hope and light in dark, uncertain times.The original Soul Food anthology (2007)...

National Book Awardwinner Arthur Sze presents a one-of-a-kind anthology that vividly traces Chinese poetry from its centuries-old lyrical traditions up to the present day.In The Silk Dragon II, National Book Awardwinning poet Arthur Sze presents a...

A record of daily bewilderments and accidental concessions to hope after a momentous loss. In this follow-up to her award-winning collection, Toxicon and Arachne, Joyelle McSweeney proposes a link between style and survival, even in the gravest of...

With an equal dose of fatalism and dark wit, Antigua captures the body's capacity to cage and cradle sadness. Diannely Antigua's Good Monsteranxiety, depression, and boundless need become monstrous shadows. Here, poems dance on bars, speak in tongues,...

Written with keen perception and insatiable curiosity, Chris Nealon's fifth book of poetry,All About You, is both a study of personhood and a diary of release from it."You almost let your ego go," he writes, "but oh-/maybe tomorrow." Revolving through...

Elegiac and haunting, Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi completes the KOR-US trilogy, along with Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016) and the National Book Awardwinning DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020).Much like Proust's madeleine, a spinning Mercedez Benz...

Beforelight explores queer childhood as a site of rupture and queer coming-of-age as a process of both becoming and unbecoming. With wisdom and grace, the speaker in these poems confronts the impacts of fragmented relationships and trauma on his nascent...

Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire draws together MacGillivray's extensive research into the life and work of Norwegian-Shetlandic poet Kristjn Norge, who vanished from Eilean a' Bhis in the Outer Hebrides in 1961. Comprising two previously unpublished...

Mapping the Futureoffers new work by all 30 writers supported byThe Complete Works project, including Warsan Shire, Raymond Antrobus, Mona Arshi, Roger Robinson, Inua Ellams, Malika Booker, Sarah Howe, Will Harris, Kayo Chingonyi, Jay Bernard, Yomi Sode...

Grounded in protest and solidarity, Subhaga Crystal Bacon's Isabella Gardner Award-winning Transitory is a collection of elegies memorializing 46 transgender and gender-nonconforming people murdered in the US and Puerto Rico in 2020.Epistolary in nature,...

Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit explores disability, storytelling, and the process of mythologising trauma. Jen Campbell writes of Victorian circus and folklore, deep seas and dark forests, discussing her own relationship with hospitals - both as a...

Tale of Ahmedis a gripping fictional account of the dangerous journey of a teenage boy, Ahmed, who travels from Afghanistan, across the Middle East and Europe, to seek refuge in England.Author Henry Cockburn lives at one end of a long trail stretching...

Winner of the 2024 LAMBDA Literary Award for Outstanding Bisexual PoetryConsumed with the accumulation of lost time and unfulfilled longing, Desire Museum by Danielle Cadena Deulen is an intricate exploration of things left unfinished or unsatisfied...

As labyrinthine as its namesake, Dorothea Lasky'sThe Shiningis an ekphrastic horror lyric that shapes an entirely unique feminist psychological landscape.Here, Lasky guides us through the familiar rooms of the Overlook Hotel,both realized and imagined,...

Confessional and immersive, Michael V. Smith's latest collection is a broad tapestry that explores growing up queer and working class, then growing into an urban queer life.In these poems, we are immersed in the world of a young Smith as he shares the...

In a country where violence and the threat of violence is a constant weather for queer Black people, where can the spirit rest?With lush language, the meditative poems in the Isabella Gardner Award-winning Tenderness examine the fraught nature of...

In her loving Foreword to this expanded anniversary edition, Naomi Shihab Nye writes "Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry is one of the dearest, most appealing books ever published. These poems are tiny delicious American haiku affectionately...

A series of poetic remixes, WAR IS NOT MY MOTHER might be considered a form of spirit possession.Each poem in this manuscript takes up another poet's work- a selection that ranges from Lorca to CD Wright, H Xun Hng to Sappho, Agha Shahid Ali to Ishrat...

Winner of The Laurel Prize 2023 Best UK First Collection, Burning Season is a book about fire and survival, climate change and nature's defiance.The book combines poems with nature diaries and lyric essays to trace an intriguing family history. This...

Five Fifty-Five quizzical poems concerned with time and mortality which ask fundamental questions about our lives, such asWhere have you gone?andWho were you anyway?In her first new collection since The Silveringtries to find out through conversations...

Although the consciousness of death is, in most cultures, very much a part of life, this is perhaps nowhere more true than in Japan, where the approach of death has given rise to a centuries-old tradition of writing jisei, or the "death poem." Such a...

A primer serving to facilitate dialogue between those who have experienced the crushing arms of war and those who have not, at its foundation Black Snowflakes Smothering a Torch presupposes that many issues veterans face when reintegrating come not from...

Traveling the nation, Matt Donovan examines the paradox of a country plagued by gun violence yet consumed with protecting the right to bear arms.Matt Donovan's The Dug-Up Gun Museumconfronts our country's obsession with guns to explore America's...

In Michael Earl Craig's sixth book, poems resonate with an inscrutable logic that feels excitedly otherworldly and unsettlingly familiar.Whether he be writing about the cadaver that Hans Holbein the Younger used as a model, Montana as the "Italy of God,"...

In her latest book,New Life, Lambda Awardwinning poet Ana Boievi writes, "For my birthday I want a cake/revealing the color of my soul." Never saccharine, these poems are by turns cheeky and heartfelt, grounded and wistful, and above all-surprising. New...

Sandra Simonds's Triptychs is a brilliant intersection of poetic form and the passage of time.Crafted initially in strips handwritten on rolls of receipt paper obtained at a dollar store, then assembled into three textual columns that sit side-by-side on...

Winner of the 2023 CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative NonfictionWinner of the Pegasus Award for Poetry CriticismOptic Subwoof is a collection of talks that poet and National Book Award finalist Douglas Kearney presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture...

In her new collection, renowned publisher and poet Rebecca Wolff voyages in the myopia of American consumer consciousness-erotic regard, spiritual FOMO, gentrification, branding-without destination.Labyrinthine in their paradoxical musings and incisive...