It’s not just novels at the Library. Why not try one of our new Poetry books!

This essential collection, in the tradition of Dudley Randall’s The Black Poets and E. Ethelbert Miller’s In Search of Color Everywhere, contains poems exploring joy, love, origin, race, resistance, and praise. Jacqueline A.Trimble likens “Black woman joy” to indigo, tassels, foxes, and peacock plumes. Tyree Daye, Nate Marshall, and Elizabeth Acevedo reflect on the meaning of “home” through food, from Cuban rice and beans to fried chicken gizzards. Clint Smith and Cameron Awkward-Rich enfold us in their intimate musings on love and devotion. From a “jewel in the hand” (Patricia Spears Jones) to “butter melting in small pools” (Elizabeth Alexander), This Is the Honey drips with poignant and delightful imagery, music, and raised fists. Fresh, memorable, and deeply moving, this definitive collection a must-have for any lover of language and a gift for our time.

And this from a local Louisiana poet…

Megan’s Guitar and Other Poems from Acadie is both poetic inquiry and poetic exploration. The collection is arranged as a diptych: the first and third sections are a mirroring of the ideas of settlement, displacement, migration, and identity, but mostly they are inquiries into the movements and habitations of the migratory heart, “Acadie tropicale” largely references life in modern southern Acadia while “Acadie du nord” is an attempt to tell the story of the eighteenth-century northern Acadian experience through predominantly historical figures who survived displacement and attempts at erasure. The hinge section suggests that song is both catalyst and clarifier, a requisite antidote to the calcifying lines every history has a tendency to draw around itself if not examined and re-examined in every way imaginable.