April is National Poetry Month! Our newest book display features the work of several U.S. Poet Laureates, including Arthur Sze (2025), Ada Limón (2022), and Joy Harjo (2019), as well as many other incredible collections of poetry. Read on to learn more about some of the books on display this month, and stop by the library anytime to take a look!
Into the Hush by Arthur Sze:
Like wind on a lake, Arthur Sze’s twelfth book of poetry, Into the Hush, extends a language that ripples and stills, widens and deepens. Through an earned and profound simplicity, these poems move with imaginative power and emotional force and gather a startling array of contrasts—from wildfires to a sprig of sunrise, from gunshots to a spirit evoked by swaying candles—to address the challenges of our nuclear age. Here, poems shadow sonnets and appear as haibun and ekphrasis, pantoum and segmented zuihitsu. They borrow the voice of an eraser and the voice of a jaguar. Even the aspen leaves speak. Sze harnesses a range of innovative forms to respond to the challenges of climate change, exploring what it means to live on an endangered planet. Written at the height of his powers, Into the Hush is a landmark publication. Sze enacts a thrilling journey from silence into sound, from emptiness into the rich panoply of existence.
Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry by Ada Limón:
Ada Limón—celebrated poet laureate and 2023 MacArthur fellow—takes us on an inspiring journey into a world where poetry is both a soothing balm for the soul and a spark for transformation. With her blend of accessible yet profound prose, Limón delivers a powerful poetry has the ability to heal, connect, and remind us of our shared humanity.
Limón’s mission to make poetry approachable shines brightly in this slim but impactful book. Recognized as a 2024 Time magazine Woman of the Year for her commitment to bringing poetry into everyday lives, Limón passionately argues that poetry is essential to understanding ourselves—our tenderness, courage, imperfections, and our deep, unshakable worthiness of love.
Drawing from her own experiences as the 24th US poet laureate, Limón shares how poetry connects us not only to each other but to the natural world. This theme is at the heart of her project You Are Here, which celebrates the beauty of our environment and our place in it. Her prose, like her poetry, feels like an open invitation—welcoming readers of all backgrounds to explore the richness of human experience through verse.
The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems by Patricia Smith:
The Intentions of Thunder gathers, for the first time, the essential work from across Patricia Smith’s decorated career. Here, Smith’s poems, affixed with her remarkable gift of insight, present a rapturous ode to life. With careful yet vaulting movement, these poems traverse the redeeming landscape of pain, confront the frightening revelations of history, and disclose the joyous possibilities of the future. The result is a profound testament to the necessity of poetry—all the careful witness, embodied experience, and bristling pleasure that it bestows—and of Smith’s necessary voice.
Lyrical and sly, meditative and volcanic, The Intentions of Thunder stunningly explores the fullness of living. The inimitable poetry of Patricia Smith radiates in The Intentions of Thunder—reaffirming Smith’s place as one of the indispensable poets of our time.
An American Sunrise by Joy Harjo:
A stunning new volume from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States, informed by her tribal history and connection to the land. In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family’s lands and opens a dialogue with history. In An American Sunrise , Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where her people, and other indigenous families, essentially disappeared. From her memory of her mother’s death, to her beginnings in the native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo’s personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings. Her poems sing of beauty and survival, illuminating a spirituality that connects her to her ancestors and thrums with the quiet anger of living in the ruins of injustice. A descendent of storytellers and “one of our finest―and most complicated―poets” ( Los Angeles Review of Books ), Joy Harjo continues her legacy with this latest powerful collection.
Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Glück:
Louise Glück is one of the finest American poets at work today. Her Poems 1962-2012 was hailed as "a major event in this country's literature" in the pages of The New York Times. Every new collection is at once a deepening and a revelation. Faithful and Virtuous Night is no exception.
You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it's the same place but it has been arranged differently. You were a woman. You were a man. This is a story of adventure, an encounter with the unknown, a knight's undaunted journey into the kingdom of death; this is a story of the world you've always known, that first primer where "on page three a dog appeared, on page five a ball" and every familiar facet has been made to shimmer like the contours of a dream, "the dog float[ing] into the sky to join the ball." Faithful and Virtuous Night tells a single story but the parts are mutable, the great sweep of its narrative mysterious and fateful, heartbreaking and charged with wonder.
Dog Show by Billy Collins:
Billy Collins's Dog Show celebrates the joy of our canine best friends, honoring the love we feel for these animals who play vital roles in so many of our lives. In twenty-five poems, Collins distills the many emotions dogs bring us, from the happiness we feel as we watch a dog trot out the door unencumbered by our burdens, to the silliness of holding a dog in our arms as we step on the scale together. Turning his inimitable eye and ear to the complexities of dog behavior, Collins ponders all that these winning creatures give us and what we learn from them about ourselves.
All book images and descriptions are from Goodreads.com.
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