The Tradition by Jericho Brown
Monday, April 19, 2021

April is National Poetry Month. Check out these 5 books that will move you:

  1. A Good Cry: What We Learn From Tears and Laughter by Nikki Giovanni
    In A Good Cry, Giovanni takes us into her confidence, describing the joy and peril of aging and recalling the violence that permeated her parents’ marriage and her early life. She pays homage to the people who have given her life meaning and joy: her grandparents, the poets and thinkers who have influenced her, the students who have surrounded her, and her good friend, Maya Angelou.
    Check it out in print or on cloudLibrary or on Hoopla as an e-book and e-audiobook.
  2. How to Fly: In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons by Barbara Kingsolver
    Barbara Kingsolver offers reflections on the practical, the spiritual, and the wild. She begins with “how to” poems addressing everyday matters. Next come rafts of poems about making peace (or not) with friendship, family and death. Some poems reflect on the redemptive powers of art and poetry itself; others consider where everything begins. Closing the book are poems that celebrate natural wonders – birdsong, ghost-flowers, coral reefs, deadly deserts, and thousand-year-old beech trees.
    Check it out in print, book-on-CD or on cloudLibrary as an e-book. 
  3. The Rose that Grew from Concrete by Tupac Shakur
    This collection of more than 100 poems that honestly and artfully confront topics ranging from poverty and motherhood to Van Gogh and Mandela is presented in Tupac Shakur's own handwriting on one side of the page, with a typed version on the opposite side.
    Check it out in print and on Hoopla as a spoken word album.
  4. milk and honey by Rupi Kaur
    Milk and honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. It is split into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose, deals with a different pain and heals a different heartache. The book takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look. 
    Check it out in print and on cloudLibrary as an e-book.
  5. The Tradition by Jericho Brown
    Jericho Brown’s daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie?
    Check it out in print and on both cloudLibrary and Hoopla as an e-book and e-audiobook.