Are you participating in the Sealey Challenge this year? Five years ago poet Nicole Sealey challenged herself to read a book of poetry every day during the month of August. The idea took off and is a great way to reconnect with poetry and support poets. Here at ALL, we've put together a list of recommended books for the month, featuring full-length collections and chapbooks, each of which can be read in one day and included a few lines from sample poems. Stop by the Kort Mezzanine and discover new work or revisit old favorites.
Note: chapbooks are non-circulating but we have some comfy reading chairs!
Outside the Frame: New and Selected Poems by Marilyn Taylor
"The house in this poem is not my house,
the red oaks arching over it not my trees—
but every time I come here, the birds
are glad to see me."
from "Extravaganza at Dave's"
The Carrying: Poems by Ada Limón
“I don’t know how to hold this truth,
so I kill it, pin its terrible wings down
in case, later, no one believes me.”
from “Killing Methods”
The Good Thief by Marie Howe
“What is permitted me is only a sure dull sorrow,
and a sense of skittering on the very
edge of things, about to fall again,
sadly deliberate as rain.”
from “Menses”
Tender by Toi Derricotte
“I’m a martyr, a girl who’s been dead
two thousand years. I turn
on my left side, like one comfortable
after a long, hard death.”
from “Invisible Dreams”
The River at Wolf by Jean Valentine
“I am the skull
under your hundred doubts.”
from “The Badlands Said”
Tremble by C.D. Wright
“Because I know this is going to be painful
I can feel the pain before it acquires a shape”
from “So Far Off and Yet Here”
Fuel: Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye
“As a boy, my father listened to them fight.
This is partly why he prays in no language
but his own. Why I press my lips
to every exception.”
from “Half-and-Half”
Hip Logic by Terrance Hayes
“I have left my name
On the walls of a dozen museums & galleries.
I have covered my face in paint.
I cannot tell you who I am, but who I ain’t.”
from “William H. Johnson – a letter home, circa 1933”
Every Day We Get More Illegal by Juan Felipe Herrera
“everything inside of me is
alive & dying at the
same time against each other
what do you know about war you are nothing
but a wall”
from “Interview w/a Border Machine”
Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser
“Coming home late from the tavern.
A Mouse has drowned in the toilet.
A metaphor of the poet, I think.
But no, the death of a glorious mouse.”
leabelly by Tyehimba Jess
“you breathe in the last breath of a man
who knew his value in weight and work,
blink hard, let out the air of a man who knows
the difference between way and no way out.”
from “five year sentence”
Alcatraz by John Engman (chapbook)
“Let me tell you about
the deep neglect of the universe: it hurts.”
from “One Way of Looking at Wallace Stevens”
Call me Ill by T.S. Banks (chapbook)
“Sometimes my mind cries
And the only way to silence
the whimpers of breath lost in flooding waters is to crawl
into stillness”
from “Symphony”
Witch by Philip Matthews
“Oxygenated angels
enclosed in their mossy tubs, feathers
combed and oiled at strange angles. No one
is flying with these wings.”
from “A Substitute”
Blessings by Ron Wallace (chapbook)
“How the stage lights soften
the faces of the audience,
the old song and dance
of dailiness washed away.”
from “Art”
And Still the Music: Poems by Alison Townsend (chapbook)
“Even then, Michael, your life
slipping off that screen
we’d tried to bring you back from
since you were seventeen,
where you danced before us,
always slightly larger than life
like Mick or Morrison”
from “I Believe She Said You Wept”
father forgive me by DeShawn McKinney (chapbook)
“i am afraid of drowning
and like all thinking men
i am enamored with water”
from “It comes in twos”
Arrows of Light by Andrea Potos (chapbook)
“I would breathe the stillness of presence, what
she taught me, hers and mine,
and the terror of not knowing,
all I could do was stay.”
from “With My Mother at Her Chemo Appointments”
A Woman in Vegetable by Ronnie Hess (chapbook)
“Days I would stare at my typewriter, sentences failing me,
jumbles of words I would cross out, circle, or move about
until the page was scribbles. Or my phrases became
paragraphs, without melody, dragging on until they dropped
dead.”
from "Writer’s Block or On Being an American Journalist in Paris, after Jean Nordhaus”
Recess by R. Virgil Ellis (chapbook)
“The current leads me to that dark opening
that wants all the breath I have left.
But I pull hard for the sun.
I’ll settle for what I know, for now.”
from “Spring-fed”
The Insomniac’s House by Lisa J. Cihlar (chapbook)
“I talk to fish in the rain.
Caught like fairytale mermaid scales,
rainbows of gasoline on puddles.”
from “Unprotected”
The Only Everglades in the World by Robin Chapman (chapbook)
“Trail a languid hand in the water
and you’ll twirl like a pelican caught
by its foot, swimming a lopsided circle
around the hammerhead shark,
vanish into that hungry vortex too.”
from “The Everglades of Northern Imagination”
Homie: Poems by Danez Smith
“i saw it. the way you would break me
into a better me. i ran from it. like any child, i saw my medicine
& it looked so sharp, so exact, a blade fit to the curve of my name.”
from “I didn’t like you when i met you”
Cinema Muto: Poems by Jesse Lee Kercheval
“For if a camera
can come this close
to death,
surely so can God.”
from “Imagine God as a Camera”
The Dead Girls Speak in Unison by Danielle Pafunda
“We’ve tacked our skin
back onto our bones, and hissing
roaches at our throats.”
from “26”
Water Puppets by Quan Barry
“The soul is segmented.
Even in the dark it glows, each thoracic bulb
brilliant, pastel, both primordial & futuristic.”
from “If only I had been able to form the idea of a substance that was spiritual, after Ana Fernandez’s Pins”
Absentee Indians & Other Poems by Kimberly Blaeser
“Colored and shaped by air gusts
each moment
on the verge of transformation.
We are something else.”
from “Lines from an Autumn Litany”
The Rock at the Corner of my Heart by Daniel P. Kunene
“The cunning, scheming trickster
Then sat back to watch and laugh and count the gains
As these children of the same womb
Ripped each other’s guts out”
from “Blood Rising in the Fatherland”
Soft Science by Franny Choi
“I invited them in. I said, Help yourselves. Then watched
as they went from room to room, taking, emptying
the shelves, sucking marrow from the bones,
and overhead, the sky filled with rain.”
from “The Price of Rain”
The Wild Iris by Louise Glück
“What are you saying? That you want
eternal life? Are your thoughts really
as compelling as all that?”
from “Field Flowers”