Metaphors, similes and rhymes galore, poetry is everywhere. We create poems out of unplanned conversations with long distance friends and from the breakfast we haphazardly cooked for ourselves yesterday. We stumble upon poems in a gift for our best friend that we’ve spent months planning out and in old family scrapbooks our parents have spent many a careful year crafting. Poems rest under our fluffed pillow, bloom from our hair being blown by the wind and reside in minute-long stares we share with an unrequited love. Poetry is within us all, but it takes a certain kind of writer to put pen to paper and bring those poems to life. Thankfully, four lovely writers have carefully curated a list of poems and poem collections that highlight writers who possess the ability to starkly speak to the experience of being human and what it feels like to be alive.
— Graciela Batlle Cestero, Senior Arts Editor, and Camille Nagy, Books Beat Editor
“Dearly” by Margaret Atwood
Is “Dearly” by Margaret Atwood the only full poetry collection I’ve read? Yes. Does that diminish my love for it? Not at all.
While I’m honestly not the biggest fan of Atwood’s prose, I find her poetry beautiful and intricate while also brutal in its frankness. I still vividly remember reading these poems for the first time a little more than two years ago, and I even still think about some of them on a weekly basis. Given the brevity of this blurb, I want to name just a few favorites.
“The Aliens Arrive” details the frustrating, flawed and entirely human reactions of the human race in the face of existential and world-ending futures. As a lover of sci-fi who used to suffer from chronic existential crises, this one resonated with me.
“Blackberries” touches on the intimate inheritance of womanhood, the cycle of aging and the importance of savoring the sweet moments in life. There’s a lot to unpack; the poem is clearly layered and meaningful. Beyond that, the imagery is beautiful and tender and overall just a pleasure to read.
The titular poem, “Dearly,” encapsulates the heartbreaking and desolate world that grief creates in our thoughts and lives. The loss of the speaker’s loved one is paired with the loss of words from our collective vocabulary. Atwood wrote the poems in this collection right before the death of her husband of 50 years, and this poem perhaps speaks to that the most.
The poems in this collection are timeless yet abruptly modern. You’ll read about the Greek prophet Cassandra refusing her gift, the integration of plastic into our everyday lives and even zombies, and I would be shocked if you failed to find at least one that stays with you.
Daily Arts Writer Cora Rolfes can be reached at corolfes@umich.edu.
“Selected Poems” by Gwendolyn Brooks
I was lucky to have stumbled upon Gwendolyn Brooks and her work through a random assignment in high school. Our final project in my senior year English class was to read a significant portion of a poet’s work from a selected list and write a paper on it. We all had to do our projects on different poets and I had the last pick. I didn’t recognize any poets left, so my English teacher suggested Gwendolyn Brooks. Funnily enough, I don’t remember a single one of the other poets I wanted to write my paper on. But I certainly remember Brooks.
You might not recognize her name, but you have heard her words (even if only as the intro to Kanye West’s “Praise God”) and seen the effects of her revolutionary impact on inclusion in literature. Brooks was the first Black poet to win the Pulitzer Prize and the first Black woman to serve as the 29th consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress. She also served as the Illinois poet laureate for 32 years.
“Selected Poems” is a comprehensive, expertly arranged selection of Brooks’ work. As you read “Selected Poems,” you embark on a structural and temporal journey through Brooks’ career. At the beginning of the collection, you see Brooks’ use of traditionally European structure and prose. Brooks initially straddled the color line, accepted by white readers as a traditional poet yet disappointing to her Black readers, as her critiques on social conditions were perceived as too soft. However, as time passed, her work became more and more revolutionary. Towards the end of her career, Brooks’ work became more overtly political and commented directly on civil rights and social progress.
The pieces in this collection are all beautiful. Brooks has a way of transforming even the most mundane objects and tasks into commentary, making beans symbolic and frying bacon bone-chilling. What’s more, Brooks’ journey from quiet defiance to bold activism is inspiring.
If you’re looking into reading more poetry, “Selected Poems” is the way to go — it is a blend of traditional and nontraditional structures, touches on a diverse range of still-pertinent themes and tells the story of a trailblazing female poet. I’m happy to have stumbled upon Gwendolyn Brooks when I did, and I’m sure you will be too after reading “Selected Poems.”
Daily Arts Writer Claire Rock can be reached at rockcl@umich.edu.
“frank: sonnets” by Diane Seuss
The feats that Diane Seuss manages to pull off in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection are almost hard to believe. An intelligent and successful reimagining of the sonnet form? Confessional, non-rhyming prose that remains resonant and non-cringeworthy? Poems that coalesce into a poignant narrative but still elicit huge emotions when read in isolation? Profound and well-placed meta commentary that never becomes grating? Combine all this with the fact that these poems feel effortless, as if pulled stream-of-consciousness from Seuss’ pen, and the collection becomes something of a masterpiece.
“frank: sonnets” is a memoir in verse, pushing us forward and backward through Seuss’ life like an ocean tide. We go back to her childhood in the Midwest and her coming of age in New York’s punk scene, all the way through to her marriage and the birth of her son. The selling point is the sea: Her collection opens with a drive to Cape Disappointment, and contemplations of the Pacific Ocean — its beauty, openness and possible use as a suicide method — link these fragments together. Always nebulous enough for interpretation yet specific enough to create straight-to-the-gut emotionality, Seuss’ word and form choices feel dirty, yet flawless in their impact.
Even considering all this, what pushes these poems over the edge is how devastating the collection is. This isn’t the kind of poetry that leaves you feeling a little melancholy; it’s the kind that makes you question if you have the emotional capacity to have a child, considering the risk of unimaginable grief that could come were the worst to happen coupled with the joy of parenthood. This is rawness at its best. Sometimes it’s borderline painful to read, but I promise every word is worth it.
Daily Arts Writer Grace Sielinski can be reached at gsielins@umich.edu.
“Contradictions in the Design” by Matthew Olzmann
I first discovered poet and Hamtramck native Matthew Olzmann through a video of John Green reading his poem, “Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem.” The speaker lists reasons their marriage might work before culminating in a heartwarming anecdote about a Mountain Dew, much like a Super Bowl advertisement. Olzmann’s poetry is straightforward and unpretentious, kneading through unassuming, peculiar images to produce gut-wrenching poems about loneliness, love and loss. He is unafraid to be vulnerable, even cheesy. In “Letter Written While Waiting in Line at Comic Con,” conlangs frame the intimacies of love. In “Letter to William Shatner,” a voiceover becomes an exploration of male rage.
While any of his three books offer an accessible entry point, I particularly recommend his second collection, “Contradictions in the Design.” Here is Olzmann at his most tender, exploring the ambiguities and ennui of creation. In the titular poem, God is not a master planner but “frustrated” and “frazzled,” his tools scattered across a drafting table. Searching for him is like searching for an elusive moose, as exhibited in “Nate Brown is Looking for a Moose.” Our woes have no convenient existential meaning.
In “Build, Now, a Monument” an hourglass maker decides to build a Tower-of-Babel-esque staircase, where he contemplates caterpillars and the brutal death of a friend: “what he can’t comprehend / is how, around those endings, everything else / continues.” Olzmann’s genius lies in his ability to arrive at simple yet powerful revelations through a careful plotting of narrative and sympathetic portrayal of subjects. The characters of metro Detroit come alive in poems like “The Minotaurs” and “Secretariat.” It’s this humanistic bent that sustains the reader. Somewhere, beneath the painful contradictions, people are worth the effort.
Daily Arts Contributor Awmeo Azad can be reached at awmeo@umich.edu.