R&R's Summer Reading Recommendations! (Part 3: Poetry)

40 More Fantastic Books to Add to Your End-of-Summer Reading List

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Sep 02, 2024

So far we’ve released a list of 30 fiction recommendations and a list of 30 nonfiction recommendations to add to your end-of-summer reading list. This week, in our final installment, we’ve got 40 of our favorite poetry reading recommendations, both old and new, from the big batch of books we’ve discussed on our Aesthetic Arrest Podcast. That’s a total of 100 fantastic books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry chosen from among our favorite books here in the R&R household.

Part 3 is focused on poetry (as well as literary anthologies which include significant amounts of poetry in addition to other genres). There’s a mix of ancient epics, recent poetry releases, groundbreaking collections, numerous Nobel Prize-winning and Pulitzer Prize-winning poets, and a wide range of poetic voices from all over the globe. Enjoy!

Click here if you missed Part 1. Click here if you missed Part 2.

R&R's Summer Reading Recommendations! (Part 3: Poetry & Anthologies)

The Aeneid by by Vergil (translated by Sarah Ruden)

“This is a substantial revision of Sarah Ruden’s celebrated 2008 translation of Vergil’s Aeneid, which was acclaimed by Garry Wills as ‘the first translation since Dryden’s that can be read as a great English poem in itself.’ Ruden’s line-for-line translation in iambic pentameter is an astonishing feat, unique among modern translations. Her revisions to the translation render the poetry more spare and muscular than her previous version and capture even more closely the essence of Vergil’s poem, which pits national destiny against the fates of individuals, and which resonates deeply in our own time.” [Source]

All the Odes: A Bilingual Edition by Pablo Neruda (edited by Ilan Stavans)

“Pablo Neruda was a master of the ode, which he conceived as an homage to just about everything that surrounded him, from an artichoke to the clouds in the sky, from the moon to his own friendship with Federico García Lorca and his favorite places in Chile. … This bilingual volume, edited by Ilan Stavans, a distinguished translator and scholar of Latin American literature, gathers all Neruda’s odes for the first time in any language. … All the Odes is also a lasting statement on the role of poetry as a lightning rod during tumultuous times.” [Source]

Bending the Bow by Robert Duncan

“‘The poetic tradition that Duncan invokes is necessarily heretical––politically, sexually, and poetically––one which sees “always the underside turning” in a search for the fullest definition of social order’ — Michael Davidson, The Los Angeles Times ... In Bending the Bow, which presents his work in poetry since Roots and Branches, Robert Duncan is writing on a scale which places him among the poets, after Walt Whitman, bold enough to attempt the personal epic, the large-canvas rendering of man’s spirit in history as one man sees it, feels it, lives it, and makes it his own.” [Source]

Collected Poems 1912-1944 by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

“‘In the tradition of poems by Yeats, Eliot and Pound, H. D’s verse sequences are richly visionary “supreme fictions”…’ — Sandra M. Gilbert, New York Times Book Review … The Collected Poems 1912-1944 traces the continual expansion of H. D.’s work from her early imagistic mode to the prophetic style of her ‘hidden’ years in the 1930s, climaxing in the broader, mature accomplishment of Trilogy. The book is edited by Professor Louis L. Martz of Yale, who supplies valuable textual notes and an introductory essay that relates the significance of H. D.’s life to her equally remarkable literary achievement.” [Source]

Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition by Federico García Lorca (edited by Christopher Maurer)

“Federico García Lorca was the most beloved poet of twentieth-century Spain and one of the world’s most influential modernist writers. … Christopher Maurer, a leading García Lorca scholar and editor, has brought together new and substantially revised translations by twelve poets and translators, placed side by side with the Spanish originals. … This is the most comprehensive collection in English of a poet who--as Maurer writes in his illuminating introduction--‘spoke unforgettably of all that most interests us: the otherness of nature, the demons of personal identity and artistic creation, sex, childhood, and death.’” [Source]

Complete Poems by Claude McKay

“Containing more than three hundred poems, including nearly a hundred previously unpublished works, this unique collection showcases the intellectual range of Claude McKay (1889-1948), the Jamaican-born poet and novelist whose life and work were marked by restless travel and steadfast social protest. … McKay’s verse eludes easy definition, yet this complete anthology, vividly introduced and carefully annotated by William J. Maxwell, acquaints readers with the full transnational evolution of a major voice in twentieth-century poetry.” [Source]

Dark Testament and Other Poems by Pauli Murray

“There has been explosive interest in the life of Pauli Murray … Celebrated by twenty-first-century readers as a civil rights activist on the level of King, Parks, and John Lewis, [Murray] is also being rediscovered as a gifted writer of memoir, sermons, and poems. … At turns song, prayer, and lamentation, Murray’s poems speak to the brutal history of slavery and Jim Crow and the dream of racial justice and equality.” [Source]

Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Writing by Latine Women (edited by Sandra Guzmán)

“Spanning time, styles, and traditions, a dazzling collection of essential works from 140 Latine writers, scholars, and activists from across the world … Daughters of Latin America collects the intergenerational voices of Latine women across time and space, capturing the power, strength, and creativity of these visionary writers, leaders, scholars, and activists--including 24 Indigenous voices. … More than a collection of writings, Daughters of Latin America is a resurrection of ancestral literary inheritance as well as a celebration of the rising voices encouraged and nurtured by those who came before them.” [Source]

The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems by N. Scott Momaday

“Pulitzer Prize winner and celebrated American master N. Scott Momaday returns with a radiant collection of more than 200 new and selected poems rooted in Native American oral tradition. … This luminous collection demonstrates Momaday’s mastery and love of language and the matters closest to his heart. To Momaday, words are sacred; language is power. Spanning nearly fifty years, the poems gathered here illuminate the human condition, Momaday’s connection to his Kiowa roots, and his spiritual relationship to the American landscape.” [Source]

The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks by Gwendolyn Brooks (edited by Elizabeth Alexander)

“Discover the most enduring works of the legendary poet and first black author to win a Pulitzer Prize--now in one collectible volume … From the life of Chicago’s South Side she made a forceful and passionate poetry that fused Modernist aesthetics with African-American cultural tradition, a poetry that registered the life of the streets and the upheavals of the 20th century. … By turns compassionate, angry, satiric, and psychologically penetrating, Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry retains its power to move and surprise.” [Source]

Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye

“This celebratory book collects in one volume award-winning and beloved poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s most popular and accessible poems. … Everything Comes Next is a treasure chest of Naomi Shihab Nye’s most beloved poems … The book is an introduction to the poet’s work for new readers, as well as a comprehensive edition for classroom and family sharing. Writing prompts and tips by the award-winning poet make this an outstanding choice for aspiring poets of all ages.” [Source]

Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972 by Alejandra Pizarnik (translated by Yvette Siegert)

“The first full-length collection in English by one of Latin America’s most significant twentieth-century poets. … Revered by the likes of Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolaño, Alejandra Pizarnik is still a hidden treasure in the U.S. …Obsessed with themes of solitude, childhood, madness and death, Pizarnik explored the shifting valences of the self and the border between speech and silence.” [Source]

Gold by Rumi (translated by Haleh Liza Gafori)

“A vibrant selection of poems by the great Persian mystic with groundbreaking translations by an American poet of Persian descent. … Rumi’s poems were meant to induce a sense of ecstatic illumination and liberation in his audience, bringing its members to a condition of serenity, compassion, and oneness with the divine. … This new translation by Haleh Liza Gafori preserves the intelligence and the drama of the poems, which are as full of individual character as they are of visionary wisdom.” [Source]

A Good Cry: What We Learn from Tears and Laughter by Nikki Giovanni

“The poetry of Nikki Giovanni has spurred movements, turned hearts and informed generations. She’s been hailed as a firebrand, a radical, a courageous activist who has spoken out on the sensitive issues that touch our national consciousness, including race and gender, social justice, protest, violence in the home and in the streets, and why black lives matter. … One of America’s most celebrated poets looks inward in this powerful collection, a rumination on her life and the people who have shaped her.” [Source]

Grand Tour: Poems by Elisa Gonzalez

“Grand Tour, the debut collection of poetry by Elisa Gonzalez, dramatizes the mind in motion as it grapples with something more than an event: she writes of a whole life, to transcendent effect. … The poet moves through elegy, romantic and sexual encounters, family history, and place--Cyprus, Puerto Rico, Poland, Ohio--all constellated in ‘a chaos of faraway.’ The collection is held together less by answers than by a persistent question: How do you reconcile a hatred for the world’s pain with a love for that same world, which is indivisible from its worst aspects?” [Source]

The Iliad by Homer (translated by Emily Wilson)

“When Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017--revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that was ‘fresh, unpretentious and lean’ (Madeline Miller, Washington Post)--critics lauded it as ‘a revelation’ (Susan Chira, New York Times) and ‘a cultural landmark’ (Charlotte Higgins, Guardian) that would forever change how Homer is read in English. Now Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of Homer’s other great epic--the most revered war poem of all time. … The culmination of a decade of intense engagement with antiquity’s most surpassingly beautiful and emotionally complex poetry, Wilson’s Iliad now gives us a complete Homer for our generation.” [Source]

Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna (translated by Betty de Shong Meador)

“The earliest known author of written literature was a woman named Enheduanna, who lived in ancient Mesopotamia around 2300 BCE. High Priestess to the moon god Nanna, Enheduanna came to venerate the goddess Inanna above all gods in the Sumerian pantheon. … This book provides the complete texts of Enheduanna’s hymns to Inanna, skillfully and beautifully rendered by Betty De Shong Meador … With this information, she explores the role of Inanna as the archetypal feminine, the first goddess who encompasses both the celestial and the earthly and shows forth the full scope of women’s potential.” [Source]

The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems by Mina Loy

“‘Mina Loy has finally been admitted into “the company of poets,” the canon. As if she cared.’ —Thom Gunn, The Times Literary Supplement … Mina Loy’s technique and subjects - prostitution, menstruation, destitution, and suicide - shock even some modernists and she vanished from the poetry scene as dramatically as she had appeared on it. Roger Conover has rescued the key texts from the pages of forgotten publications, and has included all of the futurist and feminist satires, poems from Loy’s Paris and New York periods, and the complete cycle of ‘Love Songs,’ as well as previously unknown texts and detailed notes.” [Source]

New Collected Poems by Marianne Moore

“The landmark oeuvre of Marianne Moore, one of the major inventors of poetic modernism, has had no straight path from beginning to end; until now, there has been no good vantage point from which to see the body of her remarkable work as a whole. … New Collected Poems offers an answer to the question of how to represent the work of a poet so skillful and singular, giving a portrait of the range of her voice and of the modernist culture she helped create. … Presented and collected by Heather Cass White, the foremost scholar of Moore’s work, this new collection at last allows readers to experience the untamed force of these dazzling poems as the author first envisioned them.” [Source]

Omeros by Derek Walcott

“Dive into the poignant verses of Omeros, a grand opus of epic poetry penned by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. … Titled with the Greek name for Homer, Omeros elegantly traverses the surface and depths of history. While wrapping you in the intricacies of Caribbean literature and Latin American poetry, the verses of Omeros take you on an emotional journey through Saint Lucian landscapes. … ‘One of the great poems of our time.’ -- John Lucas, New Statesman” [Source]

The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry (edited by Gerald Moore & Ulli Beier)

“This wonderfully comprehensive anthology of African poetry has been expanded to include ninety-nine poets from twenty-seven countries, thirty-one of whom appear for the first time. Equally wide-ranging is the content of the poetry itself: war songs and political protests jostle with poems about human love, African nature and the surprises that life offers; all are represented in these rich and colourful pages.” [Source]

Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems by Rita Dove

“Meticulously orchestrated and musical in its forms, Playlist for the Apocalypse collects a dazzling array of voices: an elevator operator simmers with resentment, an octogenarian dances an exuberant mambo, a spring cricket philosophizes with mordant humor on hip hop, critics, and Valentine’s Day. … Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to catastrophic failures of the human soul. Listen up, the poet says, speaking truth to power; what you’ll hear in return is ‘a lifetime of song.’” [Source]

Poems 1962-2012 by Louise Glück

“It is the astonishment of Louise Glück’s poetry that it resists collection. With each successive book her drive to leave behind what came before has grown more fierce, the force of her gaze fixed on what has yet to be imagined. She invented a form to accommodate this need, the book-length sequence of poems, like a landscape seen from above, a novel with lacunae opening onto the unspeakable. … To read these books together is to understand the governing paradox of a life lived in the body and of the work wrested from it, the one fated to die and the other to endure.” [Source]

The Poetry of Ruan Ji and Xi Kang (translated by Stephen Owen & Wendy Swartz)

“This volume provides a translation of the complete poetry and fu of Ruan Ji (210-263) in a new context that does not read his poetry as a loyalist of the Wei dynasty, but rather as someone who wanted stay alive in dangerous times. The volume also introduces English-language readers to the poetic works of Xi Kang, one of the greatest medieval Chinese writers.” [Source]

Refractive Africa by Will Alexander

“‘The poet is endemic with life itself,’ Will Alexander once said, and in this searing pas de trois, Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten, he has exemplified this vital candescence with a transpersonal amplification worthy of the Cambrian explosion. … Will Alexander’s improvisatory cosmicity pushes poetic language to the point of most resistance--incantatory and swirling with magical laterality and recovery.” [Source]

Sacred Spells: Collected Works by Assotto Saint

“The collected life-work of an interdisciplinary writer, performer, and central figure in the Black Gay cultural arts and AIDS movements. In this timely collection of poetry, plays, fiction, and performance texts, Assotto Saint draws upon music and incantation, his Haitian heritage and a politics of liberation, to weave together a tapestry of literature that celebrates life in the face of death. … Sacred Spells is Saint’s crucial legacy — five hundred incandescent pages of painful, lyric writing that exemplifies the visceral, spiritual dimensions of an artistic practice that’s integral to Black and LGBTQ activist movements worldwide, both historic and present.” [Source]

Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral (translated by Ursula K. Le Guin)

“The first Nobel Prize in literature to be awarded to a Latin American writer went to the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. Famous and beloved during her lifetime all over Latin America and in Europe, Mistral has never been known in North America as she deserves to be. … The intelligence and passion of Le Guin’s selection and translation will finally allow people in the North to hear the originality, power, purity, and intransigence of this great American voice.” [Source]

The Selected Poems of Li Po (translated by David Hinton)

“Li Po (701-762) lived in T’ang Dynasty China, but his influence has spanned the centuries: the pure lyricism of his poems has awed readers in China and Japan for over a millennium, and through Ezra Pound’s translations, Li Po became central to the modernist revolution in the West. … He wrote 1200 years ago, half a world away, but in his poems we see our world transformed. … By reflecting the ambiguity and density of the original, Hinton continues to create compelling English poems that alter our conception of Chinese poetry.” [Source]

Songs of Mihyar the Damascene by Adonis (translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid & Ivan Eubanks)

“Written in the early 1960s, Songs of Mihyar the Damascene is widely considered to be the apex of the modernist poetry movement in the Arab world, a radical departure from the rigid formal structures that had dominated Arabic poetry until the 1950s. … Songs of Mihyar is a masterpiece of world literature that rewrites--through Mediterranean myths and renegade Sufi mystics--what it means to be an Arab in the modern world.” [Source]

Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs by Leonard Cohen

“Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs celebrates the astonishing career of Leonard Cohen, revered around the world as one of the great visionaries, writers, performers, and most consistently daring songwriters. … This landmark edition demonstrates the range and depth of Cohen’s work, revealing an extraordinary gift of language that speaks with rare clarity, passion, and timelessness.” [Source]

Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (edited by Penelope Rosemont)

“This anthology, the first of its kind in any language, displays the range and significance of women’s contributions to surrealism. … Penelope Rosemont has assembled nearly three hundred texts by ninety-seven women from twenty-eight countries in Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and the African diaspora. Their works include poems, tales, dreams, essays of radical social criticism, inquiries into psychoanalysis, critical approaches to philosophical as well as topical problems, celebrations of the work of particular poets and painters, and several examples of surrealist games.” [Source]

Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania (edited by Jerome Rothenberg)

“Jerome Rothenberg’s seminal anthology moves across temporal and geographical boundaries to expand poetic tradition and ultimately make sense of our shared humanity. … Technicians of the Sacred has educated and inspired generations of poets, artists, musicians, and other readers, exposing them to the multiple possibilities of poetry throughout the world. … A half-century since its original publication, this revised and expanded third edition provides readers with a wealth of newly gathered and translated texts from recently reinvigorated indigenous cultures, bringing the volume into the present and further extending the range and depth of what we recognize and read as poetry.” [Source]

Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020 by Carl Phillips

“A new collection of poems from one of America’s most essential, celebrated, and enduring poets … The new poems, written in a time of rising racial conflict in the United States, with its attendant violence and uncertainty, find Phillips entering deeper into the landscape he has made his own: a forest of intimacy, queerness, and moral inquiry, where the farther we go, the more difficult it is to remember why or where we started. … Ultimately, Phillips refuses pessimism, arguing for tenderness and human connection as profound forces for revolution and conjuring a spell against indifference and the easy escapes of nostalgia. Then the War is luminous testimony to the power of self-reckoning and to Carl Phillips as an ever-changing, necessary voice in contemporary poetry.” [Source]

This Afterlife: Selected Poems by A. E. Stallings

“A selection of sharp, witty, and impeccably crafted poems from A. E. Stallings, the award-winning poet and translator. … Many of these poems unfold in the mytho-domestic sphere, through the eyes of Penelope or Pandora, Alice in Wonderland or the poet herself. … Her chosen home of Greece adds layers of urgency to her fascination with Greek mythology; living in an epicenter of contemporary crises means current events and ancient history are always rubbing shoulders in her poems. … The pleasure of these poems, fierce and witty, melancholy and wise, lies in a timeless precision that will outlast the fickleness of fashion.” [Source]

This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (edited by Cherríe Moraga & Gloria Anzaldúa)

“Originally released in 1981, This Bridge Called My Back is a testimony to women of color feminism as it emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, ‘the complex confluence of identities—race, class, gender, and sexuality—systemic to women of color oppression and liberation.’ … Reissued here, forty years after its inception, this anniversary edition contains a new preface by Moraga reflecting on Bridge’s ‘living legacy’ and the broader community of women of color activists, writers, and artists whose enduring contributions dovetail with its radical vision.” [Source]

Voices of Modern Greece: Selected Poems by C. P. Cavafy, Angelos Sikelianos, George Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, Nikos Gatsos (translated by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard)

“This anthology is composed of recently revised translations selected from the five volumes of work by major poets of modern Greece offered by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard … C. P. Cavafy and Angelos Sikelianos are major poets of the first half of the twentieth century. George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis, who followed them, both won the Nobel Prize in literature. Nikos Gatsos was a very popular translator, lyricist, and critic.” [Source]

Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years by Joy Harjo

“In this gemlike volume, Harjo selects her best poems from across fifty years, beginning with her early discoveries of her own voice and ending with moving reflections on our contemporary moment. Generous notes on each poem offer insight into Harjo’s inimitable poetics as she takes inspiration from Navajo horse songs and jazz, reckons with home and loss, and listens to the natural messengers of the earth. As evidenced in this transcendent collection, Joy Harjo’s ‘poetry is light and elixir, the very best prescription for us in wounded times’ (Sandra Cisneros, Millions).” [Source]

When the Night Agrees to Speak to Me by Ananda Devi (translated by Kazim Ali)

“A poetic, autobiographical collection from famed Mauritian writer Ananda Devi, engaging with loneliness, desire, violence, and aging. … The pieces herein address the resonance of personal memories and regrets, the political world, and sexuality. In light of the complexity of human identity, Devi emphasizes the importance of each word chosen, speaking directly to the reader and asking them to ‘peel back my skin. Unclothe me of myself.’” [Source]

Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems by Wanda Coleman (edited by Terrance Hayes)

“A voice for justice, anti-racism, and equality--here is the greatest and most powerful work of the people’s poet, Wanda Coleman. … Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems is a selection of 130 of her poems, edited and introduced by Terrance Hayes. … A self-made writer from Black Los Angeles, Wanda Coleman made art while living every day with racism, poverty, violence. Her triumph is in words that endure. It’s time for Coleman’s courageous, impassioned, inspiring, one-of-a-kind voice to reach readers everywhere.” [Source]

Yannis Ritsos – Poems (translated by Manolis)

“‘In this amazing collection, Manolis introduces us to the life work of Greek poet, Yannis Ritsos. … From the sea-soaked childhood through the impatient adventures of a naïve summer youth and shattered innocence. … And all is enveloped in the metaphor of nature, upon the backdrop of a Greece, painted in white and pastel and gold, tastes and textures exotic and foreign but beautiful and real. … This collection reflects a depth and vastness that must be savoured and digested, revisited and reviewed.’ — Cathi Shaw” [Source]

Click here to see the full list (all available for purchase) at our Epicurean Vagabonds storefront at Bookshop.org!