April is National Poetry Month and Penguin Random House Education is celebrating poets and the poems they craft. This list includes works of poetry from American and World poets that depict history, reflect personal experience, discuss topics of race and culture, feminism, LGBTQIA+ lives, immigration, family, and more, and ranges from Shakespeare to the 20th Century to the present.
An acclaimed young poet traces the lives of her foremothers in Western Tennessee, from those enslaved centuries ago to her grandmother, her mother, and finally her own life, in this stunning debut celebrating Black girlhood and womanhood.
A third collection that reveals an acclaimed poet further extending his range into the realm of speculative fiction, while addressing issues as varied as abolition, Black ecological consciousness, and the boundless promise of parenthood
It has been twenty-eight years since Sandra Cisneros published a book of poetry. With dozens of never-before-seen poems, Woman Without Shame is a moving collection of songs, elegies, and declarations that chronicle her pilgrimage toward rebirth and the recognition of her prerogative as a woman artist. These bluntly honest and often humorous meditations on memory, desire, and the essential nature of love blaze a path toward self-awareness. For Cisneros, Woman Without Shame is the culmination of her search for home—in the Mexico of her ancestors and in her own heart.
Poems of migration, womanhood, trauma, and resilience from the celebrated collaborator on Beyoncé's Lemonade and Black Is King, award-winning Somali British poet Warsan Shire.
From one of America’s most beloved poets, a piercing new collection reflecting on the characters and encounters that haunt us through this life and into the next
Intimate poems that explore feminine shame and violence and imagine what liberation from these threats might look like, from the award-winning author of The January Children
“O is so full of music and passion for life . . . Zeina Hashem Beck’s poems unfold the abundance of our world.” —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic From a "brilliant, absolutely essential voice" whose "poems feel like whole worlds" (Naomi Shihab Nye), a poetry collection considering the body physical, the body politic, and the body sacred
Songs from our era of communal grief and reckoning—by the Pulitzer Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner, called “a poet for these times, a powerful woman who won’t back down” (San Francisco Chronicle).
A new collection from a poet whose “celebrations of science and approachable yet profound spiritual connection to the Earth delight, entertain, and elevate” (The Poetry Foundation)
A fresh and faithful translation of Vergil’s Aeneid restores the epic’s spare language and fast pace and sheds new light on one of the cornerstone narratives of Western culture.
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by LitHub A new collection of vivid, personal and provocative work from the author of Or to Begin Again, a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in poetry
The award-winning poet weaves a tapestry of literary heritage and intimate reflection as she pays tribute to women artists and mentors, and circles the ongoing mysteries of friendship, love, art, and loss.
Ideal for students and general readers alike, this modern and accessible edition sets a new standard in Shakespearean literature for the twenty-first century.
Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States, introduces readers to the most significant and compelling poems of the past hundred years in The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry.
From the widely acclaimed poet, novelist, critic, and scholar, a lucid and edifying exploration of the building blocks of poetry and how they've been used over the centuries to assemble the most imperishable poems.
By Kristopher Jansma We’ve all been there. We’ve worked for months, or even years, on a book… poured our hearts and souls into those chapters and characters, only to wind up having to walk away in the end. Maybe you queried agents and got no takers. Maybe the publishers didn’t bite. Or maybe you simply
We are delighted to share the news that Penguin Random House author Han Kang has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” The Nobel Foundation writes, “In her oeuvre, Han Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of
