Admirable Poetry Book Covers For Display
They preach never judge a book by its cover at a young age. Not just with books, but utilizing it throughout life as well. I am here to tell you, fight societal norms. Appreciate those beautiful, stunning poetry book covers for what they are – works of art!
You know poets work hard to create their poems to be an illustration of their creativity expressed not just in words but visually as well. Let’s fill out bookshelves with poetry book covers that are so beautiful, you almost don’t’ care about the content inside. (Even though the poetry and stories are just as perfect!)
Emily Dickinson had a genius imagination. Though she was not around to create this stunning poetry book cover, from her legacy came this work of art. Let this be the inspiration you need as you glance over this list. How you can bright up your rooms while giving credit to that allusive, poetry-loving personality? Below is how.
THIS is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me, —
That simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!
Beautiful Inside and Out! Just like you 🙂
Sel
ected Poems of Emily Dickinson
by Emily Dickinson
Explore the essence of life, love, nature, and time in exquisite verse. An elegantly designed edition of Emily Dickinson’s finest poems.
Born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a prominent New England family and educated at Amherst Academy and Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson lived most of her life in seclusion, devoted to writing. She scarcely left home, nor did she have many visitors. Only ten of her poems were published in her lifetime, submitted without her permission by friends. It was only after her death in 1886 that the scope of her work as a poet came to light–over 1,700 poems were discovered in a dresser drawer by her sister, Lavinia.
For more poetry classics, visit out Intro to the Classic Poets list here!
Black Girl, Call Home
by Jasmine Mans
A Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by Oprah Magazine – Time – Vogue – Vulture – Essence – Elle – Cosmopolitan – Real Simple – Marie Claire – Refinery 29 – Shondaland – Pop Sugar – Bustle – Reader’s Digest
From spoken word poet Jasmine Mans comes an unforgettable poetry collection about race, feminism, and queer identity.
With echoes of Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez, Mans writes to call herself–and us–home. Each poem explores what it means to be a daughter of Newark, and America–and the painful, joyous path to adulthood as a young, queer Black woman.
Black Girl, Call Home is more than just a stunning poetry book cover representing culture and womanhood. It is a love letter to the wandering Black girl and a vital companion to any woman on a journey to find truth, belonging, and healing.
Bread and Circus
by Airea D Matthews
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
This powerful and timely collection of autobiographical poems from Yale Young Poets Award Winner and Philadelphia’s former Poet Laureate Airea D. Matthews about the economics of class is a brilliant intellectual and artistic contribution to the ongoing conversation about American inequality.
As a former student of economics, Airea D. Matthews stays in fascination but disturb by 18th-century Scottish economist Adam Smith’s magnum opus The Wealth of Nations. Now, she presents a direct challenge to Smith’s theory of the invisible hand, which claims self-interest is the key to optimal economic outcomes. By juxtaposing redacted texts by Smith and the French Marxist Guy Debord with autobiographical prose and poems, Bread and Circus personally offers how self-interest fails when it reduces people to commodity and spectacle.
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
by Ross Gay
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away–loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it–that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard. That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all–death, sorrow, loss–is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.
Ross Gay teaches poetry at Indiana University and is the author of the poetry collections Against Which, Bringing the Shovel Down, Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens (with Aimee Nezhukumatathil), River (with Rose Wehrenberg), Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, and the essay collection The Book of Delights.
Fabulosa
by Karen Rigby
Karen Rigby writes with “fingers cocked like a gun.” Deliciously inventive in its linguistic unfurlings, Fabulosa fibrillates with “noir and glitz”. In these strange, seductive poems that have conversation from a range of players- Dior to Endeavour Morse to Hieronymus Bosch.
I never write
without measuring, each line
hooking a quicksilver hunger.
There is no bloat in this book; it is exquisitely hewn. Underpinning the collection is a keen interest in cinema, fashion, feminism, transformation, and textuality. Or so from ars poeticas to portmanteaus to ekphrastics. Seamed with goldshine and darkness, we find in these fireball poems a “wilderness / glanced through the bull’s eye.” As the title suggests, Fabulosa is indeed absolutely fabulous! -Simone Muench
If They Come for Us: Poems
by Fatimah Asghar
NAMED ONE OF THE TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEAR.
FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD.
an aunt teaches me how to tell
an edible flower
from a poisonous one.
just in case, I hear her say, just in case.
From a co-creator of the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls comes an imaginative, soulful debut poetry that collection captures the experiences of being a young Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America. Orphaned as a child, Fatimah Asghar grapples with coming of age and navigating questions of sexuality and race without the guidance of a mother or father. These poems are bearing anguish, joy, vulnerability, and compassion, while also exploring the many facets of violence: how it persists within us, how it is inherited across generations, and how it manifests itself in our relationships. In experimental forms and language both lyrical and raw, Asghar seamlessly braids together marginalized people’s histories with her own understanding of identity, place, and belonging.
Life of the Party: Poems
by Olivia Gatwood
A dazzling debut collection of raw and explosive poems about growing up in a sexist, sensationalized world, from a thrilling new feminist voice.
i’m a good girl, bad girl, dream girl, sad girl
girl next door sunbathing in the driveway
i wanna be them all at once, i wanna be
all the girls I’ve ever loved
–from “Girl”
Lauded for the power of her writing and having attracted an online fan base of millions for her extraordinary spoken-word performances, Olivia Gatwood now weaves together her own coming-of-age with an investigation into our culture’s romanticization of violence against women. At times blistering and riotous, at times soulful and exuberant, Life of the Party explores the boundary between what is real and what is imagined in a life saturated with fear. Gatwood asks, How does a girl grow into a woman in a world racked by violence? Where is the line between perpetrator and victim? In precise, searing language, she illustrates how what happens to our bodies can make us who we are.
Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders
by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
A brilliant, singular collection of essays that looks to music, fantasy, and pop culture–from Beyoncé to Game of Thrones–to excavate and reimagine what has been disappeared by migration and colonialism.
Upon becoming a new mother, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was called to Mexico to reconnect with her ancestors and recover her grandmother’s story, only to return to the sudden loss of her marriage, home, and reality.
In Magical/Realism, Villarreal crosses into the erasure of memory and self, fragmented by migration, borders, and colonial and intimate violence, reconstructing her story with pieces of American pop culture, and the music, video games, and fantasy that have helped her make sense of it all.
Poukahangatus: Poems
by Tayi Tibble
An acclaimed young poet explores her identity as a twenty-first-century Indigenous woman. Poem by poem, Tibble carves out a bold new way. A way of engaging history, of straddling modernity and ancestry, desire and exploitation.
A debut album.
Intimate, moving, virtuosic, and hilarious, Tayi Tibble is one of the most exciting new voices in poetry today. In Poūkahangatus (pronounced “Pocahontas”). Tibble challenges a dazzling array of mythologies–Greek, Māori, feminist, kiwi–peeling them apart, respinning them in modern terms.
Her poems move from rhythmic discussions of the Kardashians, sugar daddies, and Twilight. It opens up exquisite renderings of the natural world and precise emotions.
The lump in her throat swelled like a sea that threatened to take him from her, and she had to swallow hard
Tibble is also a master narrator of teenage womanhood. Its exhilarating highs and devastating lows. Her high-camp aesthetics correlate to the overflowing beauty, irony, and ruination of her surroundings.
American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide
by Susan Barba – Leanne Shapton
Organized as a field guide, a literary anthology filled with classic and contemporary poems and essays. All inspired by wildflowers–perfect for writers, artists, and botanists alike.
Winner of a American Horticultural Society Book Award
American Wildflowers collects poems, essays, and letters from the 1700s to the present that focus on wildflowers. Their place in our culture and in the natural world. Editor Susan Barba has curated a selection of plants and texts that celebrate diversity: There are foreign-born writers writing about American plants and American writers on non-native plants. There are rural writers with deep regional knowledge and urban writers who are intimately acquaint with the nature in their neighborhoods. Also included are female writers, Black writers, gay writers, Indigenous writers. Enjoy botanists like William Bartram, George Washington Carver, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, and horticultural writers like Neltje Blanchan and Eleanor Perényi.
