Add a little something extra to your living room!
10 coffee table books for poetry lovers that are beautifully illustrated through words and art
cof·fee-ta·ble book (noun) a large, expensive, or lavish illustrated book, especially one intended only for casual reading to express ones more or invite conversation
Sage Smiles: An Illustrated Collection of Poetry
by Jet Widick – Kimberly Kuniko – Kristen Alden
In this colorful and uplifting book, poet and writer Jet Widick’s words envelop us with a gentle reminder that we don’t have to look far for things that warm our soul. We can find it in everyday things like nature, a hug, the stars, our favorite memento, or a steaming cup of coffee.
Shift: Poetry for a New Perspective
by Melody Godfred
The world has changed – but thankfully so have we. The Shift: Poetry for a New Perspective embodies the best of who we are now. From Melody Godfred, author of Self Love Poetry: for Thinkers & Feelers, comes a collection of poems designed to reframe how we see and move through this brave new, post-pandemic world.
Each pair of poems inspires a shift from the old way of thinking to the new: from guilt to gratitude, resistance to surrender, and fear to love. The left side of every spread is dedicated to the old way. The right side offers a shift in perspective that lovingly illuminates the new. Each seemingly simple poem instantly elicits a profound reset, and is coupled with beautiful line drawings that awaken not just the mind, but also the heart.
Lost Words
by Robert MacFarlane – Jackie Morris
From bestselling Landmarks author Robert Macfarlane and acclaimed artist and author Jackie Morris, a beautiful collection of poems and illustrations to help readers rediscover the magic of the natural world.
In 2007, when a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary — widely used in schools around the world — was published, a sharp-eyed reader soon noticed that around forty common words concerning nature had been dropped. Apparently they were no longer being used enough by children to merit their place in the dictionary. The list of these “lost words” included acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, heron, kingfisher, newt, otter, and willow. Among the words taking their place were attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice-mail.
Poems for the Signs
by Michaela Angemeer
From the best-selling author of You’ll Come Back to Yourself, Poems for the Signs is a highly anticipated collection that explores the twelve astrological signs through poetry.
Starting with Aries and ending with Pisces, it’s a collection about looking for love, self-reflection, depression, healing ancestral patterns, and finding beauty in being alone. It has themes of astrology, finding yourself, dating, family, grief and loss.
Zoom Rooms: Poems
by Mary Jo Salter
The timeless and timely intersect in poems about our unique historical moment, from the prizewinning poet.
In Zoom Rooms, Mary Jo Salter considers the strangeness of our recent existence, together with the enduring constants in our lives.
The title poem, a series of sonnet-sized Zoom meetings–a classroom, a memorial service, an encounter with a new baby in the family–finds humor and pathos in our age of social distancing and technology-induced proximity.
Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems about Birds
by Billy Collins – David Sibley
In this beautiful collection of poems and paintings, Billy Collins, former U.S. poet laureate, joins with David Allen Sibley, America’s foremost bird illustrator, to celebrate the winged creatures that have inspired so many poets to sing for centuries. From Catullus and Chaucer to Robert Browning and James Wright, poets have long treated birds as powerful metaphors for beauty, escape, transcendence, and divine expression.
Illustrated Edgar Allan Poe: 25 Essential Poems
by Ryan G Van Cleave
In this gorgeous collection, twenty-five of Poe’s most beloved works are each illustrated with stunning, full-color collage artwork.
Poems include “The Raven,” “The Bells,” and many others. Brief commentary and helpful definitions accompany each poem, making The Illustrated Edgar Allan Poe among the most accessible–and beautiful–introductions to Edgar Allan Poe available.
Dream Drawings: Configurations of a Timeless Kind
by N Scott Momaday
From Pulitzer Prize winner and revered literary master N. Scott Momaday, a beautiful and enchanting new poetry collection, at once a celebration of language, imagination, and the human spirit.
A singular voice in American letters, Momaday’s love of language and storytelling are on full display in this brilliant new collection comprising one hundred sketches or “dream drawings”–furnishings of the mind–as he calls them. Influenced by his Native American heritage and its oral storytelling traditions, here are prose poems about nature, animals, warriors, and hunters, as well as meditations that explore themes of love, loss, time, and memory.
Suddenly We
by Evie Shockley
In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious “we.” How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are? It begins with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas. Shockley’s poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything.
perched
i am black, comely,
a girl on the cusp of desire.
my dangling toes take the rest
the rest of my body refuses. spine upright,
my pose proposes anticipation. i poise
in copper-colored tension, intent on
manifesting my soul in the discouraging world.
under the rough eyes of others, i stiffen.
if i must be hard, it will be as a tree, alive
with change. inside me, a love of beauty rises
like sap, sprouts from my scalp
and stretches forth. i send out my song, an aria
blue and feathered, and grow toward it,
choirs bare, but soon to bud. i am
black and becoming.
–after Alison Saar’s Blue Bird
Illustrated Rumi: A Treasury of Wisdom from the Poet of the Soul
by Philip Dunn – Manuela M Dunn
This richly illustrated collection delivers a fresh and inspiring way to read Rumi’s most intimate poems of love, rage, sadness, joy, and longing. No other edition of Rumi’s poetry combines his singularly passionate words with authentic, rare, and wonderful Sufi and Islamic art.
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