Celebrating Women in Poetry for Women’s History Month
As the world celebrates International Women’s Day on March 8th, the month of March also marks Women’s History Month, a time to honor the contributions and achievements of women throughout history. Poetry has long been a powerful medium for expressing feelings and ideas, and this Women’s History Month is no exception. Explore some of the most beautiful and inspiring poems written to celebrate women and their impact on society. From famous poets to emerging voices, these poems are sure to leave you feeling empowered and inspired.Let’s dive in and celebrate the incredible women who have shaped our world through the magic of poetry for Women’s History Month.
An American Sunrise: Poems
by Joy Harjo
In this stunning collection, Joy Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where the Mvskoke people, including her own ancestors, were forcibly displaced. From her memory of her mother’s death, to her beginnings in the Native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo’s personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings.
The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: young, brilliant, beautiful, and enormously talented, but slowly going under–maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther’s breakdown with such intensity that Esther’s neurosis becomes completely understandable and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies.
Such thorough exploration of the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche – and the profound collective loneliness that modern society has yet to find a solution for – is an extraordinary accomplishment, and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.
Call Us What We Carry: Poems
by Amanda Gorman
This luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage.
Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning. Now in paperback and featuring an interview with the author and a discussion guide, Call Us What We Carry reveals that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.
A Change of World: Poems
by Adrienne Rich
A Change of World was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Out of print for decades, this initial collection launched the career of a poet whose work has been crucial to discussions of gender, race, and class, pushing formal boundaries and consistently examining both self and society.
The Hurting Kind
by Ada Limón
With Limón’s remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions–incorporating others’ stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. And they honor parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families.
Along the way, we glimpse loss. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories and the mysterious behavior of pets left behind. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
by Maya Angelou – Oprah Winfrey
Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children. The brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town. Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis. Maya is attacked by a man many times her age–and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit.
The Poetry of Emily Dickinson
by Emily Dickinson
The Poetry of Emily Dickinson is a collection of pieces by 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson, who insisted that her life of isolation gave her an introspective and deep connection with the world. As a result, her work parallels her life–misunderstood in its time, but full of depth and imagination. Covering such universal themes as nature, art, friendship, love, society, mortality, and more.
With this volume, readers can dive into the now widely respected poetry of Emily Dickinson.
Selected Poems
by Gwendolyn Brooks
By 1963 the civil rights movement was in full swing across the United States. And more and more African American writers were increasingly outspoken. In attacking American racism and insisting on full political, economic, and social equality for all. In that memorable year of the March on Washington, Harper & Row released Brooks’s Selected Poems. Which incorporated poems from her first three collections, as well as a selection of new poems.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
by Audre Lorde – Cheryl Clarke
In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde-scholar. Poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde’s philosophies resonate. More than twenty years after they were first published.
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