Romantic Poetry Book Roundup
Attention all romance enthusiasts! If you’re looking for the best romantic poetry books to dive into, join us as we explore a curated selection of captivating reads that will warm your heart and captivate your soul!
In the world of books, few types can make you feel emotions as strongly as poetry. Romantic poetry, especially, is a beautiful way to express love. Join us on a journey through pages filled with passion and love. We’ll explore a world where poets use words to create intricate stories of romance. In this special collection, we’ll experience a symphony of love, where each poem is like a musical note, and each book is a masterpiece. Get ready to be enchanted as we explore a collection of romantic poetry books that will warm your heart and make you feel alive.
Calling all romance lovers!
Good Grief, the Ground
by Margaret Ray – Stephanie Burt
Margaret Ray is pulling back the curtains on our societal performance of culture, guiding an exposing light to the daily performance that is life in a woman’s body.
Selected by Stephanie Burt as the winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, Ray’s Good Grief, the Ground interrogates the everyday violences nonchalantly inflicted unto women through personal, political, and national lenses. Moving between adolescence and adulthood, Ray alternates between dark humor and heart-wrenching honesty to explore grief, anxiety, queer longing, girlhood, escape from an abusive relationship, and the dangers of lending language to a thing.
The Wild Delight of Wild Things
by Brian Turner
The poems are also a love letter to our planet during the ongoing sixth mass extinction. Intertwining this immense grief, Turner explores the hybrid borderlands of genre, and the meditations on love and loss blur the boundaries between poetry and lyric prose. In Italian, the word “stanza” is rooted in the word “room.”
And so, stanza by stanza, room by room, page by page, we draft ourselves forward into the imagination, our arms filled with all that we can carry from the days gone by. This is the art of survival. Profound grief teaches us how to dwell in the house of memory–that vibrant temporal landscape of the past–where we might live with the dead we love once more.
Sweet, Young, & Worried
by Blythe Baird
Following her widely successful debut, Baird wastes no time as she reels in her reader with breathtaking imagery and punching narratives. With expert precision and vulnerability, Baird guides us on an expedition embracing queerness, love, loss, mental health, feminism & healing along the way.
Skeletons
by Deborah Landau
Existentialism takes on a glamorous flair in Deborah Landau’s dazzling new collection. Through a series of poems preoccupied with loneliness and mortality, Skeletons flashes with prismatic effect across the persistent allure of the flesh. Initiated during Brooklyn’s early lockdown, the book reflects the increasingly troubling simultaneity of Eros and Thanatos, and the discontents of our virtual lives amidst the threats of a pandemic and corrosive politics. Spring blooms relentlessly while the ambulances siren by. Against the mounting pressure that propels the acrostic “Skeletons,” a series of interstitial companion poems titled “Flesh” negotiate intimacy and desire.
Water Look Away
by Bob Hicok
“Once a man who sometimes wanted to kill himself
loved a woman who sometimes wanted to live.”
In Bob Hicok’s Water Look Away, we witness a brilliant poet enter a dark space and attempt to write himself out again. Told in experimental forms, from a range of perspectives– a wife who commits suicide, a husband left behind — this raw collection reads like a novella and wrestles with loss as it complicates the grief process. Working backwards from acceptance to explore depression and anger, heartbreak and remorse, often with great tenderness, Water Look Away offers pages of insight that will make you reach for a pen. Here, poetry embalms a marriage-an experimental affair, a series of miscarriages, a red bed painted on a wall. When the retelling of their first meeting morphs from “recounting” to “dreampage,” Hicok asks, how long can we trust memory when those we love are no longer there to remember with us?
Fixer: Poems
by Edgar Kunz
Temp jobs, conspiracy theories, squatters, talk therapy, urban gardening, the robot revolution: this collection fixes its eye on the strangeness of labor, through poems that are searching, keen, and wry. The virtuosic central sequence explores the untimely death of the poet’s estranged father, a handyman and addict, and the brothers left to sort through the detritus of a life long lost to them. Through lyrical, darkly humorous vignettes, Kunz asks what it costs to build a home and a love that not only lasts but sustains.
Hell, I Love Everybody: The Essential James Tate: Poems
by James Tate – Terrance Hayes
Celebrating James Tate’s work as it transcends convention, time, and everything that tells us, “No, you can’t do that,” Hell, I Love Everybody gives us the poet at his best, his most intimate, hopeful, inventive, and brilliant. John Ashbery called Tate the “poet of possibilities,” and this collection records forays into possibilities for American poetry’s future. With a foreword by Terrance Hayes, it is sure to give readers new and old a lasting collection of favorites.
And Yet: Poems
by Kate Baer
Kate Baer shot into the literary stratosphere with the publication of her debut poetry collection, What Kind of Woman, which became an instant #1 New York Times bestseller.
Kate’s second full-length book of traditional poetry, And Yet, dives deeper into the themes that are the hallmarks of her writing: motherhood, friendship, love, and loss. Taken together, these poems demonstrate the remarkable evolution of a writer and an artist working at the height of her craft, pushing herself and her poetry in a beautiful and impressive way.
I Swear Somewhere This Works: Selected Poems 2013-2023
by Trista Mateer
A manifesto on love, poetry, and heartbreak. Essential for modern poetry readers.
“A time capsule of Mateer’s most beautiful work.”
– Catarine Hancock, author of Shades of Lovers
Titled after her viral poem about lovers in a parallel universe, “I Swear Somewhere This Works” is a book by ex-Tumblr poet Trista Mateer. In this collection, Mateer offers a raw retrospective of the last decade of her career. She retraces her steps back to 2013 when she first began posting work online, and she takes the reader along for the ride.
Tanya: Poems
by Brenda Shaughnessy
The award-winning poet weaves a tapestry of literary heritage and intimate reflection. She pays tribute to women artists and mentors. Additionally, she explores the ongoing mysteries of friendship, love, art, and loss in her work.
In this powerful gathering of poems, Brenda Shaughnessy reflects on her own “influencers.” She also delves into poems dedicated to Dadaist artist Méret Oppenheim and the young choreographer Lauren Lovette. These verses are steeped in memories of the women who played a pivotal role in shaping her artistic journey.
Chrome Valley: Poems
by Mahogany L Browne
Boldly lyrical and fiercely honest, Mahogany L. Browne’s Chrome Valley offers an intricate portrait of Black womanhood in America.
Browne captures a quintessential girlhood through the pleasures and pangs of young love. Sometimes, there’s also the sting of a palm across the cheek.
Friendship, too, comes with its own complex yearnings. As Browne writes, “you ain’t had freedom until you climb on bus 62.” Heading to the closest mall for a good seat at the girl fight is an experience she beautifully explores.
Apocrifa
by Amber Flame
Apocrifa is a nongendered love story told in verse. It explores the journey of a lover and their beloved as they find each other. They experience moments of falling apart, and throughout the story, they create their own unique way to love together.
Golden Record
by Rosemary Valero-O’Connell
Golden Record is a bilingual English/Spanish poetry magazine and autofiction chapbook lusciously written and illustrated by award-winning graphic novelist Rosemary Valero-O’Connell.
The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire
by Trevor Ketner
The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire is a stunning second collection from National Poetry Series winner, Trevor Ketner. Comprised of 154 sonnets, each anagrammed line-by-line from Shakespeare’s sonnets. The book refracts these lines through the thematic lens of transness, queer desire, kink, and British paganism. The sonnets come together to form a grimoire that casts a trancelike and intense spell on the reader.
Couplets: A Love Story
by Maggie Millner
“An astounding debut.”
–Adrienne Raphel, The New York Times Book Review
A dazzling love story in poems about one woman’s coming-out, coming-of-age, and coming undone.
A woman lives an ordinary life in Brooklyn. She has a boyfriend. They share a cat. She writes poems in the prevailing style.
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