Valentine’s Day Poetry To Read Now: A Collection of Heartfelt Words
As Valentine’s Day approaches, it’s time to start thinking about ways to express your love and affection to that special someone in your life. While some turn to chocolates and flowers, others prefer the written word to convey their deepest feelings. Poetry has long been a popular medium for expressing love, and with its timeless beauty and power, it’s no wonder why.
So, whether you’re looking for inspiration or simply want to indulge in some romantic words, we’ve compiled a list of Valentine’s Day poetry to read now. So, grab a cup of coffee, cozy up with your loved one, and let the words of these poets transport you to a world of love and romance
Of Marriage
by Nicole Cooley
Cooley’s poems are sharp in all the places it can hurt and soft in ways that comfort an aching soul. Layers of joy, pain, bliss, frustration–no emotion is off limits as these sensual yet valiant poems dig their heels and hold on for dear life as winds of uncertainty threaten to overcome.
The Sun and Her Flowers
by Rupi Kaur
From rupi kaur, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of milk and honey, comes her long-awaited second collection of poetry. A vibrant and transcendent journey about growth and healing. Ancestry and honoring one’s roots. Expatriation and rising up to find a home within yourself.
Divided into five chapters and illustrated by kaur, the sun and her flowers is a journey of wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming. A celebration of love in all its forms.
Sweet Movie: Poems
by Alisha Dietzman – Victoria Chang
Sweet Movie‘s love poems and ekphrasis echo splintered versions of the same question: how do we navigate a world where the expectations of our performance–our presentation, our means of existence–are dictated by the viewers themselves?
Mirroring the uncertain, unstable tenor of Dusan Makavejev’s controversial avant-garde film Sweet Movie (1974), the voices in Sweet Movie are equal parts docile, feverish, and violent. This collection reimagines a feminist approach to religious masochism to explore the ways women are denied agency by both their faith communities and by outsiders.
Dietzman’s poems move through locations across Central Europe and the American South. Each new landscape informs the next: Memphis appears in Berlin in the form of a dead deer, and Southern syntax haunts an elegy for Gustavs Klucis.
Late Summer Ode
by Olena Kalytiak Davis
In Late Summer Ode, Olena Kalytiak Davis writes from
a heightened state of ambivalence, perched between past and present tensions.
With Chekovian humor and metered pathos, from a garden in Anchorage not pining
for Brooklyn, these poems “self -protest, -process, -recede.” Davis is a
conductor of sound and meaning, precise to the syllable: a commanding talent in
contemporary poetry.
Selected Books of the Beloved
by Gregory Orr
For more than a decade, Gregory Orr has been writing toward “the Book: ” an imagined tome containing every poem and song ever written. Drawing from a rich tradition of lyric poetry, Selected Books of the Beloved is the culmination of that project, and more–it is a celebration of the transformative power of poetry, and of our extraordinary capacity to feel and to love.
100 Poems to Break Your Heart
by Edward Hirsch
Implicit in poetry is the idea that we are enriched by heartbreaks, by the recognition and understanding of suffering–not just our own suffering but also the pain of others. We are not so much diminished as enlarged by grief, by our refusal to vanish, or to let others vanish, without leaving a record. And poets are people who are determined to leave a trace in words, to transform oceanic depths of feeling into art that speaks to others.
In 100 Poems to Break Your Heart, poet and advocate Edward Hirsch selects 100 poems, from the nineteenth century to the present, and illuminates them, unpacking context and references to help the reader fully experience the range of emotion and wisdom within these poems.
Hell, I Love Everybody: The Essential James Tate: Poems
by James Tate – Terrance Hayes
An essential collection of James Tate’s extraordinary poems that will captivate today’s readers, with a foreword by 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.
The Flame: Poems Notebooks Lyrics Drawings
by Leonard Cohen
The Flame is the final work from Leonard Cohen, the revered poet and musician whose fans span generations and whose work is celebrated throughout the world. Featuring poems, excerpts from his private notebooks, lyrics, and hand-drawn self-portraits, The Flame offers an unprecedentedly intimate look inside the life and mind of a singular artist.
A reckoning with a life lived deeply and passionately, with wit and panache, The Flame is a valedictory work.
“This volume contains my father’s final efforts as a poet,” writes Cohen’s son, Adam Cohen, in his foreword. “It was what he was staying alive to do, his sole breathing purpose at the end.”
Leonard Cohen died in late 2016.
Balladz
by Sharon Olds
“At the time of have-not, I look at myself in this mirror,” writes Olds in this self-scouring, exhilarating volume, which opens with a section of quarantine poems, and at its center boasts what she calls Amherst Balladz (whose syntax honors Emily Dickinson: “she was our Girl – our Woman – / Man enough – for me”) and many more in her own contemporary, long-flowing-sentence rhythm.
Olds sings of her childhood, young womanhood, and maturity all mixed up together. Seeing an early lover in the one who is about to buried. Seeing her whiteness, seeing her privilege.
Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting
by Kevin Powers
National Book Award finalist, Iraq war veteran, novelist and poet Kevin Powers. Creates a deeply affecting portrait of a life shaped by war. Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting captures the many moments that comprise. A soldier’s life: driving down the Texas highway; waiting for the unknown in the dry Iraq heat. Writing a love letter; listening to a mother recount her dreams.
Written with evocative language and discernment, Powers’s poetry strives to make sense of the war. And its echoes through human experience.
Virgin: Poems
by Analicia Sotelo
At every step, Sotelo’s poems seduce with history, folklore, and sensory detail–grilled meat, golden habañeros, and burnt sugar. Before delivering clear-eyed and eviscerating insights into power, deceit, relationships, and ourselves. Here is what it means to love someone without truly understanding them. Here is what it means to be cruel. And here is what it means to become an artist, of words and of the self.
Blistering and gorgeous, Virgin is an audacious act of imaginative self-mythology from one of our most promising young poets.
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