The Best Poetry Books 2025

1. Dover Thrift Editions: Poetry: Selected Poems of Rumi (Paperback)

Over 100 of Rumi's most passionate lyrics include "The Children of Light," "The Man Who Looked Back on His Way to Hell," "The Pear-Tree of Illusion." Translated by R. A. Nicholson.

In recent years the stirring, unforgettable poetry of Jalālu’l-Dīn Rūmī (1207–1273), the great Sūfi teacher and the greatest mystical poet of Iran, has gained tremendous popularity in the western world. Although he died over 700 years ago, his poetry is timeless. In the best modern translations, the passion and playfulness of his words reach across the ages to communicate themselves to people today with an undiluted fervor and excitement. Rūmī produced an enormous body of work — as many as 2,500 mystical odes, 25,000 rhyming couplets, and 1,600 quatrains — some of it instructional, some personal and emotional, much of it sublimely beautiful. The present volume includes over 100 of his finest lyrics, including "The Marriage of True Minds," "The Children of Light," "The Man who Looked Back on his way to Hell," "The Ascending Soul," "The Pear-Tree of Illusion," "The Riddles of God," and many more. "In some of these poems," says A. J. Arberry in the Introduction, "the mystic's passion is so exuberant, his imagination so overflowing, that we catch glimpses of the very madness of Divine experience."

2. Money Shot 9780819571304

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet searches for new ways to understand the world in the wake of the Great Recession ISBN: 9780819571304 ISBN10: 081957130X Contributors: Armantrout, Rae,

The poems in Money Shot are forensic. Just as the money shot in porn is proof of the male orgasm, these poems explore questions of revelation and concealment. What is seen, what is hidden, and how do we know? Money Shot s investigation of these questions

3. These Are My Rivers: New & Selected Poems 1955-1993 (Paperback)

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "one of our ageless radicals and true bards" (Booklist), has gathered here four decades of poetry in his inimitable everyman's voice, including more than fifty pages of new work. The tone has deepened over the years, and he may now be seen as a true maestro in his field. Behind the irresistible air of immediacy and spontaneity lies much erudition and an antic imagination intent on subverting "the dominant paradigm." From his earliest books, including his landmark Coney Island of the Mind, Ferlinghetti has written poetry "in ways that those who see poetry as the province of the few and educated had never imagined. That strength has turned out to be lasting" (Joel Oppenheimer, N. Y. Times Books Review).

These Are My Rivers: New & Selected Poems 1955-1993 (Paperback)

4. Norma: Vocal Score (Paperback)

Excerpt from Norma: A Serious Opera in Two Acts Char. From her prophetic lips how long must we await the glad command, vengeance to wreak on ruthless Rome Slaves must we die dis it or shall the sword of liberty shiver our shameful y e'. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Norma: Vocal Score (Paperback)

5. Parsifal : Vocal Score

Parsifal: Vocal Score

Parsifal: Vocal Score

6. Maybe the Saddest Thing, (Paperback)

\"These are wide-ranging Whitmanesque poems--self-aware meditations that rap and jazz their way forward, talk back, backtrack, and scratch so hard they blow out the speakers with their complicated love for a huge cast of icons, from Pam Grier to Flavor Flav, from RuPaul to Dave Chapelle.\" --Erika Meitner \"Keats, too, would have admired the holy truth of Marcus Wicker, whose lyric wizardry astounds the ear.\" --D.A. Powell Winner of the 2011 National Poetry Series Prize as selected by D.A. Powell, Marcus Wicker's Maybe the Saddest Thing is a sterling collection of contemporary American poems by an exciting new and emerging voice.

Maybe the Saddest Thing, (Paperback) Author: Ecco Press ISBN: 9780062191014 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2012-10-23 Page Count: 96

7. With Strings (Paperback)

A companion to the critically acclaimed My Way, his 1999 montage of essays, conversations, and poems, With Strings catapults Charles Bernstein into the future of American poetry. A compilation of sixty-nine poems in various forms and styles, dating mostly from the 1990s, With Strings is his most buoyant collection to date. With its fractured nursery rhymes, distressed mottoes, runcible riddles, and inscrutable sayings, Bernstein takes us on a poetic trip that swerves from the comic to the political, from the whimsical to the elegiac. The whole presents a densely sounded echo chamber in which a range of themes, moods, and perceptions extend and reverberate. Charles Bernstein is perhaps best known as one of the founders of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement of the 1970s. He remains one of America's liveliest advocates and practitioners of radically inventive poetry. The title of his new collection, With Strings, suggests the lush arrangement of a musical work as well as the unacknowledged implications of our everyday agreements. Just as language binds us together with its associated meanings, With Strings bounces against the ties that rend us apart as they fasten us together. From his samplings of everyday life, to his demented yet sonorous iambic beats, Bernstein has once again created a poetry of our time, for our time, and by our time.

A companion to the critically acclaimed My Way, his 1999 montage of essays, conversations, and poems, With Strings catapults Charles Bernstein into the future of American poetry. A compilation of sixty-nine poems in various forms and styles, dating mostly from the 1990s, With Strings is his most buoyant collection to date. With its fractured nursery rhymes, distressed mottoes, runcible riddles, and inscrutable sayings, Bernstein takes us on a poetic trip that swerves from the comic to the political, from the whimsical to the elegiac. The whole presents a densely sounded echo chamber in which a range of themes, moods, and perceptions extend and reverberate. Charles Bernstein is perhaps best known as one of the founders of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement of the 1970s. He remains one of America's liveliest advocates and practitioners of radically inventive poetry. The title of his new collection, With Strings, suggests the lush arrangement of a musical work as well as the unacknowledged implications of our everyday agreements. Just as language binds us together with its associated meanings, With Strings bounces against the ties that rend us apart as they fasten us together. From his samplings of everyday life, to his demented yet sonorous iambic beats, Bernstein has once again created a poetry of our time, for our time, and by our time.

8. Alternative Medicine (Paperback)

In this new collection of poetry, the acclaimed gay Latino physician author Rafael Campo continues his nuanced examination of the primal relationship between language, empathy, and healing.

In his sixth collection of poetry, the celebrated poet-physician Rafael Campo examines the primal relationship between language, empathy, and healing. As masterfully crafted as they are viscerally powerful, these poems propose voice itself as a kind of therapeutic medium. For all that most ails us, Alternative Medicine offers the balm of song and the salve of the imagination: from the wounds of our stubborn differences of identity, to the pain of alienation in a world of unfeeling technologies, to the shame of the persistent injustices in our society, Campo's poetry displays a deep understanding of hurt as the possibility for healing. Demonstrating an abiding faith in our survival, this stunning, heartfelt book ultimately embraces the great diversity of our ways of knowing and dreaming, of needing and loving, and of living and dying.

9. The Book of Men, (Paperback)

Dorianne Laux's fifth collection of poetry peels back time to the summer of love and the Vietnam War. Her keen hindsight uncovers the humanity at the center of conflict with language that goes straight to the heart. This work stands as an elegy for the loss of innocence, an homage to the glimmer underneath the urban grunge, and a love song to the imperfections that unite and divide us. Laux possesses what Tony Hoagland calls \"the brave art of looking,\" with an immediate and compassionate touch.

The Book of Men, (Paperback) Author: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 9780393342659 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2012-08-06 Page Count: 96

10. American Sonnets, (Paperback)

In his thirteenth collection, the 1998 National Book Award winner presents us with fifty-nine "Stern Sonnets," of twenty or so lines rather than the traditional fourteen. Using the events of his life as starting points, Gerald Stern deals with time and loss, with the dichotomy of light and darkness, and--always--with the possibility of joy. This stunning collection moves from autobiography to the visionary in surges of memory and language that draw the reader from one poem to the next.

American Sonnets, (Paperback) Author: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 9780393324969 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2003-11-17 Page Count: 69