The Best Poetry Books 2025

Updated On August 18th, 2025

Looking for the best Poetry Books? You aren't short of choices in 2022. The difficult bit is deciding the best Poetry Books for you, but luckily that's where we can help. Based on testing out in the field with reviews, sells etc, we've created this ranked list of the finest Poetry Books.

Rank Product Name Score
1
Dover Thrift Editions: Poetry: Selected Poems of Rumi (Paperback)

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

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100%
2
Milk and Honey (Paperback)

Milk and Honey (Paperback)

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88%
3
Money Shot 9780819571304

Money Shot 9780819571304

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4
Norma: Vocal Score (Paperback)

Norma: Vocal Score (Paperback)

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5
Parsifal : Vocal Score

Parsifal : Vocal Score

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6
Maybe the Saddest Thing, (Paperback)

Maybe the Saddest Thing, (Paperback)

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7
With Strings (Paperback)

With Strings (Paperback)

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8
Alternative Medicine (Paperback)

Alternative Medicine (Paperback)

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9
The Book of Men, (Paperback)

The Book of Men, (Paperback)

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10
Sun Rock Man (Paperback)

Sun Rock Man (Paperback)

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

Dover Thrift Editions: Poetry: Selected Poems of Rumi (Paperback)
100%

Our Score

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. Milk and Honey (Paperback)

Milk and Honey (Paperback)
88%

Our Score

Watch rupi kaur live now on Prime Video. "Rupi Kaur is the Writer of the Decade." - The New Republic #1 New York Times bestseller milk and honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. About the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity. The book is divided into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose. Deals with a different pain. Heals a different heartache. milk and honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.

Author: Rupi Kaur ISBN: 9781449474256 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 10/06/2015

3. Money Shot 9780819571304

Money Shot 9780819571304
0%

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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

4. Norma: Vocal Score (Paperback)

Norma: Vocal Score (Paperback)
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Our Score

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
0%

Our Score

Parsifal: Vocal Score

Parsifal: Vocal Score

6. Maybe the Saddest Thing, (Paperback)

Maybe the Saddest Thing, (Paperback)
0%

Our Score

\"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)

With Strings (Paperback)
0%

Our Score

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)

Alternative Medicine (Paperback)
0%

Our Score

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)

The Book of Men, (Paperback)
0%

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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. Sun Rock Man (Paperback)

Sun Rock Man (Paperback)
0%

Our Score

Corman, Sun Rock Man. Poems about Matera, Italy

Sun Rock Man (Paperback)


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