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Poetry as Hope in the Autumn Dark

A list of poets to read as the nights grow longer.

User from Johnson County Library

21 items

  • "What I want you to know is that we're okay. Hurting / but okay." --Franny Choi
    Book, 2022New York, NY : Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, [2022] — 811.6 Choi 11/2022
  • Kaddish

    Before the Holocaust and After

    Yolen, Jane,
    "Do not be fooled again. / Their people are our people. / The lamp lifts for all of us." --Jane Yolen
    Book, 2021Duluth, Minnesota : Holy Cow! Press, 2021. — 811.54 Yolen 12/2021
  • "The wind is cold and incessant and everything in me / wants to live." --Traci Brimhall
    Book, 2020Port Townsend, Washington : Copper Canyon Press, [2020] — 811.6 Brimhall 06/2020
  • “The difference between a warning and a threat is all a matter of what you've lived through.” --Hanif Abdurraqib
    Book, 2019Portland, Oregon : Tin House Books, 2019. — 811.6 Abdurraq 10/2019
  • "We do not know the history / Of this nation in ourselves." --Jericho Brown
    Book, 2019Port Townsend, Washington : Copper Canyon Press, [2019] — 811.6 Brown 04/2019
  • “I swore when I got into this poem I would convert / this sorrow into some kind of honey with the little musics / I can sometimes make with these scribbled artifacts / of our desolation.” --Ross Gay
    Book, 2015Pittsburgh, Pa. : University of Pittsburgh Press, [2015] — 811.6 Gay 09/2015
  • “The scene of hope's ahead; look, April, / and next month with a softer wind, / maybe they'll rest upon their land, / and then maybe the happy song, and love, / a tall boy who was never in a tunnel.” --Muriel Rukeyser
    Book, 2018Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press, 2018. — 811.54 Rukeyser 02/2018
  • "I believe that the sun shines / if not here, then somewhere." --Eve L. Ewing
    Book, 2017Chicago, Illinois : Haymarket Books, 2017. — 811.54 Ewing 09/2017
  • "blue skies is a sight I have never trusted again & poetry is what I reached for in the days when the ash would not stop falling..." ---Sarah Kay
    Book, 2025New York : The Dial Press, [2025] — 811.6 Kay 05/2025
  • “We do not hope for no reason. / Hope is the reason for itself." --Amanda Gorman
    Book, 2021New York : Viking, 2021. — 811.6 Gorman 11/2021
  • "Tonight I am riddled by this thick skull." --Natalie Diaz
    Book, 2012Port Townsend, Wash. : Copper Canyon Press, c2012. — 811.6 Diaz 05/2012
  • “You are the witness, on-the-scene, microphone / in hand. You stand on the road to everywhere..." --Naomi Shihab Nye
    Book, 2019Rochester, NY : BOA Editions, Ltd., [2019] — 811.54 Nye 04/2019
  • Devotions

    the Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

    Oliver, Mary, 1935-2019
    "Look, and look again. This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes. It’s more than bones. It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse. It’s more than the beating of the single heart. It’s praising." --Mary Oliver
    Book, 2017New York : Penguin Press, [2017] — 811.54 Oliver
  • “Is it strange to say love is a language / Few practice, but all, or near all speak?” --Tracy K. Smith
    Book, 2018Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press, 2018. — 811.6 Smith 03/2018
  • “It was impossible to make it through the tragedy / Without poetry. What are we without winds becoming words?” --Joy Harjo
    Book, 2019New York, NY : W.W. Norton & Company, [2019] — 811.6 Harjo 09/2019
  • “I caved and decided it will be joy from now on.” --Ocean Vuong
    Book, 2022New York : Penguin Press, 2022. — 811.6 Vuong 03/2022
  • “Go home and write / a page tonight. / And let that page come out of you - / Then, it will be true.” --Langston Hughes
    Book, 1994New York : Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1994. — 811.52 Hughes
  • “Poetry is a useful place for lamentation...poems are a place where we can cry out.” --bell hooks
    Book, 2012Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, c2012. — 811.6 Hooks 11/2012
  • The Asking

    New and Selected Poems

    Hirshfield, Jane, 1953-
    “Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace. Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.” --Jane Hirshfield
    Book, 2023New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2023. — 811.54 Hirshfie 10/2023
  • “THIS LETTER / IS FOR US ALL, to remind us that we are many. That we are right for trying. That purpose is real. That making it is possible.” --Jason Reynolds
    Book, 2018New York, NY : Atheneum, [2018] — TEEN 811.6 Reynolds