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BKLYN BookMatch: BIPOC & Women's Poetry

This list was created by a librarian with Brooklyn Public Library for a reader. These titles include books of poetry by BIPOC and women. Would you like your own personalized list of reading suggestions? Visit Bklyn BookMatch, here: www.bklynlibrary.org/bookmatch ?

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8 items

IRL
Tommy Pico.
Format:

Composed as a long text message, this poem asks what happens to a modern, queer indigenous person a few generations after his ancestors were alienated from their language, their religion, and their history.

Night sky with exit wounds
Ocean Vuong.
Format:

Vuong's first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial "big"—and very human—subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the fiercest hungers.

If they come for us : poems
Asghar, Fatimah, author.
Format: EBOOKS

This imaginative, soulful debut poetry collection captures the experiences of being a young Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America. Orphaned as a child, Fatimah Asghar grapples with coming of age and navigating questions of sexuality and race without the guidance of a mother or father. These poems at once bear anguish, joy, vulnerability, and compassion, while also exploring the man facets of violence: how it persists within us, how it is inherited across generations, and how it manifests itself in our relationships.

If they come for us : poems
Asghar, Fatimah, author.
Format: PRINTED MATL

This imaginative, soulful debut poetry collection captures the experiences of being a young Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America. Orphaned as a child, Fatimah Asghar grapples with coming of age and navigating questions of sexuality and race without the guidance of a mother or father. These poems at once bear anguish, joy, vulnerability, and compassion, while also exploring the man facets of violence: how it persists within us, how it is inherited across generations, and how it manifests itself in our relationships.

Don't call us dead [electronic resource] : poems
Smith, Danez, author, narrator.
Format: eAudiobook

Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality-the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood-and a diagnosis of HIV positive. "Some of us are killed / in pieces," Smith writes, "some of us all at once."

Don't Call Us Dead : Poems
Smith, Danez
Format: PRINTED MATL

Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality-the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood-and a diagnosis of HIV positive. "Some of us are killed / in pieces," Smith writes, "some of us all at once."

1919
Ewing, Eve L., author.
Format:

The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots comprising the nation’s Red Summer, has shaped the last century but is not widely discussed. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event—which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries—through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city.

1919
Ewing, Eve L.
Format:

The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots comprising the nation’s Red Summer, has shaped the last century but is not widely discussed. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event—which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries—through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city.