Showing titles in Death, Grief & Loss

With A Year of Last Things, acclaimed novelist Michael Ondaatje returns to poetry, where he began his career over fifty years ago, and what a return it is. Born in Sri Lanka during the Second World War, Ondaatje was sent as a child to school in London, and later moved to Canada. While he has lived here since, these poems reflect the life of a writer, traveller and watcher of the world – describing himself as a “mongrel,” someone born out of diverse cultures.

"Ashes in the Milk" will remind listeners that their greatest path to healing lies within—all they must do is walk down the path. Valerie Johns, MA, MFT, is a prolific poet, author, and therapist who is passionate about helping others heal from their deepest wounds.

A man sits at a window through the dead hours of night, his sleep broken by troubling dreams of a figure in a white landscape. This fragmentary vigil anchors a series of narrative sections in which a dramatic voice - which might well be an interior monologue - gives, first, an account of the man, then addresses him directly. We learn of a conflicted childhood, of love lost to circumstance, of the press of death on the protagonist's waking thoughts. He is a man afflicted by personal loss, but also a man of his time, all too aware of the troubled world in which he lives.

Take a look into the mind of the undead bohemian Jack Townson, an artist who found himself trapped in a world of nightmares, a life without sunlight, never to feel the warmth of day or the permanence of true love. Jack dives inward to put pen to paper, filling each minute with forbidden secrets—from the loves he's lost, to the friends he's made, to the villains who have plagued him, and the dreams of tomorrow. Step into the shoes of a child of dusk trying to find his way back into the dawn.

From the author of Bastards comes Scarcity, the new collection of poetry. Bleak, philosophical, and with an often surgical precision, it is a journey through emptiness, environmental collapse, and poverty that is at the same time rich with humanity, raw emotion, and hope.

By turns moving, playful and wise, the poems gathered in Dearly are about absences and endings, ageing and retrospection, but also about gifts and renewals. They explore bodies and minds in transition, as well as the everyday objects and rituals that embed us in the present. Werewolves, sirens and dreams make their appearance, as do various forms of animal life and fragments of our damaged environment.

Bread and Circus is a hybrid and palimpsestic memoir-in-verse: it combines poetry, photography and spectral imagining to explore the realities of economic necessity and marginal poverty through a personal lens. Examining the experience of the US urban Black community from a variety of perspectives, it draws heavily on the author’s archival research on Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century Scottish economist, as well as his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations.

Sabrina Benaim, author of Depression & Other Magic Tricks, has connected deeply with readers and reached millions of viewers through her poetry, breaking down the stigma around mental illness. Now, she dives into challenging and universal territory: grief over a relationship’s end, loneliness in a world under lockdown, and the anxiety of caring for a loved one from afar in the wake of a serious diagnosis.

In her electric fourth collection, Melissa Broder penetrates the itch of existence and explores numberless deaths: the annihilation of self, the bereavement of love, the destruction of fantasy, the transmutation, even, of our ideas of dying. What emerges is an infinite series of false endings - each a trap door containing the possibility for alchemy, rebirth, and renewal. Last Sext confronts both eternal longing and the mystery of mortality, with language hot, primal, and dark.

Perhaps Poe's most famous work, "The Raven" was first published in 1845 in the New York Evening Mirror. Known for its tight rhymes and rhythm and the repetitive response given by the eponymous raven - "nevermore" - the poem focuses on that raven and a forlorn man who is distraught over his lost lover, Lenore.

Osmond has written a powerful and challenging collection of original poems representing the complex, fragmentary nature of traumatic experience. Interleaved with these are translated excerpts of two very different texts: the Anglo Saxon epic poem Beowulf and the Qur'an. Osmond's translations from the Qur'an, in contrast to the stereotype of the Qur'an as a monolithic book full of judgment and proscription, focus on its vivid lyricism and the surprisingly riddling nature of its philosophy.

The Perseverance is the remarkable debut book by British-Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus. Ranging across history and continents, these poems operate in the spaces in between, their haunting lyrics creating new, hybrid territories. The Perseverance is a book of loss, contested language and praise, where elegies for the poet's father sit alongside meditations on the d/Deaf experience.

From acclaimed poet Franny Choi comes a poetry collection for the ends of worlds—past, present, and future. Choi’s third book features poems about historical and impending apocalypses, alongside musings on our responsibilities to each other and visions for our collective survival.

Innermost is a collection of both free-verse and fixed-verse poetry written over a period of half a decade about every emotion felt inside the human heart. These poems will transport you to a whole other world within the innermost depths of the human soul.

In this poignant and inspiring collection of 60 poems, Melody Wallack takes listeners on a journey through the highs and lows of life after loss, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the enduring power of love. Through her personal story of grief and healing, Wallack captures the beauty and pain of love, the sorrow of loss, and the transformative power of self-discovery.

Heartbreak and grief touch every soul at least once in a lifetime, and Ranata Suzuki translates those raw emotions into words. The Longest Night combines strikingly poignant quotations, powerfully emotive poetry, and captivating silhouette imagery to form a mournful lover's journal that explores a side of love that is deep, dark, and hauntingly beautiful.

A Sand Book is a poetry collection in 12 parts, a travel guide that migrates from wildfires to hurricanes, tweety bird to the president, lust to aridity, desertification to prophecy, and mother to daughter. It explores the negative space of what is happening to language and to consciousness in our strange and desperate times.

A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection—a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and houses hold archival material for one another, tracing paths between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Boundaries and borders blur between space and time and poetic form—small banal moments of daily life live within geopolitical brutalities and, vice versa, the desire for stability lives in familiarity with displacement.

In haunted poems glinting with laughter, Saeed Jones explores the public and private betrayals of life as we know it. With verve, wit, and elegant craft, Jones strips away American artifice in order to reveal the intimate grief of a mourning son and the collective grief bearing down on all of us.

Soul Speaking is a collection of emotional poetry straight from the soul. Every human emotion from love to hate, joy to grief, celebrating newfound friendships to healing from toxic people, is captured in these free verse poems. Whether these words haunt you or heal you, their beauty, depth, and power will certainly never leave you.