×

New at Peter White Public Library

What’s New at PWPL: National Poetry Month

Two-time U. S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey once said this about poetry: “I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.” Poetry is a way for human beings to connect and put a voice to those common experiences we all share. April is National Poetry Month, and Peter White Public Library has new collections to satisfy the inner poetry lover in everyone.

“This Is Where I Live I Have Nowhere Else to Go,” Dennis Hinrichsen’s latest collection of poetry (811.54 HI), won the 2020 Off The Grid Poetry Prize. The poems in the book are cinematic and musical, enigmatic and profoundly moving. They resurrect the ghosts of Blake and Whitman, Rilke and Coltrane, exploring place intimately, grounding us to our corruptible bodies and releasing us to explore the complexities of love, betrayal, young age, old age, and death. A former Poet Laureate of the Greater Lansing area, Hinrichsen is a writer of fierce honesty and gentle humor. His voice reaches out on the page to help us find firm ground on which to build the places where we all live.

“The Animal at Your Side,” a new collection by Megan Alpert (811.6 AL), is about the ferociously fragile animal that exists around and inside you, and inside the people you love. The poems are about finding ways to engage this animal, through exploration, understanding, and language. Alpert’s images are startling and familiar at the same time, helping you see the world in ways that make her subjects gleam like sunlight on crow wings. This collection won the Airlie Prize and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series.

“This Is How the Bone Sings” by W. Todd Kaneko (811.6 KA) engages an ugly part of American history: the internment of Japanese-Americans in camps run by the U. S. Government during World War II. The poems in this collection imaginatively follow Kaneko’s grandfather, grandmother, and father from the frigid buildings of Minidoka, Idaho, where they are forced to live alongside horses and livestock, to a landscape haunted by ogres and witches and ghosts. The breath of Kaneko’s words resuscitates the bones buried deep in Minidoka, brushes them off, and lets them whisper about a legacy that should be carried forward as elegy and warning.

“Bellocq’s Ophelia” by Natasha Trethewey (811.6 TR), while not recently published, is new to the shelves of Peter White Public Library. Trethewey, a two-time U. S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, weaves together a collection of poems that casts harsh light on the racial and gender divide that exists in the United States. Following the life of Ophelia, a mixed-race prostitute in Storyville, the red-light district of New Orleans, at the turn-of-the-century, the poems are shot through with hope and desperation as Ophelia searches for identity in a place where labels seem tattooed permanently on the soul.

“Flight of the Diamond Smugglers” by Matthew Gavin Frank (364.1336 FR), while not technically poetry, is written so lyrically that it will satisfy the poetic palette of poetry and prose lovers. The book is a narrative that spans the wasted coasts of South Africa, to Orpheus and the Underworld, to Krishna’s cursed Koh-i-Noor diamond.  It’s a ride that takes wild turns, and just when you think you see the destination ahead, “Flight of the Diamond Smugglers” finds an updraft or trade wind, and you go sailing into another gleaming facet or bottomless mine. Book passage on this flight.  You won’t be disappointed.

Newsletter

Today's breaking news and more in your inbox

I'm interested in (please check all that apply)
Are you a paying subscriber to the newspaper *
   

Starting at $4.62/week.

Subscribe Today