For English teachers, picking a favorite book is almost impossible! But we asked them to do exactly that during our January #楼凤天堂chat, New Year/New Ideas. During the chat, we asked educators to share one text (poem, book, novel) that they would recommend every teacher (or student) read in 2018. As you might expect, we received HUNDREDS of wonderful recommendations!
Get ready to add to your To Be Read pile, because over the next few weeks we鈥檒l be sharing all of the recommendations we received. This week we鈥檙e sharing recommended poetry and verse books, as well as poems, just in time for #楼凤天堂PoetryMonth.
Be sure to check out the other blog posts in this series so far,听professional development,听children鈥檚 books, and YA and adult fiction recommendations.
If we missed one of your favorites, be sure to let us know on听! All recommendations were pulled from January鈥檚 #楼凤天堂chat archive, which you can find听.
Book descriptions are taken from the Goodreads website.
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Poetry Books听
by Eve L. Ewing
Electric Arches is an imaginative exploration of Black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose. Blending stark realism with the fantastical, Ewing takes us from the streets of Chicago to an alien arrival in an unspecified future, deftly navigating boundaries of space, time, and reality with delight and flexibility.
by Chen Chen
In this ferocious and tender debut, Chen Chen investigates inherited forms of love and family鈥攖he strained relationship between a mother and son, the cost of necessary goodbyes鈥攁ll from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives.
by Nicole Tong
In this brave, elegiac debut,听Nicole Tong relies on empirical evidence to construct meaning in the wake of a series of losses that include a childhood lost to trauma, a best friend lost following childbirth, a brother-in-law, a father, and a generation of children in the poet’s hometown after a water contamination event.
by Tiana Clark
by Donika Kelly
Across this remarkable first book are encounters with animals, legendary beasts, and mythological monsters鈥攈alf human and half something else.
by Kaveh Akbar
Poems confront craving, control, the constant battle of alcoholism and sobriety, and the questioning of the self and its instincts within the context of this never-ending fight.
by R. A. Villanueva
In his prize-winning poetry collection听Reliquaria, R. A. Villanueva embraces liminal spaces in considering an ever-evolving Filipino American identity. Languages and cultures collide; mythologies and faiths echo and resound.
by Victoria Chang
Barbie鈥檚 cultural artifice is unmasked by Victoria Chang鈥檚 imagination, lifting the struggle of Asian American experience to mythic levels.
by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Like nothing before it,听Rocket Fantastic听reinvents the landscape and language of the body in interconnected poems that entwine a fabular past with an iridescent future by blurring, with disarming vulnerability, the real and the imaginary.
by Danez Smith
Don’t Call Us Dead听is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America鈥�”Dear White America”鈥攚here every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.
Citizen Illegal by Jos茅 Olivarez [will be available September 4, 2018]
In this stunning debut, poet Jos茅 Olivarez explores the stories, contradictions, joys, and sorrows that embody life in the spaces between Mexico and America. He paints vivid portraits of good kids, bad kids, families clinging to hope, life after the steel mills, gentrifying barrios, and everything in between.
by Nayyirah Waheed
salt. is a journey through warmth and sharpness. This collection of poetry explores the realities of multiple identities, language, diasporic life & pain, the self, community, healing, celebration, and love.
by Clint Smith
Smith explores the cognitive dissonance that results from belonging to a community that unapologetically celebrates Black humanity while living in a world that often renders Blackness a caricature of fear.
by Nikki Grimes
In this collection of poetry, Nikki Grimes looks afresh at the poets of the Harlem Renaissance鈥攊ncluding voices like Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and many more writers of importance and resonance from this era鈥攂y combining their work with her own original poetry.
by Rupi Kaur
milk and honey听is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. It is about the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity.
Verse Books
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by Margarita Engle, illustrated by Edel Rodriguez
Margarita is a girl from two worlds. Her heart lies in Cuba, her mother’s tropical island country, a place so lush with vibrant life that it seems like a fairy tale kingdom. But most of the time she lives in Los Angeles, lonely in the noisy city and dreaming of the summers when she can take a plane through the enchanted air to her beloved island.
by Jacqueline Woodson
In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights Movement.
by Kwame Alexander
Blade never asked for a life of the rich and famous. In fact, he鈥檇 give anything not to be the son of Rutherford Morrison, a washed-up rock star and drug addict with delusions of a comeback. Or to no longer be part of a family known most for lost potential, failure, and tragedy.
by Jason Reynolds
Revenge. That鈥檚 where Will鈥檚 now heading, with that gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, the gun that was his brother鈥檚 gun. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. He knows who he鈥檚 after. Or does he?
by Elizabeth Acevedo
A young girl in Harlem discovers slam poetry as a way to understand her mother鈥檚 religion and her own relationship to the world.
by Kwame Alexander
Josh and Jordan must come to grips with growing up on and off the court to realize breaking the rules comes at a terrible price, as their story’s heart-stopping climax proves a game changer for the entire family.
by Jacqueline Woodson
When Lonnie Collins Motion “Locomotion” was seven years old, his life changed forever. Now he’s eleven, and his life is about to change again. His teacher, Ms. Marcus, is showing him ways to put his jumbled feelings on paper.
Poems
by Fernando Pessoa
鈥溾�� by Harry Baker
by Brian Bilston
by Marshall Davis-Jones
by Pat Mora
by Emma Lazarus
by Maggie Smith
by Rudyard Kipling
“” by Clint Smith
by Ellen Bass
by Langston Hughes
by Jack Gilbert
by Kwame Alexander
鈥淭hree Uses of Chopsticks鈥� by Juliet S. Kono
鈥淭he Little Boy鈥� by Helen Buckley
鈥淪ometimes鈥� by Mary Oliver
by Clint Smith
Poets
Edgar Allan Poe
Naomi Shihab Nye
Looking for even more poetry books to add to your collection?
Be sure to check out and听other resources that can help you teach poetry during April and throughout the year. Some recent poetry book favorites have included:
by Jaime Wood
Jaime Wood offers middle school English language arts teachers material for teaching poetry by Nikki Giovanni, Li-Young Lee, and Pat Mora; the text includes graphic organizers and other resources.
by Brian Moon
Studying Poetry听uses text-based activities to help students approach poetry鈥攏ot in the conventional Romantic way as a mystical, heightened mode of expression, but as a form of 鈥渄iscourse鈥� that can be vitally relevant to their daily lives.
You might also want to check out the 2018 Notable Poetry Books selected by the 楼凤天堂 Award for Excellence in Children鈥檚 Poetry Committee.