Anthony DiPietro's 3 favorite reads in 2024

An award-winning collection from one of America's most beloved twentieth-century poets

'The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton - both the woman and her poetry - is constant and deeply felt' Toni Morrison

Lucille Clifton was one of the most distinguished American poets of the twentieth century. This award-winning collection of her poems showcases the simplicity and song-like grace with which she addressed the whole of human experience: birth, death, children, dreams, spirituality, womanhood, illness, sexuality and racial injustice.

'Physically small poems with enormous and profound inner worlds' Elizabeth Alexander, New Yorker

'Clifton's earliest poems could have been written yesterday,… show more.

With an equal dose of fatalism and dark wit, Antigua captures the body’s capacity to cage and cradle sadness.

Diannely Antigua’s Good Monster grapples with the body as a site of chronic pain and trauma. Poignant and guttural, the collection “voyage[s] the land between crisis and hope,” chronicling Antigua’s reckoning with shame and her fallout with faith. As poems cage and cradle devastating truths—a stepfather’s abusive touch, a mother’s “soft harm”—the speaker’s anxiety, depression, and boundless need become monstrous shadows. Here, poems dance on bars, speak in tongues, and cry in psych wards. When “God [becomes] a house [she] can’t… show more.

While Turner (author of Here, Bullet) grieves the loss of his wife to cancer, The Goodbye World Poem is a series of poetic meditations that sit quietly in the silent “afterward” of someone’s death. Losing his wife, his father, and his best friend in quick succession, Turner explores those relationships through the complicated lenses of moments in time, weaving in and out of memory to explore the disparate history that fuses together to form ones psyche. Throughout the collection, a prevailing motion recurs: that of submersion, sinking, plunging into the deep―whether it be the ocean or the subconscious. In other… show more.