Books like Modern Poetry — picked by fans

Anything by Louise Erdrich is worth buying and reading.

If somebody had told me about the blender scene in the Netflix series Jessica Jones, I would have passed. I'm glad that I didn't. Jones is the sort of sarcastic, flawed hero I truly can't get enough of. She has superpowers, but not enough to be on lunchboxes. A superhero underdog—what's not to like? Breaking the Dark is the first Marvel novel, and it focuses on Jones and a new case. Something wonky is going on with two teenagers who've recently returned from spending a summer with their dad abroad. There are plenty of twists and turns but enough character development to elevate this story to something special.

Again and again, Terry Tempest Williams shows us we can live in a disaster zone, literal and emotional, and survive.

Refuge, her fourth major book, testifies to the calamities set in motion by the atomic testing that occurred in the Nevada desert during the 1950’s. The book weaves the story of her mother and grandmother’s resultant deaths from cancer and the flooding of the Great Salt Lake that has endangered native bird species.

The loss she records is human and non-human, bringing home a truth we have yet to learn: that sullying the Great Mother, our earth, threatens our own bodies and those of future generations. If Refuge is a record of lamentations, it is also a missive for restoration and regeneration and a document of hope.

Risk-taking writers are my heroes, and Katherine Dunn is at the top of my list.

Her astonishing book Geek Love, a cult classic, defiantly celebrates the freakish and bizarre, tearing to shreds the subjective and culturally determined definitions of normality, intelligence, and beauty. Dive into Geek Love, and you’ll be traveling with the Binewski family, owners of the “Carnival Fabulon,” whose “special” offspring are prized for their money-making monstrous endowments.

In creating Oly, an albino hunchback, or her brother Arty, born with flippers, or Chick, with telekinetic powers, Dunn risks alienating readers by turning her characters into stereotypes, comic or horrid. Instead, she has written a haunting, humorous, and existentially relevant novel about Otherness, about the afflictions of family life—alternatively claustrophobic and competitive or caring and dear.

In the matrix of family, we learn who we are and how to love. I, too, am a writer driven to explore… show more.

Human creativity is on full peacock feathers out display with this one.

The story is laid out as a series of postcards and letters written between two people. Many of them are letters, on separate pieces of paper tucked inside envelopes that are inside the book. This one will be over the head of younger kids but because of the interactive nature, the colorful pictures, and the solve-a-mystery vibe of the story it could be a fun one to read with slightly older kids. 

For me, I started it one night with my six-year-old and then continued to dig through the letters on the floor next to their bed long after they fell asleep. It feels voyeuristic reading through it. Who are these people? What’s inside this next envelope? Do they know I am reading their letters? It’s clever as hell and a lot of fun to read.

I grew up in an Italian family where the wisdom of my elders poured from ocean voyages. At family gatherings my relatives spoke of chaperoned romances, ice trucks, and cinematic stories that went on and on.

Peggy Freydberg’s image, the lined flesh conveying time’s signature, is what first drew me in. When I learned she began writing poetry at 90, I was curious and immediately humbled after diving into her work. Here was a woman in fierce-writing shape and in physical command of a powerful voice. She was brutally honest about life, aging, and death.

Her poems remain gritty, defiant, elegant, and sad. She passed at 107, and I still imagine the words she’d yet to write. I keep Ms. Freydberg’s memory and her brave words close to my heart.

I’ve never been one to read a writer because of their accomplishments. But there are confessional voices (with stellar accolades), I can’t avoid. Louise Glück’s poetic voice evaluates experiences in ways that remind me that we’re all a bit messed up, but beauty sometimes lingers under rocks if you’re willing to dig. And dig I must to improve my work.

My poetry sometimes hides behind soft language, while my word-wolf remains hidden. Poems like Ms. Glück’s “Purple Bathing Suit” force me to evaluate if I’m artfully deceiving or striving to rise to her level of genuine gut-wrenching prose.

“I like watching you garden / with your back to me in your purple bathing suit: your back is my favorite part of you, the part furthest away from your mouth”

As a small child, I’d felt as alone as a moon in a blank sky.

While my classroom mind collected daydreams, I often missed what the adult in the room was saying. I spent too much time not following directions. I always wanted to prove I was as strong as any boy. My kindergarten teacher had recommended that I repeat the year. My parents decided I should move on. For a long while, fitting-in had felt like sand in my eyes until I discovered Geranium. The words and the fantastical illustrations knew me.

This book taught me to cope by using my words and my art. So, I found Geranium when I was eight, or it found me, and it has been with me ever since. 

Four-legged girl begins with a powerful cover image and ends with the equally evocative “four-legged girl.” Captivating and curious.

I own several Diane Seuss collections, but this one (her third) is my favorite. Seuss bares the train wrecks in a way I admire and strive to emulate. Her lines crash, her images explode – I’m reading but can’t stop the comet crashing to earth, or sometimes earth is crashing into the comet – either way, Ms. Seuss, a former therapist, doesn’t do faux redemption like I so often do out of guilt for happy endings. Her frank language catapults. She confesses, critiques, includes me in her world and excludes pity of any kind.

Her poetry pushes me, in the best way possible, to smash every crayon in my secret box. 

Michael Cunningham is an author empathically attuned to the travails of individual souls trapped by the external circumstances of their lives.

Flesh and Blood is his masterpiece about the hidden desperation seething within families and the crushing transgenerational legacy of class and the immigrant experience. 

Constantine Stassos, a Greek-American and family patriarch, is determined to live out the American Dream. The novel unfolds over his lifetime and explores the emotional and physical costs on his children and wife to simultaneously embrace and reject the entrapment of rigid family values. 

Cunningham explores societal issues of gay rights, the AIDS epidemic, suicide, and depression with great sensitivity in prose that elevates and illuminates the human struggle against loneliness and isolation.