Books like Playlist for the Apocalypse — picked by fans

The poems in this book made me feel glad to be alive in a world that feels like it’s ending. I loved how Jones situated personal grief within disasters of national and international scale; grieving a mother is as monumental as grieving a world. 

I also found it compelling how Jones consistently maintains a musical quality to the poems’ language. The first two lines of, 'Saeed, How Dare You Make Your Mother into a Prelude', are: "And then, night neons itself inside me / and I begin missing you in loud new ways.”

Multisensory with pleasing consonance, these lines are a small sample of Jones’s linguistic verve. Full of wit and sincerity, these poems made me want to write my own defiant love letter to the apocalypse. 

This book is the blueprint. From the concept—persona poems and scenes from New Orleans, told from the perspective of Hurricane Katrina—to the flawless execution of that concept, this book is a must-read for understanding disasters.

I loved the sustained attention to the storm and the people and the way that Smith finds fresh ways to create the scenes before, during, and after the storm. I loved Katrina the persona, too, as much as I feared her destructiveness. Her rage and vengeance felt entirely real, and the poems made me want to walk the earth as if every step would shatter the ground. This book lives up to its succinct, evocative title. 

If there are two things I love, it’s persona poems and a sustained concept throughout a collection. Like Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith above, this book has both things.

A book of persona poems imagining the 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan as a series of monsters battling against the 50 employees who remained on-site after the tsunami, the collection weaves seamlessly between languages and comic book-like sound effects that create a heroic narrative in a sparse style.

This collection is one I return to when I think of trying to combat apocalyptic despair; if 50 people can face down a fatal situation, then I can live through another, less catastrophic day. 

What I love most about this collection is how it begins with an ending: printed on the inside jacket flap of the book is the end poem, 'The End of Poetry,' which demands an end to the intangibles of poetic clichés and calls instead for physical sensation.

The intense desire to be touched is heightened with the COVID-19 pandemic hanging over each poem; the pandemic is never named, but I felt the ache of social distancing. The pandemic is another kind of catastrophe, one that is tenderly and vividly captured in this book.

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ear.” This is a must-have for any library. I wish I had begun reading William Shakespeare much earlier than high school! This 48-page volume provides a wonderful introduction for young and older readers with an assortment of Bard’s poems and speeches. Each entry is beautifully illustrated and explained by an expert. Definitions of hard-to-understand words are thoughtfully included at the bottom of each page.

Sorrow is plural but grief is singular writes American poet, Victoria Chang, in her latest book Obit.

To me, this phrase resonates all the more powerfully as we find ourselves emerging from the Covid pandemic and assessing the impact it had on us. We were united, around the world, in our sorrow but the way we grieved was unique to each one of us.

This long poem, written after the death of her mother, is an elegy to grief itself. Taken from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the epigraph at the beginning of the book reads: give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak. This is exactly what the writer has done. 

Shara Lessley and I met in Amman, Jordan, during the Arab Spring—both of us American writers whose husbands worked at the embassy. Poetry is not a staple of my reading diet, but Lessley’s poems are small, crystalline stories that perfectly encapsulate what it is like to be an American woman living in the Middle East during a time of potential instability. This volume is slim, but the Jordan that emerges is vast and unforgettable.

Bashir’s father was Somali, and she is a first-generation American.

Her breath taking poetry echoes her heritage in poems like “We call it dark matter because it doesn’t interact with light.” She doesn’t identify herself as “Somali,” but her heritage is there. Her blackness is there. Her womanhood is there. A jazz trumpet is there. A spinning sky is there.

I watched Somalis as their world began to fall apart. I could only vaguely comprehend the complexity of their emotions, the loss they would feel when they were forced to leave. I doubt that even they did not know what it meant to lose a homeland.

It seems that women need dirt, dirt to grow from, dirt to grow into. When that dirt is snatched from under us, so many of us lose our footing in the world. A few strong women like Samiya Bashir find their footing in poetry,… show more.

This is one of those gems that can easily get lost in the literary shuffle. Poet-teacher John Fox gets into the craft of writing poetry in Finding What You Didn’t Lose, but it’s not one of those dry books that will get you all tangled up worrying about your iambic pentameters. Instead, he takes you on a beautiful journey, showing how such useful tools as imagery, sound, metaphor, and rhythm can help you express yourself. Quotes and poetry excerpts round out the rich content of this book.

In this book-length poem, Ross Gay manages to “talk” to the reader intimately without once “mansplaning” the way that so much of the tradition of “nature writing” has, for centuries, done. With the refrains of “what am I seeing?” and “what am I practicing?” Gay creates what feels like a genuine conversation with the reader, allowing me to ask myself the same questions as I read, to form my own thoughts and feelings, rather than passively receiving his.

In what I find to be his best work yet, Gay offers a genuine invitation to the reader to join into the seeing and feeling and meaning-making, thus making the meaning-making infinitely more meaningful. Be Holding is like a personal letter taken from its envelope, but somehow intended for all of us. It is as intricate as it is accessible and clear.