Here are 100 books that Poems fans have personally recommended if you like
Poems.
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I started to write poetry because I loved the poetry my father recited. I've kept writing poems because poems brought me closest to the mystery my father and mother were to me. Both my parents lived through the Depression in England and the Second World War that followed. Both of them suffered, one as a civilian casualty, the other as a soldier, and both carried to their deathbeds the things they did and the things that were done to them. The books that move me most offer me the words that lift the weight of sorrow and the understanding that replaces grief and anger with compassion.
In this book, Alison Bechdel is obsessed with the triangular relationship between one’s parents, oneself, and literature, and, in my poetry, so am I.
Our parents are either puzzles we can solve or mysteries we cannot, but still we have to try. And in this book, again and again, Bechdel takes those insights and moments of beauty that literature offers, investigates her father’s life and death, and in this book (as well as the follow-up, Are You My Mother?), the meaning of her mother’s choices as well.
Now that I think of it, Fun Home is the story of how literature is always the child of what an author experiences in their life and what they read, the two brimming over into the impulse to make more words, understand more life.
DISCOVER the BESTSELLING GRAPHIC MEMOIR behind the Olivier Award nominated musical.
'A sapphic graphic treat' The Times
A moving and darkly humorous family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Alison Bechdel's gothic drawings. If you liked Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis you'll love this.
Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high-school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and the family babysitter. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I started to write poetry because I loved the poetry my father recited. I've kept writing poems because poems brought me closest to the mystery my father and mother were to me. Both my parents lived through the Depression in England and the Second World War that followed. Both of them suffered, one as a civilian casualty, the other as a soldier, and both carried to their deathbeds the things they did and the things that were done to them. The books that move me most offer me the words that lift the weight of sorrow and the understanding that replaces grief and anger with compassion.
Stefanie Green administered my mother’s medically assisted death, and among the stories in the book is my and my brother's farewell with her.
It wasn’t a long story – just a paragraph among chapters – and I read the book to find out more about my mother’s choice and the choice of the doctor who cared for her. I say “cared” because for my mother, a medically assisted death turned hopelessness about the end of her life into the happiness of having a choice in a situation in which she was otherwise helpless.
In her account of my mother’s last moments, Stefanie showed me what I did not see at the time, and that insight only added more meaning to the story of my mother’s life.
An international bestseller, this compassionate memoir by a leading pioneer in medically assisted dying who helps suffering patients explore and fulfill their end of life choices is "written with sensitivity, grace, and candor...not to be missed" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Dr. Stefanie Green has been forging new paths in the field of medical assistance in dying since 2016. In her landmark memoir, Dr. Green reveals the reasons a patient might seek an assisted death, how the process works, what the event itself can look like, the reactions of those involved, and what it feels like to oversee proceedings and administer…
I started to write poetry because I loved the poetry my father recited. I've kept writing poems because poems brought me closest to the mystery my father and mother were to me. Both my parents lived through the Depression in England and the Second World War that followed. Both of them suffered, one as a civilian casualty, the other as a soldier, and both carried to their deathbeds the things they did and the things that were done to them. The books that move me most offer me the words that lift the weight of sorrow and the understanding that replaces grief and anger with compassion.
I’ve often told my students that the poetry most meaningful for you either puts into words things you’ve wanted to say but didn’t have the words for, or it gives you words for experiences you haven’t had but might be waiting for you somewhere down the road.
Stuart’s poetry has long amused and challenged me with his play at language and disruption of conventions, but in this book, I am made aware that he and I are born only a couple of years apart, and in some things, like the subjects of this book, he’s just up ahead, telling me what’s in store: what it is to be the last living member of your birth family, what it is to lose one of your oldest friends.
Poetry is sometimes just the wisdom of growing old made pure by art, and this is one of those times.
A poignant meditation on mortality from a beloved Canadian poet
A writer friend once pointed out that whenever Stuart Ross got close to something heavy and “real” in a poem, a hamburger would inevitably appear for comic relief. In this hybrid essay/memoir/poetic meditation, Ross shoves aside the heaping plate of burgers to wrestle with what it means to grieve the people one loves and what it means to go on living in the face of an enormous accumulation of loss. Written during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, shortly after…
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
I started to write poetry because I loved the poetry my father recited. I've kept writing poems because poems brought me closest to the mystery my father and mother were to me. Both my parents lived through the Depression in England and the Second World War that followed. Both of them suffered, one as a civilian casualty, the other as a soldier, and both carried to their deathbeds the things they did and the things that were done to them. The books that move me most offer me the words that lift the weight of sorrow and the understanding that replaces grief and anger with compassion.
This is a book about extreme compassion, and the long and torturous work of it in the face of neighbourhood fear and municipal hostility towards those who live without fixed addresses and all that that entails.
Further, I see in Encampment the hope that on a personal and social level, we all have it within us to understand people we didn't think we could and keep alive the capacity we're born with to love those whom so many tell us we should not.
An activist priest provides sanctuary for an encampment of unhoused people in her churchyard
The housing crisis plaguing major urban centres has sent countless people into the streets. In spring 2022, some of them found their way to the yard beside the Anglican church in Toronto's Kensington Market, where Maggie Helwig is the priest. They pitched tents, formed an encampment, and settled in. Known as an outspoken social justice activist, Helwig has spent the last three years getting to know the residents and fighting tooth and…
She really gets at the heart of how Brown and Black bodies are seen, and what is fascinating to me is the approach through current “technical art” and a good discussion of architecture. I had a class focus on her discussion—lengthy—about surveillance and race. It’s extremely poignant, and something whites especially just don’t think about. I will never again go through an airport without thinking about her book.
In Dark Matters Simone Browne locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws from black feminist theory, sociology, and cultural studies to analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness she discusses: from the design of the…
As a longtime outdoors editor of a Mississippi newspaper, I actually got paid to paddle local rivers. Over the decades, I expanded my territory to adjacent states, the South, the continent, and other countries. I parlayed my experiences into several books on rivers. As a paddler and writer, I naturally love to read about adventures on the water–not only classics like Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi River and Paul Theroux's Happy Isles of Oceania but also the many less-known but highly praiseworthy books like those listed here.
Bill Mason was a legend in the world of paddling. He was old-school: red and black plaid wool shirt, wood-and-canvas canoe, canvas lean-to-style tent. His sojourns in the North Woods inspired me in my own explorations of the Deep South. When he paddled Lake Superior, I thought of Louisiana's Atchafalaya Swamp. When he canoed the Hood River, I thought of Mississippi's Pascagoula.
This book combines in-depth advice on wilderness travel with accounts of some of Bill's own journeys. He was also an artist and filmmaker. His documentary, Waterwalker, is a must-see classic for anyone who loves adventure on the water.
More than a how-to camping and paddling guide, Song of the Paddle is a philosophical guide to outdoor living. Written by the acclaimed paddler and outdoorsman, Bill Mason, the book leads readers on a journey of exploration and discovery.
Mason writes from an intensely subjective viewpoint and the advice is practical and sound. He emphasizes the difference in perception between camping (rough) and outdoor living (comfort). Each page is packed with hard-won tips and tricks for enjoying the great outdoors. No detail is ignored -- from keeping campfire smoke out of your eyes…
Tina Edwards loved her childhood and creating fairy houses, a passion shared with her father, a world-renowned architect. But at nine years old, she found him dead at his desk and is haunted by this memory. Tina's mother abruptly moved away, leaving Tina with feelings of abandonment and suspicion.
I’m a journalist in Edmonton, Canada, who covered former premier Jason Kenney’s rise through Alberta politics, in which he tapped into the populist zeitgeist of Donald Trump and Brexit, and his eventual implosion. I have a newsletter on Substack, "The Orchard," where I cover the intersection of politics, the media, and corporate power. Through my journalism, I’ve developed a keen interest in this age of mass discontent we find ourselves in, with right-wing political and economic elites promising to blow up the entire system they embody while feckless liberal politicians seek to tinker around the edges to make the established order more palatable.
I regard Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the embodiment of an empty progressive politics that is far more concerned with style over substance.
Martin Lukacs does a great job in The Trudeau Formula of outlining how Trudeau’s combination of soaring rhetoric and tepid reform on issues like economic inequality, Indigenous reconciliation, and the climate crisis works to stave off the more systemic changes needed to address these concerns in a substantive way.
Lukacs aptly demonstrates how Trudeau serves to uphold the status quo while presenting himself as an agent of transformative change.
"The book is not a biography of Justin Trudeau, nor is it a treatment of the minutiae and manoeuvres of party politics. It is an investigation into how the Liberal government governs in the shadow of a silent, multi-decade corporate coup in Ottawa that dares not speak its name. It tells the hidden history of how the Liberal party has served as the most effective vehicle for implementing deeply unpopular neoliberal policies--and how Justin Trudeau continues this agenda today."--
In my life, I have always loved visiting the unsung places: villages rather than cities, places where I am the only tourist. In both reading and writing, I’m drawn to the quietly dramatic times, the moments before important events, or the aftermaths. I want to see how real characters live in real places dealing with real problems, even if all three are invented. I spent most of my childhood getting lost in books, emerging only long enough to return to the library to discover more places and times where I could snuggle between the covers of a story. As a writer, I hope I can do this for other readers.
We all need rock stars to idolize, and mine is Alice Munro, a Canadian writer whose books are mostly short story collections about the quietly intense lives of farmers and townspeople in rural Canada.
I’m from a generation of writers who learned about writing through the stories of Alice Munro, Anton Chekhov, and Raymond Carver, among others. Choosing my favorite Munro book is a challenge—for decades I read them all over and over—but if I had to, I’d say it’s Dance of the Happy Shades.
No one understands better what it’s like to be an adolescent girl than Alice Munro, and no one is more gifted at portraying it, particularly in the stories “An Ounce of Cure” and “Red Dress—1946,” with such generous characterizations and courageous honesty.
In these fifteen short stories--her eighth collection of short stories in a long and distinguished career--Alice Munro conjures ordinary lives with an extraordinary vision, displaying the remarkable talent for which she is now widely celebrated. Set on farms, by river marshes, in the lonely towns and new suburbs of western Ontario, these tales are luminous acts of attention to those vivid moments when revelation emerges from the layers of experience that lie behind even the most everyday events and lives.
"Virtuosity, elemental command, incisive like a diamond, remarkable: all these descriptions fit…
I first became interested in the history of the British Empire as an undergraduate. Understanding this history helped me relate my parents’ experiences growing up in a postcolonial nation with the history of the United States, where I grew up. As an academic historian, my research and teaching emphasize connections—between disparate places, between the past and present, and between our personal experiences and those of people born in distant times and places. My first children’s book allowed me to translate my scholarly work for a young audience. I hope this list of books that inspire my approach to history encourages your own investigations of imperialism and its pasts!
George Manuel was once asked by a white coworker, “Does Indians have feelings?” Refusing dehumanization, Manuel reveals the ongoing colonial relations between First Nations and the Canadian settler state. He charts his political journey from Secwepemcúl̓ecw to the National Indian Brotherhood to the World Council of Indigenous Peoples.
Manuel argues that the victories of the anti-colonial independence movements of the twentieth century did not end colonial domination of Indigenous Peoples—what he calls the Fourth World. The Fourth World is not a destination but the right to travel on your own road in your own way.
With a new insightful introduction, foreword, and afterword, the book's latest edition shows how Manuel’s analysis of colonialism and vision for solidarity continue to be relevant to contemporary struggles for decolonization.
A foundational work of radical anticolonialism, back in print
Originally published in 1974, The Fourth World is a critical work of Indigenous political activism that has long been out of print. George Manuel, a leader in the North American Indian movement at that time, with coauthor journalist Michael Posluns, presents a rich historical document that traces the struggle for Indigenous survival as a nation, a culture, and a reality. The authors shed light on alternatives for coexistence that would take place in the Fourth World-an alternative to the new world, the old world, and the Third World. Manuel was the…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I’m the author of 26 twisty psychological thrillers, many of which are Amazon bestsellers. I’ve sold over three-quarters of a million books and particularly enjoy writing about dysfunctional families and unpleasant neighbours! Several of my novels touch upon this theme: The Visitors, The New Neighbour, and Violets Are Blue, to name just three. And yes, I have drawn upon some difficult experiences I’ve had with neighbours... I’m a full-time author and I’m also an avid reader of thrillers and enjoy nothing more than reading a book with an ending that makes me gasp!
From the very first page, Someone Like You had me hooked.
This is one of those books you pick up “just to start” and before you know it, hours have disappeared because you simply can’t put it down. It’s full of interesting characters and plot twists and left me feeling on edge, with my heart racing as I turned those pages faster and faster.
I loved the setting with its super creepy vibes, which only increased exponentially when more and more scary things started happening. I really warmed to Carey and her son and was rooting for them throughout. The explanations at the end made complete sense and tied things up perfectly.
I thought this was an excellent debut novel and I look forward to reading more by Elena Frost.
Has she found the perfect haven? Or a deadly trap?
Carey Billingham thought the lighthouse at Saltwick would be a fresh start for her and her son—a peaceful escape from a dark past. But vandalism, odd holiday guests, and a figure from her nightmares signal something is terribly wrong. As her grip on reality frays, Carey must face a terrifying truth that will test her sanity.
Someone Like You – the chilling psychological thriller, perfect for fans of John Marrs, Freida McFadden, Nicola Sanders.
What readers are saying about Someone Like You:
“...genuinely a brilliant thriller, and not like any…
