Books like Resistance — picked by fans

I love this anthology for its activism, all too necessary now! Poets, both settler and Indigenous, pay tribute to trees through reflections on the past, connections to the present, and calls for the protection of our future. In Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees, celebrated poets and activists pay homage to the ghosts of lost forests and issue a rallying cry to protect remaining ancient giants and restore uncolonized spaces. Themes of connection, ecology, grief, and protection are explored through poems about trees and forests written by an impressive number of influential poets.

Trees are being cleared at a faster rate than any time in history! How can we possibly reverse this? How can poetry raise awareness of the value of our forests, worth more standing? This anthology, in its breadth and scope, offers readers hope, and prompts us to action on behalf of our trees. The anthology features an important introduction by Diana Beresford-Kroeger, author of The Global Forest and renowned expert on trees.

This anthology continues my theme of activism through poetry to raise awareness about our threatened environment. With over 100 poems and contributions from poets all over the country, Heartwood is a tribute to and celebration of the timeless impact of nature on Canadian poetry. “We must turn to the poets to expand dreams. This is because trees are the parents to the child deep within us. Forests bear silent witness to the tides of time upon which we… show more.

Voicing Suicide is a collection of poems about suicide and its impact on lives. When my stepdaughter killed herself, I desperately needed an anthology like this. Decades later, the poems here still resonate and console me. The book arises out of a conviction that poetry offers an opportunity to understand some of the difficult aspects of suicide by allowing us to give it voice; through memory, and elegy, through an honest declaration of the draw of death. In poetry, we can enter the spaces suicide shapes around loss and sorrow and give it voice. Poems can speak to the loss of a loved one, to considering suicide, to struggling to make sense of suicide and poems can offer the words of those who have suicided. Although intense and sometimes painful, the book is honest, in moments delicate and tender. It offers an important exploration of suicide by writers who have… show more.

This anthology attempts to answer ongoing questions about struggle in poems that engaged, challenged, and comforted me. What might survival sound or look like to us in our daily lives? Is it loud, refusing silence, demanding action? Or quiet, interior? What does surviving feel like in the body, this long into the pandemic? What techniques have helped us exist, continue to bear witness, learn to live with illness, grief, and pain? Is survival the continual interrogation of inequity and oppressive structures? What happens when we get tired of fighting?

Survival may very well be a composite of things; both a tending to one’s inner life and to the processing of life events, as well as the will to act, retrieve momentum. It is also a plurality/multiplicity of practices that serve to keep us well—as persons and with respect to our communities, the ongoing project of social justice/civil rights, which involves… show more.

I love this dazzlingly original collection, which evokes a childhood in rural Cumbria. Jackself is the title character, but there are plenty of other Jacks in the poems, too – Jacks from nursery rhymes and folklore and English legend.

Jackself is a mostly solitary boy, and the poems take us into the strange, funny, frightening world of a child who lives on the edge of nature, sometimes seeming to become a feral creature himself. I was struck by the startlingly wild and fearless imagery of the poems, which make the natural world a darkly compelling place. 

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.

I’d grown frustrated with the way some modern poets romanticize mental health issues, often glossing over the real impacts of trauma to lean into some weird chronic optimism. When I read it, I felt like I had finally found something that explored highly triggering trauma in a very realistic way.

Pastor doesn’t shy away from the messy parts of change and self-discovery, and I find Pastor’s voice to be refreshingly authentic. I loved how the poems felt like entries in a journal: raw, real, and familiar. Pastor is an openly queer poet, and I recommended it immediately to friends who I knew were searching for a voice like Pastor's.

I was in second grade when I first read this Robert Frost poem in our classroom textbook. There was one magnificent illustration of a horse in a dark, snowy forest, with big snowflakes falling that captured my imagination. I was entranced by the language and images and remember memorizing the poem to recite. In 1978 Susan Jeffers illustrated the poem as a picture book, with evocative gray and white drawings. A later edition added some color. In this case, the beauty of the text is such that no illustrations are needed, but it is lovely to see the snowy village, the narrator stopping to make a snow angel, and the snow-laden tree branches. A great introduction to the poems of Robert Frost, who called this poem “my best bid for remembrance.” (Just FYI, you can listen to a recording of Robert Frost reading this poem on YouTube.) 

I love this book. Dionne Brand conveys what it means to write through a crystalline web of ideas, poetry, and philosophy. Her profound, evocative, and real tale of imagined conversations between a poet and the clerk charged with dealing with their output is simultaneously familiar and fantastical. I got lost in the beauty of language only to be jolted into the realities of the world as it exists in all its beauty and awfulness. 

I love this book because it’s a beautiful and honest reckoning with what it means to serve, particularly as an enlisted American soldier in Vietnam. Weigl focuses on combat, homecoming, the horror faced by civilians, and he does it with a subtle plainspoken language that draws in every reader.

The images are remarkably stark and fresh; each poem also carries an undercurrent of sonic attention, a musicality that limns the harsher moments of the book—hence, that “Song” of Napalm.