Here are 100 books that Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth fans have personally recommended if you like
Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth.
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As a writer and best-selling poet who addresses themes of mental health, addiction, grief, and hope, I have a deep understanding of the struggles that many face and what they are looking for when they are trying to heal, feel less alone, or come to terms with something. They are looking for honest, authentic writing from people who have made it out alive, free of platitudes and chronic optimism. For over 10 years, I have used my own writing to create connections and open conversations around sensitive topics, so of course, I would recommend other writers who do the same.
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.
"Brianna Pastor is by far one of my favorite new writers. If you want to feel seen and deeply moved, read Good Grief. Let the power of her writing guide you to a better life."-Yung Pueblo, #1 New York Times bestselling author
An expanded edition with over forty brand-new poems of the bestselling poetry collection Good Grief by Brianna Pastor
When Brianna Pastor released her self-published poetry collection, Good Grief, she was blown away by the outpouring of support from people who reached out and said, "Yes. Me too." For anyone who has struggled with questions of identity or coped…
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…
As a writer and best-selling poet who addresses themes of mental health, addiction, grief, and hope, I have a deep understanding of the struggles that many face and what they are looking for when they are trying to heal, feel less alone, or come to terms with something. They are looking for honest, authentic writing from people who have made it out alive, free of platitudes and chronic optimism. For over 10 years, I have used my own writing to create connections and open conversations around sensitive topics, so of course, I would recommend other writers who do the same.
When I read this, I felt like I was being trusted with something delicate and personal. At times, it felt like I overhear something I shouldn't—but not in a bad way! Let me explain. Cofer’s poetry is what I prefer to read as it focuses on trauma, suicide, depression, and the often-unseen roads of relapse and recovery.
I appreciated how she also examined topics like racism, body dysmorphia, and self-harm. I walked away from this poetry book, having learned more about the human experience. Cofer's writing reminded me of the strength it takes just to survive another day, something too many of us take for granted.
"I have never been anything but a paper girl. Something to tear into pieces. Something to burn."
We've all been paper before. We've all been fragile. Leaflike and gently blowing, enough to create stories or build fires. We go through life like that. We come across things that tear us into pieces, and we keep going. We keep fighting, because we must. We look for ways to be whole. To be the person we dream ourselves to be.
Fragile by nature but tough by circumstance, paper girls are shaped by their love and loss. This collection of poetry and prose…
As a writer and best-selling poet who addresses themes of mental health, addiction, grief, and hope, I have a deep understanding of the struggles that many face and what they are looking for when they are trying to heal, feel less alone, or come to terms with something. They are looking for honest, authentic writing from people who have made it out alive, free of platitudes and chronic optimism. For over 10 years, I have used my own writing to create connections and open conversations around sensitive topics, so of course, I would recommend other writers who do the same.
This book made me reflect deeply on how my connection with my own parents has changed as I’ve gotten older. I highlighted so many lines, especially ones centered on the complicated evolution of a parent-child relationship and the pain, love, and resentment that can coexist in these relationships.
Brik might be one of my favorite modern poets at this point. I even recommended this book to my therapist.
"My Father's Eyes, My Mother's Rage" is the raw and emotionally charged debut poetry collection by Rose Brik. Rose delves into the intricate layers of the human experience with profound insight. Through her poetry she fearlessly navigates themes of the mother and father wound, childhood trauma, domestic violence, grief, mental health struggles, love, motherhood and ultimately, the process of healing. Her words possess the power to unearth buried emotions and memories, evoking a deep sense of empathy and reflection in her readers.
"I have my mother's rage, and my father's ability to walk away. this, I've learned, is a very…
Separating the true stories from the myths, The Duty of Memory provides a deeper understanding of the diverse motivations that drove ordinary people to join an underground network of French Resistants despite terrible odds and horrifying consequences.
This book takes the reader inside the true story of men and women…
As a writer and best-selling poet who addresses themes of mental health, addiction, grief, and hope, I have a deep understanding of the struggles that many face and what they are looking for when they are trying to heal, feel less alone, or come to terms with something. They are looking for honest, authentic writing from people who have made it out alive, free of platitudes and chronic optimism. For over 10 years, I have used my own writing to create connections and open conversations around sensitive topics, so of course, I would recommend other writers who do the same.
Anytime anyone asks me to recommend a modern poet to them, J.R. Rogue enters the chat. With this book, she’s compiled some of her best work into one collection, so everything I love about her is now under one cover. I often describe her as a modern-day Sylvia Plath; she’s one of the few modern poets I’ve read who is able to weave traditional poetic devices and language into the struggles and mediums of today.
This makes her writing feel timeless to me but also jarringly current. I’ve recommended this book countless times to friends dangling from their last thread, looking for poetry that addresses mental health issues but still feels like the poetry of yesterday.
For the first time, five of J.R. Rogue's poetry chapbooks, including Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist La Douleur Exquise, can be purchased in one volume. Coming in at over 300 pages, this collection contains poetry written between 2014 and 2016. Included works: La Douleur Exquise An Open Suitcase & New Blue Tears Rouge Le Chant Des Sirènes Apus
How might we live and write otherwise? I am preoccupied by this question, and am fairly certain that at minimum we have to start by imagining it. As a culture worker and writer I hope my projects and experiments do just this. There is so much to reinvent, and so much that interconnects us. I am inspired by the ways the authors of these books take on their times and passions, and tell stories in ways I find unexpected. Their abilities to integrate divergent avenues of thought, deep research, and truly weird characters and circumstances has lit my imagination and I hope it does yours as well!
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.
On a lonely wharf a clerk in an ink-blue coat inspects bales and bales of paper that hold a poet’s accumulated left-hand pages—the unwritten, the withheld, the unexpressed, the withdrawn, the restrained, the word-shard. In The Blue Clerk renowned poet Dionne Brand stages a conversation and an argument between the poet and the Blue Clerk, who is the keeper of the poet’s pages. In their dialogues—which take shape as a series of haunting prose poems—the poet and the clerk invoke a host of writers, philosophers, and artists, from Jacob Lawrence, Lola Kiepja, and Walter Benjamin to John Coltrane, Josephine Turalba,…
I’ve been writing poems since an inspirational period of study in Stirling in my twenties, when I did a lot of hill walking in the Scottish Highlands. For me, poetry that doesn’t move you, that doesn’t make you feel, is just words on a page. I love poems that make you shiver as they incongruously bear the full load of life’s mystery. I like all kinds of poetry but have a special place reserved for nature poems, poems that find the heart and soul in the landscape, rivers, and wildlife.
Alice Oswald is one of our best living poets, renowned for her nature poetry and particularly her long poem about the River Dart in Somerset. I love this first collection, full of heart-stopping attention to detail and transcendental shiver. She follows very much in the tradition of our great poets writing about nature. Try the poem "Mountains" for a Wordsworthian sense of a hidden, almost pantheistic presence in the world.
This is Alice Oswald's first book of poems. More confident and achieved than many first collections, it shows her writing in an already distinct voice. The poems are intensely musical: she recites them from memory. Influenced by the rhythms of Hopkins, they speak passionately of nature and love. They have a religious sense of mystery, and try to express the intangible in marvellously vivid language. A long poem, `The Wise Men of Gotham', which makes up the second part of the book, is, by contrast, a version of the folk-legend about the three men who went to sea in a…
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
I have published 18 books of poetry, most recently the one I have listed here, as well as a collection of literary essays, Fables of Representation. My emphasis has always been on the more progressive and risk-taking kinds of expression, as seen with the Beat poets, Ginsberg and Corso, and the New York School poets, Ashbery and O'Hara. Seeing a lack of that perspective on bookshelves, I edited two editions of a major anthology, Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, and 42 issues of the literary magazine, New American Writing. I have been reading, more recently, a lot of great writing by women, especially those writing at length, with the volume up.
The book contains 70 sonnets, all with the same title as the book. Quick-witted, ironic, and politically dedicated to good cause, Hayes speaks from his own experience as an African-American: “Probably twilight makes blackness dangerous/Darkness. Probably all my encounters/Are existential Jambalaya.”
Winner of the National Book Award for his earlier work, Lighthead, he is a poet to watch for his moral sense and mastery of poetic form. The book was written in the first two hundred days of the first Trump presidency.
Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry
One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2018
A powerful, timely, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of America's most acclaimed poets, Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award-winning author of Lighthead
"Sonnets that reckon with Donald Trump's America." -The New York Times
In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the…
Ever since I was a child and my father first pointed me to a few of his favorite poets (Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley), I have been passionate about poetry, particularly poems that speak plainly of the world in a very relatable way. I’ve found that I can learn something about myself and my humanity by reading my favorite poets who often teach me something new about the world. They are my guides and companions.
I love how crystalline and to the absolute point these poems are. “Where do I begin/being a minimalist?” the poet writes. These poems make me see the world in a fresh but very relatable way. “What would I/think, coming/up after/my world/had evaporated?/I’d wish/I were water."
So much said, so few words. The longing is implicit. This book is home to breathtaking lyricism–as well as narrative poems of mystery, loss, and wonder. It is a book I keep coming back to.
About Andrea Cohen’s poems, Christian Wiman has said: “One is caught off guard by their cumulative force. This is work of great and sustained attention, true intelligence, and soul.” In The Sorrow Apartments, Cohen’s eighth collection, those signature gifts are front and center, along with sly humor, relentless economy, and the hairpin curves of gut-punch wisdom. How quickly Cohen takes us so far:
Bunker
What would I think, coming
up after my world
had evaporated? I'd wish
I were water.
The Sorrow Apartments is home to spare and uncanny lyricism––as well as leaping narratives…
I'm a writer and a late-life fine arts photographer. For eight years I had been writing a book set in the personal and historical past. I would sit at the computer, shut my eyes, and say to myself, “Go deeper.” Eventually, I was able to recall long-forgotten details. When I looked up from those years of writing, the memoir, entitled Phantom Limb, was finished and being published. However, I discovered that I could no longer see – really see – what was around me. Along the way, I had lost that alert attention to the way light falls, to colors that used to hit me between the eyes. I felt the loss deeply. I’ve always loved to look. I had to do something to summon it back.
In order to retrieve my sense of seeing in the present, I went to my second home in Mexico, read a little each morning, and then went walking without any destination. This is the book I was reading those mornings in Mexico, before my walks. It may seem odd to start with a book about poetry, but this one opened the gate to seeing and to taking my first photograph.
A Gate Enables passage between what is inside and what is outside, and the connection poetry forges between inner and outer lives is the fundamental theme of these nine essays.
Nine Gates begins with a close examination of the roots of poetic craft in "the mind of concentration" and concludes by exploring the writer's role in creating a sense of community that is open, inclusive and able to bind the individual and the whole in a way that allows each full self-expression. in between, Nine Gates illumines the nature of originality, translation, the various strategies by which meaning unfolds itself…
Pioneer Paddles of the Colonial South
by
William D. Auman,
Award-winning novelist William Auman, author of If Trees Could Testify..., takes the reader on a time-traveling odyssey featuring 345 bodies of water in six states within the historical context through which they unfold.
Journey into remaining Colonial-era wilderness with stories of pirate treasure, epic frontiersmen, Indigenous Peoples, and Revolutionary…
I’ve been in the DEI trenches for over 20 years, and let me tell you, it's been one hell of a ride. As a Black woman navigating this shit show, I've seen it all—from clueless executives to well-meaning “allies” who can't get out of their own way. My passion? Calling out the bullshit and actually making DEI work. I've gone toe-to-toe with tech giants, founded Inclusology, and now I'm tackling a second PhD because I believe in the work, even at is most discouraging. DEI-ing is my no-holds-barred guide to creating real change. I’m all about busting AI bias and building DEI that sticks, not just some feel-good fluff.
I love this book because it teaches that real healing starts from within. This book doesn’t sugarcoat the work required to find your truest self; it’s about diving deep, stripping away the nonsense, and facing yourself head-on.
If you want real change, you’ve got to go inward, confront who you are, and do the work to heal. This book doesn’t just talk about it—it shows you how to get there.
"i closed my eyes to look inward and found a universe waiting to be explored"
From poet, meditator, and speaker Yung Pueblo, comes a collection of poetry and prose that explores the movement from self-love to unconditional love, the power of letting go, and the wisdom that comes when we truly try to know ourselves. It serves as a reminder to the reader that healing, transformation, and freedom are possible.
