100 Books Like The Complete Poems

Leo Tolstoy’s follow-up project to the massive War and Peace explores the meaning of human existence and the interplay of socio-political events and individual free will through the medium of infatuation, marriage, and love.

It’s also a real page-turner. When she finished it, Elisabeth Elliot called it the greatest book she had ever read, writing that Anna Karenina’s character had held a mirror up to her soul and showed her what her own heart was capable of. 

Illusion. Women’s framing. Adrift in a world everyone thinks is perfect. Living the glamorous life others want. Being the thing men desire to have, to own, as long as the veneer holds. Dealing with mental illness that people explain away because all the tinsel is just dressing and sparkles, but if you lean on it, it parts, and you find yourself falling through the space.

Although ‘they’ say they care, they don’t, and no one wants to hear the truth, they only want pretend. Within the first five pages, we understand what’s going on inside her, that she has something to hide, and that she’s willing to lie about who she really is. In chapter one, we discover that her best friend, Doreen, doesn’t really know her name. We see the world through her eyes, interspaced with an actual conversation that calls the world a lie and her own framing… show more.

I was one of those women who was obsessed with Oprah’s Book Club. She started it in 1996, the same year I started my sophomore year of college. I can’t say that I read every book assigned to me in my classes, but I damn sure as hell read every book Oprah recommended.

White Oleander was picked in May 1999, just a few months before my wedding. I did zero wedding planning the week I read that book. I ignored my soon-to-be husband and called my sisters to demand that they read the book. The story, which follows Astrid (why did my parents name me such a terrible ugly name like Courtney when Astrid was right there?) as she navigates foster care following her mother’s conviction for murder, is compelling. However, I fell in love with the prose and the way Finch describes the people and places in the novel.… show more.

Many of us writers are subject to the terrible cliché of substance abuse, none so much as Charles Bukowski. Having dabbled in the debauched myself, Ham on Rye sadly reflects what life could be like if the idiocy of adolescence continues into adulthood. This book is hilarious, vulgar, shocking, and oddly insightful. Not only is this my favourite Bukowski book, but it’s the book that introduced me to his work and changed my writing forever.

I recently discovered Kim Addonizio and wanted to include her to share with you a modern poet I am recently obsessed with. I am also reading her book of memoirs at the moment and I am loving her raw style. I was going to put Bukowski in my five picks but I wanted to make it about women. Hench here is a modern poet who comes close to that raw and in-your-face poetry. Confessional poetry, like Plath and Sexton’s, has been my favorite genre, but Addonizio gives it a raw twist with a shot of vodka. I love how Addonizio’s poems slap you in the face with truth. Her poems teach me how to be comfortable sharing my own stories with strangers. Her poems teach me it’s okay to lie about it too. A place where reality and fantasy merge. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to… show more.

I’ve been fascinated by poetry ever since I picked up this book for seven dollars at the second-hand bookstore near my university at the age of nineteen. Anne Sexton’s Selected Poems taught me how to write confessional poetry. They taught me how to write narrative poetry. They taught me to not be afraid to speak my truth, no matter how ugly.

I love how Anne Sexton writes about marriage, affairs, love, loss, family, and relationships with depth into herself and her psyche. Her poems in this collection encompass all her most remarkable work from her array of poetry books. Here you have all the classic poems as well as some obscure ones. Her famous, "Black Art" and the classic lines, "A woman who writes feels too much." As well, "For My Lover, Returning to His Wife," and the last two lines, "As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash… show more.

Marie’s poems are separated into three sections: childhood (which included an alcoholic and abusive father), the illness and death of her brother Johnny from AIDS, and life beyond his death, including her relationship with James Shannon, a tree surgeon and a fisherman. They were like lifelines to me after Jeffrey died.

I memorized the title poem and said it repeatedly in my head like a litany. These poems are clearly spoken; life boiled down to a stock with the healing power of fresh air and cool water. No other book of poems has ever helped me so much through a catastrophic time, and I ended up setting many of these poems to music.

Lowell began this memoir in a mental hospital. He was told it may help him recover from a manic-depressive condition. But he never finished it. He sold the manuscript to Harvard University and there it mouldered away for forty years until editors Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc resurrected it. Lowell had never meant it to be published. Yet, in this manuscript we discover the bones of his famous poetic work Life Studies, which virtually turned him into one of the greatest of Confessional poets. The manuscript that fell between the cracks demonstrates what a great prose writer Lowell was, and how the language of his poetry was already embedded in these prose descriptions. 

Hand’s sentences are always beautiful, and this novel, her first, is dense with new ideas and original imagery. She evokes a bizarre future in a post-apocalyptic city where twins go on a hallucinogenic quest. Reads like a somewhat disturbing mythology. Gods and talking animals, autistic prophets, feral children, and death is personified. Unforgettable.

For me, the power of both history and anthropology as disciplines of knowledge is their shared capacity for taking a thing you thought you knew and showing you that you didn’t actually know anything about it at all—in fact, you didn’t even know what questions to ask about it. I would be seriously remiss in a list like this if I did not mention the book that first fascinated me, as a historian, with the anthropologist’s way of posing questions. In this towering classic of British social anthropology, Professor Douglas forces us completely to rethink something we actually never think about at all: dirt. But trust me, once you pose the question, “what is dirt?” you can never think about filth (and its structural counterpart, purity) in the same way again.