Here are 78 books that The Orchard fans have personally recommended if you like
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Ever since I can remember, during difficult periods, or just when I needed inspiration, I have turned to poetry. Eventually, I became so in love with poetry that I became a poet. I believe these five books of poetry will offer even a reader who is generally not drawn to poetry solace and strength and inspiration. I would go so far as to say each of these poetry collections has changed me for the better.
With pyrotechnical poetic skills, Danez Smith brought me into powerful ways of rethinking race, gender, sexuality, masculinity, and femininity. He brings the urban to the level of the pastoral.
You will thank this gifted poet for changing your world.
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection
“[Smith's] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy.”―The New Yorker
Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality―the dangers…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Ever since I can remember, during difficult periods, or just when I needed inspiration, I have turned to poetry. Eventually, I became so in love with poetry that I became a poet. I believe these five books of poetry will offer even a reader who is generally not drawn to poetry solace and strength and inspiration. I would go so far as to say each of these poetry collections has changed me for the better.
I first heard some of the poems from this book at a reading given by Joy Harjo. The deep and varied rhythms combined with the spiritual world she finds in the everyday captivated me.
I felt an almost desperate need to read the whole book. I bought it, immersed myself in it, and have come back to its wisdom time and time again. You will feel these poems deep in your bones.
First published in 1983 and now considered a classic, She Had Some Horses is a powerful exploration of womanhood's most intimate moments. Joy Harjo's poems speak of women's despair, of their imprisonment and ruin at the hands of men and society, but also of their awakenings, power, and love.
Ever since I can remember, during difficult periods, or just when I needed inspiration, I have turned to poetry. Eventually, I became so in love with poetry that I became a poet. I believe these five books of poetry will offer even a reader who is generally not drawn to poetry solace and strength and inspiration. I would go so far as to say each of these poetry collections has changed me for the better.
Never before have I read a book of poetry that turns the ordinary moments of marriage and raising a child into the metaphysical.
You will relish everything about these poems: the language, the nearly preternatural power of observation Mathys displays, and most of all, the humanity of his voice.
Lustrous, tender, and expansive, Gold Cure moves from boomtown gold mines and the mythical city of El Dorado to the fracking wells of the American interior, excavating buried histories, legacies of conquest, and the pursuit of shimmering ideals. Ted Mathys skewers police brutality on the ribs of a nursery rhyme and drives Petrarchan sonnets into shale fields deep under the prairies. In crystalline language rich with allegory and wordplay, Mathys has crafted a moving elegy for the Anthropocene.
Mia Lark is running out of options. There is only one way to change the score: the fantasy planet Revivium.
Armed with the powerful magic in the helm and the friendly AI, Hex that goes with it, Mia throws caution out the window. It’s time to find the main guildhall…
Ever since I can remember, during difficult periods, or just when I needed inspiration, I have turned to poetry. Eventually, I became so in love with poetry that I became a poet. I believe these five books of poetry will offer even a reader who is generally not drawn to poetry solace and strength and inspiration. I would go so far as to say each of these poetry collections has changed me for the better.
I love how Jericho Brown takes traditional poetic forms, alters them, and blends them into his completely modern voice.
These poems sing of degradation and exaltation, hate and love. They bring the music of a Black, queer man to all of us in unforgettable lines and stanzas.
The Tradition by Jericho Brown, is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while revelling in a celebration of contradiction.
A Poetry Book Society Choice
'To read Jericho Brown's poems is to encounter devastating genius.' Claudia Rankine
Jericho Brown's daring poetry collection The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does…
I was fortunate enough to receive a fellowship to study in Washington, DC, at the Library of Congress. I wrote a paper on cities and urban spaces that I later published. But this period of study coincided with the creation of early sections of Drifter, and the work in this collection draws from the books I’ve listed as energy sources, inspiration, and confirmation. I love anything that tries to open the mind to the limited ways we see and feel. That’s what I’m after on this journey, and these books are worthy companions and teachers.
“The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house,” Forche writes in her famous poem from this collection, “The Colonel.” I knew there was a connection between what I saw in Forche’s poetry and what I was after as I was cooking up my aesthetic with a good dose of Debord and Baudelaire and others.
I love that these are little dream movies, narrative flashes that spike up in your mind and then drift away like something you caught a glimpse of on that river moving quickly out of sight. And like Debord, there’s a little of the political, a little psychological, and more mystery to keep me coming back.
Carolyn Forche's The Country Between Us bears witness to what she saw in El Salvador in the late 1970s, when she travelled around a country erupting into civil war. Documenting killings and other brutal human rights abuses, while working alongside Archbishop Oscar Romero's church group, she found in her poetry the only possible way to come to terms with what she was experiencing first-hand.
By 1980, when the fighting was becoming too dangerous, Archbishop Romero urged Forche to return home, asking her to 'talk to the American people, tell them what is happening to us. Convince them to stop the…
I started writing poetry when I was eight or nine, inspired by the way song lyrics stirred my soul. The poetry of songs like Bowie’s Space Oddity or Dylan’s Johanna made me want to write. I read Allen Ginsburg’s Howl as a young man and found a new language, rhythm, and way of seeing the beauty and sadness of the world. Over the years, I’ve written many songs and more than many poems. My first collection, OWL, is out now. Poetry feeds my heart and soul and entices my senses. I love the books on this list and hope you enjoy them as much as I do!
The poems in this book are intimate conversations between the living, the dead, and the soul. I love these poems because they are at once piercingly direct and also delicate and loving. As my parents enter the final years of their lives, I find myself both celebrating my time left with them and also pre-grieving their loss.
Clifton courses this transom, above and below the ground, with a surety of craft that I can only aspire to in my own work. This collection includes a daily poem journal covering the seven days starting with 9/11. I am struck by this sequence of poems in their ability to cover the nation’s fear and grief, the commonality of the global experience, and the minutely personal, all in a few short lines.
Lucille Clifton's poetry carries her deep concerns for the world's children, the stratification of American society, those people lost or forgotten amid the crushing race of Western materialism and technology. In turns sad, troubled and angry, her voice has always been one of great empathy, knowing, as she says, "the only mercy is memory." In this, her 12th book of poetry, the National Book Award-winner speaks to the tenuous relationship between mothers and daughters, the debilitating power of cancer, the open wound of racial prejudice, the redemptive gift of story-telling. "September Song," a sequence of seven poems, featured on National…
Winner of the 2024 New Mexico - Arizona Book Award.
In this deeply researched novel of America's most celebrated outlaw, Mark Warren sheds light on the human side of Billy the Kid and reveals the intimate stories of the lesser-known players in his legendary life of crime. Warren's fictional composer…
As a poet and a novelist, I'm fascinated by the places where these two genres meet, undo each other, and create something new again. That sounds a lot like what love can do, and whenever I read a long poem that achieves a unique aesthetic unity, I feel the writer has found a new way to love the world, to love the reader. And, as usual, both the world and the reader are challenged by that love—to grow.
When I worked at the Academy of American Poets many years ago, I found a record of Stanford’s submission to the Walt Whitman Award. The Editors told him his submission could not be accepted because it exceeded the page limit—by about 500 pages.
The poem he submitted was The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, and if you’re interested in archetypal imagery that will shatter your heart and put it back together again differently, entirely differently, this wild ride is for you.
Poetry. Frank Stanford was called by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Alan Dugan a brilliant poet, ample in his work, like Whitman. He was the founder of Lost Roads Publishers and the author of a number of important works, among them the epic THE BATTLEFIELD WHERE THE MOON SAYS I LOVE YOU, reprinted by Lost Roads under the editorship of Forrest Gander and C.D. Wright. Frank Stanford said his purpose in his writing and with his press was to 'reclaim the landscape of American poetry' - The Arkansas Times. Stanford ended his own life in 1978 when he was 29. The reprinting…
I can’t guess how many great poems I have committed to memory. In waiting rooms, or in the checkout line, I recite them to myself. In this way, poetry helps me not only understand the world we live in, but live in it without going crazy. And while I love all poetry, I’ve always found that poetry in traditional forms—with meter and rhyme—is easier to remember. That’s one reason why I’ve always been drawn to formal verse. In my own poetry, I strive to uphold that tradition, while inventing new forms that spring organically from the subject at hand. I trust these books will demonstrate I’m not alone.
I love the music in these poems! I love the wry wit and unexpected turn of phrase—which may well be Salter’s hallmark. The title is, of course, a vivid example of her playful phrasing.
Salter is a deft formalist, and I am impressed by her effortless handling of some very demanding forms: villanelles, quatrains, sonnets, blank verse, haiku, and ghazals, not to mention various invented rhyme schemes. She is also a master of the slant rhyme, which, for a poet, is akin to the blue note in jazz.
As a parent, I am particularly moved by the poems about her daughters, which are tragically poignant and all too familiar. Salter is a devotee of James Merrill—one of my central poetic influences—and I think she has carried on his tradition more than any other poet I can name.
Mary Jo Salter’s sparkling new collection, Open Shutters, leads us into a world where things are often not what they seem. In the first poem, “Trompe l’Oeil,” the shadow-casting shutters on Genoese houses are made of paint only, an “open lie.” And yet “Who needs to be correct / more often than once a day? / Who needs real shadow more than play?”
Open Shutters also calls to mind the lens of a camera—in the villanelle “School Pictures” or in the stirring sequence “In the Guesthouse,” which, inspired by photographs of a family across three generations, offers at once a…
I have spent my life both in the classroom (as a university professor) and out of it as a passionate, committed reader, for whom books are as necessary as food and drink. My interest in poetry dates back to junior high school, when I was learning foreign languages (first French and Latin, and then, later, Italian, German, and ancient Greek) and realized that language is humankind’s most astonishing invention. I’ve been at it ever since. It used to be thought that a writer’s life was of little consequence to an understanding of his or her work. We now think otherwise. Thank goodness.
James Merrill (1926-1995) was a son of Charles Merrill, the man famous for bringing Wall Street to Main Street (Merrill Lynch. et al.).
He grew up in luxury—Manhattan, Long Island, Palm Beach— went to Amherst college, and was a poet born and bred.
A gay man at a time when it was still dangerous to be out, he wrote many superb, deeply moving lyric poems of “love and loss,” and an entire epic poem based on seances around a ouija board, which is still turning heads and bewildering readers.
Merrill’s own life and loves were as rich and varied as anything he produced in his work. Hammer spent 12 years on this book, and it is both long and utterly gripping.
Langdon Hammer has given us the first biography of the poet James Merrill (1926–95), whose life is surely one of the most fascinating in American literature. Merrill was born to high privilege and high expectations as the son of Charles Merrill, the charismatic cofounder of the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch, and Hellen Ingram, a muse, ally, and antagonist throughout her son’s life. Wounded by his parents’ bitter divorce, he was the child of a broken home, looking for repair in poetry and love. This is the story of a young man escaping, yet also reenacting, the energies and obsessions of…
Ramon Ramirez’s Dog is a collection of essays written over the years about the adventures and misadventures, mostly outside but occasionally inside the diplomatic career of a U.S. ambassador. Common threads weaving the stories together are a desire for a life well-lived, balancing career with family and friends, keeping physically…
I’ve been fascinated by musicians almost my entire life, but I always wanted more than the slick on-screen video, profile on the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, or interview. I wanted to know the whys and hows: why they wrote a certain way, what made them want to be a musician first, and where the inspiration and determination came from. What are they like when they’re hanging out at home, not in the spotlight? This research led me to the music and musicians of Laurel Canyon in particular and how one small area of Los Angeles has managed to create music still influential today.
This woman is a Hollywood icon, and her stories put you smack-dab in the center of every party, every hangout, and every living room, being seen and making the scene. She places you in the center of her head as she tells you her life story and who the players are.
We are center stage, hanging out at the Troubadour bar, a trendy lunch place, and she sets her lap on fire by mistake… all with wit and amazing insight into the time and iconic places surrounding her. I loved seeing these places through her experience and felt like I was in her world.
Previously uncollected nonfiction pieces by Hollywood's ultimate It Girl about everything from fashion to tango to Jim Morrison and Nicholas Cage.
With Eve’s Hollywood Eve Babitz lit up the scene in 1974. The books that followed, among them Slow Days, Fast Company and Sex and Rage, have seduced generations of readers with their unfailing wit and impossible glamour. What is less well known is that Babitz was a working journalist for the better part of three decades, writing for the likes of Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Esquire, as well as for off-the-beaten-path periodicals like Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing…
