When I was messed-up teenager, my self-esteem hovered somewhere way below sea level, acne was a constant threat, and I truly did not see the point of school, or my family, or, sometimes, my entire existence. Everyone has a worst time of his or her life — mine was between 16 and 19. During that time, I developed a habit of reading and writing poetry. That outlet kept me sane and helped control my angst. (OK, maybe sometimes it fueled the angst a little, too.)
Ever since then, I've returned to poems at low points, the way some people turn to an album or a trusted friend. If you think poetry is boring because your idea of it is colored by what you read in school, trust me when I say that contemporary poetry is fresh, relevant, and wise. Forget rhyming silliness or super-esoteric epics that demand background reading. Poets today are writing in a hip, accessible vernacular.
In honor of National Poetry Month, here are 12 poetry collections that will every woman should read.
1. Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, by Patricia Lockwood
If you haven't yet read "Rape Joke," Patricia Lockwood's wrenching takedown of rape culture, do so immediately. "The rape joke is that you were nineteen years old," Lockwood writes. "The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend." Feel that? The lines operate on several levels — your first impulse is to prepare for a joke, your second impulse is horror. That's what poetry can do. If you start reading Balloon Pop Outlaw Black now, you'll finish just in time to preorder Lockwood's next collection, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals.
2. Stag's Leap, by Sharon Olds
This is the one to read after a breakup so devastating you wonder if you will survive. Sharon Olds, whom I once heard read a poem called "The Pope's Penis" on a stage in front of hundreds of stuffy academics, is beloved for her willingness to share everything with her readers. In this book, she writes about the dissolution of a 30-year marriage — the weird contradictions of sex on the brink of separation, the loss of her identity, and her own stunning capacity for forgiveness. She can also be damn funny and irreverent, as evidenced by this video of her reading a poem called, "Ode to a Tampon."
3. Life on Mars, by Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith won a Pulitzer for Life on Mars, her third collection. The book is a daughter's struggle to come to terms with the loss of her father, an engineer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. It's also a thoughtful meditation on celebrity and pop culture. In "Don't You Wonder, Sometimes," Smith ponders David Bowie's celebrity, using the star as a metaphor to talk fame and what endures: "But I'll bet he burns bright, / dragging a trail of hot-white matter / the way some of us track tissue / back from the toilet stall."
4. Stop Wanting, by Lizzie Harris
Tracy K. Smith judged the contest that resulted in the publication of Lizzie Harris's first collection, and it's easy to see why she found the work so compelling. Harris writes about trauma, about growing up, about family. Her poems tackle domestic abuse and its aftermath, and offer no easy answers about how to cope with familial betrayal. The most amazing thing about this work is how, poem-by-poem, Harris puts together the pieces of her own violation — many poems hinge on surfaced memories. That she writes with such beauty, grace, and forgiveness makes this book an inspiration.
5. Geography III, by Elizabeth Bishop
Poetry forces us to discover the hidden pockets in our everyday moments, the places where real meaning and big questions lurk. It's no coincidence that we read poetry at funerals, at weddings, at baptisms — poetry is for the big stuff, even when it appears to be about the very, very small. Elizabeth Bishop is a master of the small — her poems hinge on lost keys and the striations of color in a fish scale, on the way a view changes depending on the time of day. But in each of these details, Bishop confronts what it means to be alive. My favorite poem of all time is "In a Waiting Room," a long first-person account of Bishop as a child, struggling with her own existence.
6. What the Living Do, by Marie Howe
Marie Howe transforms vivid vignettes from girlhood into high art, reminding us of the glory of being a raw-knee'd kid, goofing off in a suburban basement. The poem "Practicing" opens with the line: "I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade." The book is full of such love poems — to childhood, to the brother she lost, and to the pain of growing up and away. What the living do, Howe knows, is live.
7. Housekeeping in a Dream, by Laura Kasischke
Laura Kasischke, who also writes thrillers like the fabulous Mind of Winter, knows girls. In this collection you'll revisit all your adolescent nightmares, but in Kasischke's hands, they become revelatory. In one poem, the narrator talks candidly about fucking the entire football team. These are the poems your best friend from high school would write if she could translate her inner world into language. "Am I wrong / or has every teenage girl been / at this same carnival in the rain, in 19 / 78, with four wild friends and a fifth of peach / schnapps in her purse…"
8. The Compleat Purge, by Trisha Low
Trisha Low, born in 1988, has created the first text that successfully wrestles with cybersex and female coming-of-age in the era of Internet porn. The Compleat Purge's hallmark is a series of suicide notes created by the narrator, an alter-ego she created named Trisha Low, at various points in her girlhood. Reading it feels almost voyeuristic — like you managed to get your hands on the diary of a depressed teenager who is also an undiscovered feminist genius. From her author bio: "Trisha Low wears a shock collar because she has too many feelings." The girl gets you.
9. Lofoten, by Rebecca Dinerstein
Lofoten, Rebecca Dinerstein's debut collection, is named after a Norwegian archipelago famous for its fishing and for sunsets like this. Dinerstein writes exquisitely about falling in love with a landscape and about finding herself far, far from home. This book is the perfect accompaniment for a summer abroad or backpacking across Europe.
10. The Trees The Trees, by Heather Christle
Ever have one of those days where the world seems full of weird details? Maybe the sky seems extra ominous, or your friend keeps talking and all you can notice is one stray hair stuck to the restaurant booth behind her. This book is for brainy readers with an off-kilter sense of humor — for anyone who's ever felt like the world she's living in is a tiny bit different than everyone else's. Sometimes Christle writes like a manic child, sometimes her wisdom will stun you.
11. Ariel, by Sylvia Plath
If you think Sylvia Plath is for weepy teenage girls, you're right — but you're also completely missing the enduring brilliance of the poems collected in Ariel, which are more than shrieks of pain and meditations on despair. Every woman should read this book at least twice — first emotionally when she's 16 and again when she's a clearer-eyed 35. Plath's metaphors elevate her poetry into an almost visual art form. "Love set you going like a fat gold watch," she writes "In Morning Song," a poem about her first child. Plath, famous for her suicide and for poems like "Daddy" (in which she compares her father to Hitler), empowered women to own their darkness and their rage.
12. Bluets, by Maggie Nelson
Bluets is a series of short meditations on the color blue. From each of these studies emerge the devastating details of love affair that destroyed Nelson's world. "I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would have rather have had you by my side than any of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world." Bluets always refers back to Nelson's broken heart and is a beautiful acknowledgment of the way suffering is simultaneously universal and specific.
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