Thankful Thursday: Split This Rock Holiday Book List

Split This Rock Poetry Festival is a poetry celebration I hope to be at in 2012. For right now, I am happy to be included in the Split This Rock HolidayGift List: Books, 2010. The list includes single author collections as well as anthologies. Here are a few of my favorite ones. It feels good to be included on this list. A list I will be using to do some gift giving of my own. Thank you!

Terrance Hayes | Lighthead
| Penguin, 112 pp. $18.00 |

The 2010 National Book Award winner for poetry takes a fearless look at our urgings, hopes and fears. Hayes’ language always surprises the reader with its layers and beauty. Like the blues, this collection names pain and moves through it. Any reader who loves language will delight in this award-winning collection of poems.

Melissa Kwasny & M.L Smoker, Editors| I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights || Lost Horse Press, 168 pp. $18.00 |

Poems of witness against crimes of genocide, torture, war, rape, hate crimes, and more. These poems bring dignity and humanity to the wounded, language to our deepest silences, voice to unspeakable crimes, with poems by such poets as Marvin Bell, Tamiko Beyer, Martha Collins, Lois Red Elk, Christopher Howell, Scott Hightower, Christi Kramer, Phillip Metres, Farnoosh Moshiri, Susan Rich, and others. A poignant and necessary book. For a full review, please click here.

Myra Sklarew | Harmless
|Mayapple Press, 92 pp., $15.95|

Harmless will capture you from the first poem. Its delicate poems, often using Jewish Biblical characters and themes, explore memory, family, parenting, and conflict. The poems build an architecture of tenderness we could all live in.

Susan Rich | The Alchemist’s Kitchen
|White Pine Press, 105 pp., $16.00|

The poems here weave the personal and the political; they tell stories and lament. A strong middle section resurrects the early female photographer and painter of the American Northwest, Myra Albert Wiggins, with scenes from her life and work. Rich is in love with the music of poetry and many of the poems are in form, lilting through even the most difficult of subjects.