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National Poetry Month 2020
By White Whale Bookstore
By White Whale Bookstore
All April 2020, we featured local poets and their reading recommendations on our Instagram in the stories and highlights! All their reading recommendations are collected here. Many are available on Bookshop, but for those that aren't, we'll be linking you to the independent presses where you can get the books.
Follow us on Instagram. , @whitewhalebks, for more information about this year's #NationalPoetryMonth fun and to swipe along!
The Depression
Jon Pack and Mathias Svalina
$15.95 $14.674/29, recommended by Kelly Lorraine Andrews: A book of poems by Mathias Svalina and photographs by Jon Pack, "The Depression" is a wild ride inside Svalina's imagination while Pack's photographs ground you back to reality. The poems manage to be both surreal and totally relatable, which is on brand for Svalina. In one, a killer kills all of the speaker's family and friends and then moves on to the speaker's favorite actor, then a band he used to like. The poem ends "I was stunned. I was appalled. Then a pop-up ad covered the screen. I clicked the red X to close the ad."
I Can't Talk about the Trees Without the Blood
Tiana Clark
$17.00 $15.644/28, recommended by Shannon Sankey
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities
Chen Chen
$16.00 $14.724/28, recommended by Shannon Sankey
The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All
C. D. Wright
$18.00 $16.564/28, recommended by Shannon Sankey
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
Sappho
$18.00 $16.564/27, chosen by Jessica Lanay: Carson’s lyric translation of Sappho’s fragments reminds me that poetry, even when atomized (by fire for instance), can still affect slivers of emotional and psychological intention. Through careful attention to Sappho’s scriptual DNA, I realize that those writerly ticks create a gravity in poems that communicate something when complete and torn apart.
Helium
Rudy Francisco
$16.00 $14.724/24, chosen by Cameron Barnett: This book is a one stop shop for anyone looking for a balance between poems that don’t take themselves too seriously, and seriously quality poetry. Francisco’s work is personal, confessional, and intimate. He endears the reader through his well-honed self-deprecating humor, as well as heavy hitting issues, such as in the poem “Complainers.” A real must-have book.
Instructions for Temporary Survival
Monica Prince
$19.954/24, chosen by Cameron Barnett: This book is a bold and vivacious collection. It never hesitates. It never waivers. Prince’s poems move with the precision of performance and hit with the weight of personal narrative. “Inheritance” is a bombshell poem that will have you holding your breath as you go back to re-read it again and again. Definitely pick up this collection! --- And order her choreopoem from [PANK] here: https://pankmagazine.com/shop/how-to-exterminate-the-black-woman/
The Drowning Boy's Guide to Water
Cameron Barnett
$17.954/2, chosen by Monica Prince (and Cameron is the featured poet of 4/24): On love, legacy, and latitude—this collection both scared and buoyed me. I finished it in one sitting, lying next to my beloved, and realized with strong certainty that if poetry like this exists in the world, then love and survival cannot be mutually exclusive.
Wednesday Vol. 1 No. 3: The Body and the Blood
$10.00 $9.20
Order Chiwan Choi's books here on Bookshop!
