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!
I Can't Talk about the Trees Without the Blood
Tiana Clark
$18.00 $16.744/28, recommended by Shannon Sankey
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities
Chen Chen
$16.00 $14.884/28, 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 $16.744/28, recommended by Shannon Sankey
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
Sappho
$19.00 $17.674/27, 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 $14.884/24, 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.
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 $9.30
Order Chiwan Choi's books here on Bookshop!
Sarah Kane: Complete Plays: Blasted; Phaedra's Love; Cleansed; Crave; 4.48 Psychosis; Skin
Sarah Kane
$35.944/22, chosen by Chiwan Choi
Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple
Malcolm Friend
$15.00 $13.95Order Malcolm Friend's full-length here!
Up Jump the Boogie (Reissue)
John Murillo
$16.95 $15.764/21, chosen by Malcolm Friend: John Murillo’s Up Jump the Boogie is a masterclass in received forms. Murillo remixes forms such as the sestina, pantoum, ghazal, and more in ways that both pay tribute to those often overlooked in the U.S., as well as speak against the systems and structures that aim to silence us.
Cannibal
Safiya Sinclair
$17.95 $16.694/21, chosen by Malcolm Friend: Indicated in the book’s preface, Sinclair’s Cannibal is a reckoning with language, of the machinery that makes savage the Caribbean. Turning to Eve, to mermaids, and, of course, to Caliban, Sinclair pulls apart British and American imperialisms—and all their requisite tools—by pulling apart and devouring their very language.
