Celebrate National Poetry Month and Seattle Reads 2025 With These Books

For only the second time in the history of Seattle Reads, the library’s citywide book club, a book of poetry has been selected. “You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World,” an anthology edited and introduced by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, features 50 American poets observing and reflecting on their place in the natural world, including local Indigenous poets Cedar Sigo and Laura Da̕.

If you haven’t picked up “You Are Here” yet, now is the perfect time. April is National Poetry Month, and what better way to celebrate than reading and discussing poems with your friends and neighbors?! Here are a few other titles to complement “You Are Here” and deepen your appreciation of poetry.

Whether you’re new to poetry or a longtime fan, you’ll enjoy “Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems” by Stephanie Burt. Burt, an award-winning poet and literary critic, has written an accessible and engaging guide that encourages readers to abandon fixed ideas about what poetry should be and instead embrace the astonishingly broad variety of the form.

Her book explores everything from the lyric poetry of John Donne to the character-focused poems of Langston Hughes to the technically dazzling ghazals of Agha Shahid Ali, and offers ways to understand them, in hopes that you will find the works that speak to you most strongly.

Many of the poems in “You Are Here” belong to a recent trend known as ecopoetry, which describes not only flora, fauna and the landscapes we inhabit, but also the devastating impact of climate change and the emotions it evokes. Local poet Martha Silano gives voice to those feelings in her most recent collection, “This One We Call Ours.”

Arranged by four new seasons (for example, spring is now known as “Freakishly Hot, Excessively Cold, Anticipation of Heat Dome and Wildfire Season”), these poems express fear, grief, hope, wonder, anger, uncertainty and more in settings that will be familiar to many Seattleites. For example, a poem in the “Atmospheric River, Songbird Salmonella Die-Off, No Snow/Record-Breaking-Snow Season” takes place at the Burke Museum.

Rena Priest, a member of the Lummi Nation, describes “I Sing the Salmon Home: Poems from Washington State” as a dream project because “salmon are keystone species, which means everything relies on them, and if we want to be okay, the salmon must thrive.”

In this epic anthology, the former Washington state poet laureate compiled the work of 150 poets from the state, ranging from first graders to tribal elders. They write beautifully about the importance of salmon to our ecosystems and to ourselves in poems like “Nugguam means to talk” by Susan Landgraf, “A salmon of a man” by Tito Titus, and “A salmon scale is called a cycloid” by Sylvia Byrne Pollack.

Another vibrant ecopoetry selection is “When We Only Have the Earth” by Abdourahman A. Waberi, a French Djiboutian poet, novelist and essayist, with translation by Nancy Naomi Carlson.

Lyrical and evocative, this newly published collection takes the reader on a journey throughout North America, Africa and Europe that encourages them to recognize the healing power of love in restoring the Earth.

In “Less Desolate,” former Seattle Civic Poet Shin Yu Pai and comic artist Justin Rueff use the hybrid form of haiku comics to tell the story of navigating life and desolation during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Panels and haiku illustrate scenes of Pai’s daily life during this time, including working to overcome “the old fear of driving,” going to the temple to meditate and using a pair of shears to cut her son’s rice noodles “like a Chinese auntie.” Though “Less Desolate” is not a work of ecopoetry per se, it showcases the human ability to persist even in the face of calamity.

– By Abby Bass and Okunyi Bëhree, Humanities librarians

Seattle Reads is the library’s citywide book group, with more than 20 programs planned in April and May, including events with U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón on May 16 and 17. Find a copy of “You Are Here” at the library, including unlimited copies of the e-book and audiobook versions.

Originally published in the Seattle Times and reprinted here with permission, this column is a space to share reading and book trends from a librarian’s perspective. You can find these titles at the library by visiting spl.org and searching the catalog.