poetry

  • 2025 Seattle Reads Selection Celebrates Poetry and the Natural World

    2025 Seattle Reads Selection Celebrates Poetry and the Natural World

    We are so excited to share this year’s selection for Seattle Reads, the Library’s citywide book group: Edited by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón,  “You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World,” celebrates our deep connection with the natural world and the collective power of poetry. For the book, Limón invited 50 American poets to observe… Continue reading

  • Book Bingo NW 2024: LGBTQIA+ Poetry/Essays

    Colleen Lindsay, Bookseller at Charlie’s Queer Books, offers suggestions to fill your “LGBQTIA+ Poetry/Essays” AND “Suggested by an Independent Bookseller” squares for Book Bingo NW 2024. Since we’re headed toward the last weeks of Book Bingo, I thought I’d share a few suggestions for a category that sometimes intimidates readers: queer poetry and essays. Don’t… Continue reading

  • Poetry for Teens

    For National Poetry Month, here are fifteen books of teen-centered poetry, all as novels in verse. See these titles in our catalog. In Kwame Alexander’s The Door of No Return, Kofi’s peaceful life in Upper Kwanta is changed forever when his older brother wrestles – and accidentally kills – a boy from Lower Kwanta. As… Continue reading

  • Teen Novels in Verse

    To celebrate National Poetry Month, here are eleven terrific titles in verse. In Chlorine Sky by Mahogany L. Browne, Skyy feels terribly alone after her best friend’s boyfriend calls her a name she can’t forgive or forget.  Her sudden freedom allows her to see herself in a new light and consider all the ways she… Continue reading

  • Celebrate National Poetry Month 2022

    April is National Poetry Month, a time to celebrate the role played by poetry and poets in our culture, and to read some poetry! We’ve got you all set to find a collection of poetry to sink into, with lists created by librarians for adults, teens, and kids. Seattle Picks: 2021 Poetry Revisited 2021 was… Continue reading

  • What Happens When Poetry Propagates a Nation?

    Citizens, the month of harvest is here. Celebrate National Poetry Month. Here comes, once again, An American Sunrise. Arrived, once again, a proliferation of poetry; each poem The Winged Seed of a thousand thoughts. From whence do they come, these Words Like Thunder? Of course, from poets, those propagating Children of Grass who Forage for Earth… Continue reading

  • #BookBingoNW2020 Poetry or Comics

    One of the best things about Summer Book Bingo is how it challenges readers to step outside their comfort zones.  Of all the different kinds of books out there, however, poetry and graphic novels can be some of the most challenging. Readers not used to a visual format can sometimes struggle to make a cohesive… Continue reading

  • Pride Reads: BIPOC Trans/Non-Binary Poets

    Pride month is a great time to be delving deeper into poetry, and in particular the kind of poetry that shares aspects of LGBTQIA+ experience. More specifically, voices that are often pushed to the margins of the queer community – the voices of trans and non-binary Black, Indigenous, People of Color – are especially important… Continue reading

  • The Last Note Begins with See Sharp: On Transforming Your Thoughts into Poetry

    In the first four weeks of April, Shelf Talk published the series An April Quartet in honor of National Poetry Month. Each blog post was centered around an accompanying resource list, An April Quartet: In Alto, Poets Face that Discordant Sound, An April Quartet:  Some Soprano Sops Up a Poem’s Bread (the Rising), An April… Continue reading

  • An April Quartet, Part IV: Tenor, in the Tenor of these Times, Raise Your Voice High

    What do you say, to yourself and others, about these days we are living through? How are you describing the events, people, known and unknown, the circumstances and situations you witness or find yourself encountering? Your words may be heard by a few, by many or you alone, either way you give voice to the… Continue reading

  • An April Quartet, Part III: Bass Note of Blue, the Flowering

    This Spring greets us with peril and possibility. More than a movie, more than any play or book in which we can flip fast to the end and find out what happens, walk out, grab a snack or turn the dang thing off we just don’t know, do we, when this will be over? We… Continue reading

  • An April Quartet, Part II: Some Soprano Sops a Poem’s Bread (the Rising)

    When poetry is on the menu how can you go wrong? There is such a bounty of poems, in the world, about our favorite pastime that you can have your pick and there’s plenty more where that came from! We have to start somewhere and that somewhere is right here. The resource list, An April… Continue reading

  • An April Quartet:  In Alto, Poets Face that Discordant Sound

    This is how April will find us, still, in the throes of this great viral mystery. Who shall be next? Who will escape, sometimes, barely? Hold on! Persist. Where to find solace and perspective? In poetry, perhaps. In honor of National Poetry Month, we have prepared a map of sorts. A poetic map of terrain… Continue reading

  • Feminist Slam

    Some of my favorite slam poetry fixes come from Button Poetry, founded in 2011 by Sam Cook and Sierra DeMulder, who were shortly joined by Rachele Cermak and Heidi Lear. They launched the first Button website and blog. Sierra DeMulder was the first to pull me in with her poem “Today Means Amen,” from her… Continue reading

  •  Languages of Land: Poems of Immigration and Exile

    Unaccompanied, you ventured into The Flayed City to find what? More Nomadologies, more Notes on the Assemblage and 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border. Before the Afterland, there was that City of Rivers flowing beneath a Night Sky with Exit Wounds.  It was The Other Side of Paradise and, yes, the air tasted of… Continue reading

  • #BookBingoNW2017: Poetry

    Bingo is a game of chance. Take a chance on poetry. Reading a poem, for some, is akin to entering a country where everybody speaks a language, except the one you know. Poetry can be daunting.  It can, also, be a journey unlike any other.  Take, Josephine Yu’s Prayer Book of the Anxious, for instance.… Continue reading

  • Seek the Story

    Edward Hopper’s paintings were inspired as well as inspiring. Who could view his moody and spare piece, “Nighthawks,” and not look for a story therein? A recent short story collection, edited by Lawrence Block, called In Sunlight or in Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper, makes that point. In the foreword, Block writes:  “Hopper… Continue reading

  • This Valentine’s Day, Use Your Words!

    What truly says “I love you” to your Valentine? A fancy dinner out? Good luck getting a table, or avoiding romantic indigestion as you navigate the desperate crush of other romance seekers. A box of chocolates? Hardly original, and not exactly helpful with our New Year’s resolutions. Do diamonds speak louder than words? Nope – not even close:  … Continue reading