Books like American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
Seventy sonnets written in the first months of the Trump presidency, each an address to an imagined assassin, Black life, and the ghosts of the form.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
The Tradition
Pulitzer-winning collection where Brown's invented duplex form holds up the violence against Black bodies alongside desire, faith, and flowers.
Citizen: An American Lyric
A genre-bending work using poetry, essay, and image to document the accumulation of racial microaggressions and violence in everyday American life.
Wade in the Water
The former US Poet Laureate writes through Civil War letters, motherhood, and ecological grief, listening for the voices buried in the national record.
How to Wash a Heart
A book-length monologue from an immigrant guest addressing the white citizen host who is generous, watchful, and does not intend to let her leave.
The Hill We Climb
The inaugural poem delivered at Joe Biden's 2021 swearing-in, published as a slim standalone volume with foreword by Oprah Winfrey.
Don't Call Us Dead
Opens with a vision of a Black afterlife free of police bullets, then turns inward to a young HIV-positive Black queer poet writing to survive.
Alive at the End of the World
Poems written through the pandemic, private loss and public Black death, elegies that refuse to choose between the historical and the personal.
Obit
After her mother's death, Chang writes obituaries for everything else that died along with her, her father's frontal lobe, her mother's teeth, logic, in a book of grief.
Magical Negro
NBCC-winning poems that dissect the stereotype of its title and the specific loneliness of Black womanhood in contemporary American culture.
Just Us: An American Conversation
A hybrid of poems, essays, and images documenting Rankine's attempts to hold everyday conversations about whiteness with friends, strangers, and herself.
Homie
A book-length love letter to the friends who keep Smith alive, in poems that refuse both despair and easy access.
The Wild Iris
A book-length sequence of poems spoken by the flowers of a garden, by the gardener, and by the god they all address.