Books like Crush
Poems of desperate wanting: two bodies, a car crash, a war, desire so intense it becomes hard to tell from destruction.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Crush
Postcolonial Love Poem
Pulitzer-winning poems written as a Mojave queer woman in love in an American empire that wants both her land and her body.
The Tradition
Pulitzer-winning collection where Brown's invented duplex form holds up the violence against Black bodies alongside desire, faith, and flowers.
This Wound Is a World
Griffin-winning debut from a Cree poet making a queer Indigenous lyric out of grief, desire, and the political weather of the Canadian state.
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.
Ariel
Poems written in a furious burst during Plath's last months, raw, incandescent and relentless in their confrontation with death and rebirth.
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.
Stag's Leap
Pulitzer-winning book-length account of the year her husband of thirty years left her, in poems that stay unbearably present to every small event.
Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Vuong's debut moves between a Vietnamese boy's afterlife of war and a queer American coming-of-age, in poems that braid family memory and desire.
The Captain's Verses
Love poems Neruda first published anonymously, written for Matilde Urrutia during their secret affair in exile.
Here on Earth
March Murray comes back to her Massachusetts hometown after many years in California, for the funeral of the woman who raised her, and finds Hollis, the boy she loved as a girl, still there.
Sonnets from the Portuguese
Forty-four love sonnets tracing the poet's journey from invalid solitude to the astonishment of being loved, including the one that begins 'How do I love thee'.
Homie
A book-length love letter to the friends who keep Smith alive, in poems that refuse both despair and easy access.