Books like Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
Césaire's book-length poem of a Martinican returning home from Paris, moving from disgust at the island's misery to a furious, exultant claim on Blackness, the founding text of Négritude.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
Collected Poems 1948–1984
Walcott's poems from his first books in St Lucia to The Fortunate Traveller and Midsummer.
A Portable Paradise
T.S. Eliot-winning poems of London, Grenfell Tower, windrush childhood, and the portable paradise a grandmother insisted her grandson carry.
Sun of Consciousness
Glissant's first book, written as a young Martinican in Paris, moves between prose and verse to think about exile, the Caribbean and what France looks like from the outside.
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.
Howl and Other Poems
The poem that launched the Beat Generation and an obscenity trial, a howl against conformity, capitalism and the destruction of the best minds of a generation, with other early poems.
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.
A Small Place
Kincaid addresses the tourist directly as she describes Antigua, the island where she grew up, and lays out what centuries of colonial rule and the corruption that followed have done to it.
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.
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.
The Tradition
Pulitzer-winning collection where Brown's invented duplex form holds up the violence against Black bodies alongside desire, faith, and flowers.
The Essential Rumi
Coleman Barks's versions of the thirteenth-century Sufi poet, poems of divine love, longing and the dissolving of the self in the beloved.
Omeros
An epic poem with Homer in its bones, set among the fishermen of St Lucia, where Achille and Hector fight over Helen.