Books like 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.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Hill We Climb
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.
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.
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.
The Tradition
Pulitzer-winning collection where Brown's invented duplex form holds up the violence against Black bodies alongside desire, faith, and flowers.
A Portable Paradise
T.S. Eliot-winning poems of London, Grenfell Tower, windrush childhood, and the portable paradise a grandmother insisted her grandson carry.
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.
Homie
A book-length love letter to the friends who keep Smith alive, in poems that refuse both despair and easy access.
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.
The Carrying
Poems about the body that refuses pregnancy, the small domestic world of horses and fig trees, and what the heart carries forward anyway.
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.
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.
Devotions
Mary Oliver's own selection from a lifetime of poems about the natural world, attention, wonder and the discipline of noticing.