Books like 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.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Wade in the Water
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.
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.
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.
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.
Life on Mars
An elegy for her father, an engineer on the Hubble telescope, that reaches through Bowie and sci-fi for a language of outer space and inner loss.
Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman celebrates the whole of American experience, the body, democracy, war, grass, stars and the self, in a collection that reinvented what poetry could be.
A Portable Paradise
T.S. Eliot-winning poems of London, Grenfell Tower, windrush childhood, and the portable paradise a grandmother insisted her grandson carry.
Pilgrim Bell
Poems weighing doubt and belief, Islamic faith and American life, silence and prayer.
Homie
A book-length love letter to the friends who keep Smith alive, in poems that refuse both despair and easy access.