Sarah Browning’s National Poetry Month Recommendations – Pandemic Version

A list of recommended poetry books curated by Sarah Browning, cofounder, Split This Rock and MFA candidate, Rutgers University-Camden

I’m grateful to the good folks at The Head & The Hand bookstore in Philadelphia for inviting me to curate a list of poetry collections for National Poetry Month. I’ve chosen 15 books, many by poets from populations most grievously affected by the coronavirus pandemic and by the policies of our nation, and others’, that have rendered them so vulnerable: Native peoples, people with disabilities, the incarcerated, and immigrants, especially our undocumented kin. Each of these collections brings poetry’s power – as a challenge and a balm both, reminding us, with ferocity and tenderness, of our common humanity.

The list appears on Bookshop.org, a new site for buying books online, with a portion of proceeds benefiting independent bookstores!

Read the list — and shop for great books! — on Bookshop’s website.

Author: Sarah Browning

Sarah Browning is the author of Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017) and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works, 2007). She is co-founder and for 10 years was Executive Director of Split This Rock: Poems of Provocation & Witness. She is an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and recipient of the Lillian E. Smith Writer-in-Service Award as well as of fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, Mesa Refuge, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been guest editor or co-edited special issues of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Delaware Poetry Review, and three issues of POETRY magazine. From 2006 to 2019 Browning co-hosted the Sunday Kind of Love poetry series at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC. She has been nominated numerous times for the Pushcart Prize. She received an MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction from Rutgers University Camden in 2021 and lives in Philadelphia, PA.

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