I have this friend who’s into sand / not like the beach / like sand you might use in construction / the economics of sand / buying and selling sand / not that he buys or sells / but he enjoys / for example / that there is a black market for sand / this friend is a writer / he writes novels in which characters are obsessed with sand / buried in sand / swallow some sand stuck to a sandwich / when he describes the act of eating sand / he describes it so vividly / I know he’s done it / I don’t even need to ask / he likes to eat things / he’s a good cook / he also ate a lover’s hair / once / it’s not like he’s got a sand fetish / although scrutinise anything long enough / it might as well be your kink / there’s porn for everyone now / I’m sure there’s sand porn / I google sand porn / an hour has passed and it’s just sand-coloured bodies / on a beach / and I don’t feel any different / and yet I am changed / walking through the city / with this friend who used to love cities / and now loves sand / I wonder if there is anything left / to be interested in / get off my sand / he’ll say when he reads this / but it isn’t about the sand / it’s about those times / I’ve fallen asleep at parties / and woken to him / high as the great dune of Pilat / his eyes like gaping coal pits / which doesn’t fit the theme / but boy are those eyes black / kneeling over me / saying / don’t sleep / don’t sleep yet / and although the sofa is deep / and my limbs are deadweights in the shallow end of the pool / I do get up / and I’m glad to watch us / two misshapen grains / buffeted / angular / dancing as the sun cuts across the window / in a building / twenty miles wide / twenty miles high / stretching further than our tiny human eyes can see
I lie on the ground.
I open my mouth.
I suck on a spoon.
I embrace a stone.
A beetle crawls by.
I empty my mind
I stuff it with grass
I’m green, I repeat.
The sun is a drink.
The yellowest squash
I can’t get enough
I can’t get enough
I can’t get enough
I can’t get enough
I can’t get enough
I can’t get enough
hi all! i've been reading a lot of really great poetry lately and i thought i'd make a post a) to save and keep to look back on and b) in case anyone is on the lookout for recs!
a lot of the poetry tags are always cluttered with classic, well known recs from older poets - which are well loved for a reason! - but there are plenty of modern poets that would likely benefit from some extra support. so this rec in particular will be poets who are currently releasing or have recently published work. if you have the time/resources, be sure to engage with the media, purchase or rent the books, or visit the author's sites/socials for more info.
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*please be aware that many of the linked poems deal with heavier topics and themes -- trigger warnings are not included*
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from their website: Ollie Schminkey is a non-binary transgender poet/musician/artist living in St. Paul, MN. They have spent the past decade coaching, mentoring, teaching classes, and running workshops for poets. They facilitate, direct, and host many organizations, including a weekly writing workshop called Well-Placed Commas, which serves primarily queer and trans writers. [...]
Where I Dry the Flowers
If Ollie Schminkey’s Dead Dad Jokes asks the question, “What was it like to watch my father die?”, Where I Dry the Flowers asks “How did watching someone die teach me how to live?”
This unrestrained and raw sophomore collection explores themes of grief, healing, and forgiveness while refusing to sacrifice the hard truths that come with addiction, care taking, and the death of a loved one. Ollie opens their heart to readers and tells them that these emotions are okay, no matter how conflicting and confusing they may be.
they also feature on Button Poetry's YouTube channel often, if you enjoy spoken word.
→ 'My Father'
→ 'Guidebook for feral memories wishing to be domesticated' (YouTube)
from her website: Ella Frears is a poet and artist based in London. Her debut collection, Shine, Darling, (Offord Road Books, 2020) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Goodlord, (Rough Trade Books, 2024) her new hybrid work which takes the form of one long email to an estate agent, is shortlisted for the Forward Prize and the Sky Arts Awards’ Times Breakthrough Artist of the Year. [...]
Goodlord: An Email
Asked by letting agent, Ava, to make an account with the ominous sounding property technology 'Goodlord', our narrator launches into a breathless and rage fuelled reply that swings wildly between anecdotes of chaotic house-shares, grubby university halls, the claustrophobic school days that haunt her still, her various underpaid exploitative jobs at pubs and restaurants, relationships and sexual encounters both troubling and ecstatic, and an artists' residency that offers her the space she craves but demands a complicated transaction in return.
Written in sharp, unflinching prose, Goodlord exposes the grinding inequalities of modern life. It is a blistering exploration of what it means to live in a world where everything, including your dignity, comes with a price tag.
→ 'Ars Poetica with Desire Line'
→ I'm technically reccing the entirety of 'Goodlord', for the record, because it's phenomenal; but here's an excerpt (YouTube, starting at 1:50) if you don't have time for the whole thing
from his website: Richard Siken is a poet and painter. His book Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, selected by Louise Glück, a Lambda Literary Award, a Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon Press, 2015) and I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2025). Siken is a recipient of fellowships from Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
I Do Know Some Things
It is brave to write about childhood scars and the heartbreak the dead leave behind. It is brave to reconfigure one’s life in the aftermath of a stroke. Richard Siken presents these subjects directly, without ornament, and with nothing to hide behind, confronting the fact that he can no longer manipulate the constructions of form, or speak lies that tell the truth. In spite of these limitations, Siken chooses to write these poems and release them into a dangerous world. Each image, each sentence, is as direct as the American artist Jasper Johns’s shooting targets. Each poem is like a small room in a house, a room where you will be punched in the throat. As he claws himself back into a self, into a body, Siken has written a book that is unsettling and autobiographical by necessity, and its seventy-seven prose poems invite the reader to risk a difficult intimacy in search of yet deeper truths.
→ 'A Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out'
→ 'Wishbone
→ 'Cover Story'
→ 'You Are Jeff'
from their website: K. Iver (they/them) is a nonbinary trans poet born in Mississippi. Their book Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco won the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry from Milkweed Editions. Short Film won the Wisconsin Book Award and was shortlisted for the L.A. Times Book Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Lambda Literary Award. It was named a Best Book of 2023 by the New York Public Library. Iver’s poems have appeared in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, The L.A. Review of Books, and elsewhere. [...] They have a Ph.D. in Poetry from Florida State University.
Short Film Starring my Beloved's Red Bronco
In small-town Mississippi, before the aughts, a child “assigned ‘woman’” and a boy “forced to call / himself a girl” love one another—from afar, behind closed doors, in motels. The child survives an injurious mother and the beast-shaped men she brings home; the boy becomes a soldier. Years later, the boy—the eponymous beloved, Missy—dies by suicide, kicking up a riptide of memory. This is where K. Iver writes, at the confluence of love poem and elegy.
→ 'Who is This Grief For?'
→ 'Anti Elegy'
→ 'Ballet's Guide to OCD [...]'
from his website: Kaveh Akbar is the New York Times bestselling author of the novel Martyr!—a finalist for the National Book Award and one of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year—and two books of poetry: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf. [...] Born in Tehran, Iran, Kaveh is the Roy J. Carver Professor of English at the University of Iowa. His work has been translated into over thirty languages.
Martyr! [novel]
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.
Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.
Pilgrim Bell [poetry]
With formal virtuosity and ruthless precision, Kaveh Akbar’ssecond collection takes its readers on a spiritual journey of disavowal, fiercely attendant to the presence of divinity where artifacts of self and belonging have been shed. How does one recover from addiction without destroying the self-as-addict? And if living justly in a nation that would see them erased is, too, a kind of self-destruction, what does one do with the body’s question, “what now shall I repair?” Here, Akbar responds with prayer as an act of devotion to dissonance—the infinite void of a loved one’s absence, the indulgence of austerity, making a life as a Muslim in an Islamophobic nation—teasing the sacred out of silence and stillness.
Richly crafted and generous, Pilgrim Bell’s linguistic rigor is tuned to the register of this moment and any moment. As the swinging soul crashes into its limits, against the atrocities of the American empire, and through a profoundly human capacity for cruelty and grace, these brilliant poems dare to exist in the empty space where song lives—resonant, revelatory, and holy.
→ 'Against Hell'
→ 'Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Inpatient)'
→ 'Despite my Best Efforts Even My Prayers Have Turned into Threats'
→ 'Stop me if You've Heard This One Before'
from their website: torrin a. greathouse (she/they) is an award-winning transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity, and The Ragdale Foundation. She is the author of two collections, DEED (Wesleyan University Press, 2024), winner of a 2025 Stonewall Book Award, and Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020), a Minnesota Book Award and CLMP Firecracker Award finalist, and winner of the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. [...]
DEED
DEED [...] is a formally and lyrically innovative exploration of queer sex and desire, and what it can cost. Sprawling across art, eros, survival, myth, etymology, and musical touchstones from Bruce Springsteen to Against Me!, this new book both subverts and pays homage to the poetic canon, examining an artistic lineage that doesn't always love trans or disabled people back. Written in a broad range of received and invented forms—from caudate sonnets and the sestina, to acrostics and the burning haibun—DEED indicts violent systems of carceral, medical, and legal power which disrupt queer and disabled love and solidarity, as well as the potentially vicarious manner in which audiences consume art. This collection is a poetic triptych centered on the question of how, in spite of all these complications, to write an honest poem about desire. At its core, DEED is a reminder of how tenderness can be made a shield, a weapon, or a kind of faith, depending on the mouth that holds it.
→ 'My Mouth is the Mouth of a River'
→ 'On Confinement'
→ 'Aubade Beginning in Handcuffs'
→ 'Hapnophobia or the Fear of Being Touched'
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that's all for now! possibly more to come when I finish some other current reads, but we'll see!
They don’t teach you that kind of stuff in school,
do they?
Can’t put on a condom correctly.
Can’t navigate a friendship.
I’m terrified of HMRC.
But I do know what an oxbow lake is, Ava;
and which of Henry’s wives was pig-dog-ugly;
and what those plucky boys of West Poley fame stuck to
their faces to disguise themselves as wizards.
