Books To Read if You Love The Tortured Poets Department

With this startling, exhilarating book of poems, first published in 1960, Sylvia Plath burst into literature with spectacular force. In classics such as The Beekeeper’s Daughter, The Disquieting Muses, I Want, I Want, and Full Fathom Five, she writes about sows and skeletons, fathers and the noisy imperatives of life. Graceful in their craftsmanship, wonderfully original in their imagery, and presenting layer after layer of meaning, the forty poems in The Colossus are early artifacts of genius that still possess the power to move, delight, and shock.

The selection of letters presented here provides a fuller picture of the eccentric recluse of legend, showing how immersed in life she was: we see her tending her garden; baking bread; marking the marriages, births, and deaths of those she loved; reaching out for intellectual companionship; and confessing her personal joys and sorrows. These letters, invaluable for the light they shed on their author, are, as well, a pure pleasure to read.

As darkness falls, a man caught in a snowstorm is forced to shelter at the strange, grim house, Wuthering Heights. It is a place he will never forget. There he will come to learn the story of Cathy: how she was forced to choose between her well-meaning husband and the dangerous man she had loved since she was young. How her choice led to betrayal and terrible revenge — and continues to torment those in the present. How love can transgress authority, convention, and even death.

In these short, captivating lyrics, Catherine Cohen, the one-woman stand-up chanteuse who electrified the downtown NYC comedy scene in her white go-go boots, and who has been posting poignant, unfiltered poems on social media since before Instagram was a thing, details her life on the prowl with her beaded bag; she ponders guys who call you “dude” after sex, true love during the pandemic, and English-major dreams. “I wish I were smart instead of on my phone,” Cat Cohen confides; “heartbreak, / when it comes, and it will come / is always new.”

Let a literature professor and a musical theater artist guide you through the Taylor Swift canon — from Shakespeare to the Brontë sisters to Robert Frost! With full-color illustrations guiding you through the literary eras of Dr. Swift (yes, she has an honorary Ph.D.), it’s a perfect gift for the Swiftie in your life. Packed with fun facts, entertaining analysis, and literary-themed playlists that fans will love, Taylor Swift by the Book will turn anyone from a Taylor Swift lover into a Taylor Swift scholar.

It’s 2011: America is in a deep recession and Occupy Wall Street is escalating. But at the elite Wrynn College of Art, students paint and sculpt in a rarefied bubble. Louisa Arceneaux is a thoughtful, observant nineteen-year-old when she transfers to Wrynn as a scholarship student, but she soon finds herself adrift in an environment that prizes novelty over beauty. With a canny, critical eye, Sirens & Muses overturns notions of class, money, art, youth, and a generation’s fight to own their future.

In Thick with Trouble, award-winning poet Amber McBride interrogates if being “trouble” — difficult, unruly, fearsome, defiant — is ultimately a weakness or an incomparable source of strength. Steeped in the Hoodoo spiritual tradition and organized via reimagined tarot cards, this collection becomes a chorus of unapologetic women who laugh, cry, mesmerize, and bring outsiders to their knees. Summoning the supernatural to examine death, rebirth, and life outside the male gaze, Amber McBride has crafted a haunting, spellbinding, and strikingly original collection of poems that reckon with the force and complexity of Black womanhood.

In Girls That Never Die, award-winning poet Safia Elhillo reinvents the epic to explore Muslim girlhood and shame, the dangers of being a woman, and the myriad of violence enacted and imagined against women’s bodies. Drawing from her own life and family histories, as well as cultural myths and news stories about honor killings and genital mutilation, she interlaces the everyday traumas of growing up a girl under patriarchy with magical realist imaginings of rebellion, autonomy, and power.

“All My Rage is a love story, a tragedy and an infectious teenage fever dream about what home means when you feel you don’t fit in.” — New York Times Book Review — From one of today’s most cherished and bestselling young adult authors comes a breathtaking novel of young love, old regrets, and forgiveness — one that’s both tragic and poignant in its tender ferocity.

Witchcraft is woven into Dalloway’s past, a centuries-old, ivy-covered boarding school. The school doesn’t talk about it, but the students do. In secret rooms and shadowy corners, girls convene. And before her girlfriend died, Felicity was drawn to the dark. She’s determined to leave that behind now, but it’s hard when Dalloway’s occult history is everywhere. And when the new girl won’t let her forget. This dark twisty thriller romance is perfect for fans of dark academia.

Catalyzed by sheltering in place and by a personal challenge to give up alcohol for thirty days, Leigh Stein, the poet laureate of The Bachelor, has written a twenty-first-century Decameron to frame modern fables. What to Miss When makes mischief of reality TV and wellness influencers, juicy thoughtcrimes and love languages, and the mixed messages of contemporary feminism.

Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, and lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question.

It has been twenty-eight years since Sandra Cisneros published her last book of poetry. With dozens of never-before-seen poems, Woman Without Shame is a moving collection of songs, elegies, and declarations that chronicle her pilgrimage toward rebirth and the recognition of her prerogative as a woman artist. These bluntly honest and often humorous meditations on memory, desire, and the essential nature of love blaze a path toward self-awareness. For Cisneros, Woman Without Shame is the culmination of her search for home—in the Mexico of her ancestors and in her own heart.

Carefully curated, these 200-plus poems feature Oliver’s work from her first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015. This timeless volume, arranged by Oliver herself, showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world.

With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a young girl, who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her way toward womanhood. Drawing from her own life, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women, and teenage girls. In Shire’s hands, lives spring into fullness. Each reader will come away changed.

Lauded for the power of her writing and having attracted an online fan base of millions for her extraordinary spoken-word performances, Olivia Gatwood now weaves together her own coming-of-age with an investigation into our culture’s romanticization of violence against women. At times blistering and riotous, at times soulful and exuberant, Life of the Party explores the boundary between what is real and what is imagined in a life saturated with fear. Gatwood asks, How does a girl grow into a woman in a world racked by violence?

yesterday i was the moon, collects and makes sense of the phases of collapsing and rebuilding one’s self on the treacherous modern path from teenager to adult. Noor’s poetry ranges from succinct universal truths to flowery prose exploring her heritage, what it means to find a physical and emotional home, and the intimate and painful dance of self-discovery.

Riley Wynn went from a promising singer-songwriter to a superstar overnight, thanks to her breakup song concept album and its unforgettable lead single. When Riley’s ex-husband claims the hit song is about him, she does something she hasn’t done in ten years and calls Max Harcourt, her college boyfriend and the real inspiration for the song of the summer. Max hasn’t spoken to Riley since their relationship ended.  When Riley asks him to go public as her songwriting muse, he agrees on one condition: he’ll join her band on tour. As they perform across the country, Max and Riley start to realize that while they hit some wrong notes in the past, their future could hold incredible things.

New York City has always been a larger-than-life, half-mythical place, and this collection offers an appropriately stunning mosaic of its many incarnations in poetry — ranging from Walt Whitman’s exuberant celebrations to contemporary poets’ moving responses to the September 11 attack on the city. Encompassing as many moods, characters, and scenes as this multifaceted, ever-changing metropolis has to offer, Poems of New York will be treasured by literary lovers of New York everywhere.

Love Songs and Sonnets includes Ronsard’s famous sonnets to Helene, Dorothy Parker’s sardonic reflections on men, and Anne Bradstreet’s touching poem “To my Husband.” Shakespeare is here,  of course, and Burnas, whose comparison of his love to a red, red rose remains one of the most celebrated of all poetic similes. This edition also includes a variety of delights from Thomas Wyatt to Langston Hughes, from Aphra Behn to John Updike.