Staff Recommendations
Welcome to Staff Recommendations, our regularly updated archive of books for all ages and interests. Tap the book covers to see full details and catalog availability. Use the Filters box (at bottom on mobile) to narrow titles by category and audience.
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Best Barbarian: Poems
Winner of the 2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection, and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry
Longlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize
A New York Times Notable Book
In his brilliant, expansive second volume, Whiting Award–winning poet Roger Reeves probes the apocalypses and raptures of humanity—climate change, anti-Black racism, familial and erotic love, ecstasy and loss.The poems in Best Barbarian roam across the literary and social landscape, from Beowulf’s Grendel to the jazz musician Alice Coltrane, from reckoning with immigration at the U.S.–Mexico border to thinking through the fraught beauty of the moon on a summer night after the police have killed a Black man.
Daring and formally elegant, Best Barbarian asks the reader: “Who has not been an entryway shuddering in the wind / Of another’s want, a rose nailed to some dark longing and bled?” Reeves extends his inquiry into the work of writers who have come before, conversing with—and sometimes contradicting—Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, Sappho, Dante, and Aimé Césaire, among others. Expanding the tradition of poetry to reach from Gilgamesh and the Aeneid to Drake and Beyoncé, Reeves adds his voice to a long song that seeks to address itself “only to freedom.”
Best Barbarian asks the reader to stay close as it plunges into catastrophe and finds surprising moments of joy and intimacy. This fearless, musical, and oracular collection announces Roger Reeves as an essential voice in American poetry.
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Golden Ax
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 PEN OPEN BOOK AWARD
“Outstanding . . . the poetry in these pages is intelligent, lyrical, as invested in the past as the present and future with witty nods to pop culture.” —Roxane Gay, author of Hunger
“I’ve never read anything like it. Truly a sublime experience.” —Jason Reynolds, author of Ain’t Burned All the Bright
A groundbreaking collection about Afropioneerism past and present from Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and New York Times bestselling author Rio Cortez
From a visionary writer praised for her captivating work on Black history and experience comes a poetry collection exploring personal, political, and artistic frontiers, journeying from her family's history as "Afropioneers" in the American West to shimmering glimpses of transcendent, liberated futures.
In poems that range from wry, tongue-in-cheek observations about contemporary life to more nuanced meditations on her ancestors—some of the earliest Black pioneers to settle in the western United States after Reconstruction—Golden Ax invites readers to re-imagine the West, Black womanhood, and the legacies that shape and sustain the pursuit of freedom. -
The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On
Named A Most Anticipated Book by: LitHub * Vulture * Time * A PW 2022 Holiday Gift Pick
One of: Time's "100 Must-Read Books of 2022" * NPR's 2022 "Books We Love" Vulture's "10 Best Books of 2022"
A Goodreads Readers Choice Award Semifinalist
From acclaimed poet Franny Choi comes a poetry collection for the ends of worlds—past, present, and future. Choi’s third book features poems about historical and impending apocalypses, alongside musings on our responsibilities to each other and visions for our collective survival.
Many have called our time dystopian. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples.
With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time--from Korean comfort women during World War II, to the precipice of climate crisis, to children wandering a museum in the future. These poems explore narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal. As she wrestles with the daily griefs and distances of this apocalyptic world, Choi also imagines what togetherness--between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest--could look like. Bringing together Choi's signature speculative imagination with even greater musicality than her previous work, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On ultimately charts new paths toward hope in the aftermaths, and visions for our collective survival.
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Girls That Never Die
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Intimate poems that explore feminine shame and violence and imagine what liberation from these threats might look like, from the award-winning author of The January Children
“Incredibly moving . . . Every single poem is stellar.”—Roxane Gay, author of Difficult Women and Hunger
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 violences 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.
Elhillo writes a new world: women escape their stonings by birds that carry the rocks away; slain girls grow into two, like the hydra of lore, sprouting too numerous to ever be eradicated; circles of women are deemed holy, protected. Ultimately, Girls That Never Die is about wrestling ourselves from the threats of violence that constrain our lives, and instead looking to freedom and questioning:
[what if i will not die]
[what will govern me then] -
3 2 1 Awesome!
Instagram superstar and New York Times bestselling author of Juno Valentine and the Magical Shoes Eva Chen shines a spotlight on 20 amazing women—including Megan Rapinoe, Sonia Sotomayor, Shirley Chisholm, Greta Thunberg and more!—in 3 2 1 Awesome! a sassy and fun counting board book, perfect for the youngest of budding feminists.
Why stick to counting on fingers and toes when you can count:
3 straight sets for Billie Jean King's historic win...
2 groundbreaking suffragettes named Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton...
1 singular, sensational YOU!
With Derek Desierto's bold and vibrant art, Eva fans and readers of all ages will be transported through "herstory."