7 Books to Read for National Poetry Month and the Read Harder Challenge

For a lot of us, Shel Silverstein was a childhood favorite whose poems got plenty of rereads. The subversive tone, unexpected humor, evocative drawings, and underlying emotion appeal to kids and adults alike, making his collections of poetry a perfect choice for a reread. Where the Sidewalk Ends is his most well-known collection, but they’re all bangers. Just read “Masks” or the wordless poem “The Thinker of Tender Thoughts” today and tell me they don’t still hit as an adult!

Queer poet Ocean Vuong published Night Sky With Exit Wounds in 2016, and New Yorker Magazine named Vuong’s debut poetry as one of the ten books poetry book of that year. Vuong was born in Ho Chi Minh City in 1988 and exquisitely details the scenes from Vietnam’s historic trauma. “Milkflower petals in the street/like pieces of a girl’s dress,” is Vuong’s memory of the ash drifting over the dead and injured during the fall of Saigon, when Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” was being piped into the streets. Young love is discovered, “Show me how ruin makes a home/out of hip bones.//teach me to hold a man the way thirst holds water.” Vuong presents depression, queer sexuality, domestic abuse, and the violence his family experienced during the war and as refugees. “American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farm girl. Thus my mother exists./Thus I exist./Thus no bombs = no family = no me. Yikes.” The people in Vuong’s poetry all speak with an unfiltered voice, with pure emotion that makes for excellent political poetry. —Nancy Snyder

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