The art of poetry has endured thousands of years of human existence and may have even predated literacy, existing initially in the form of oral recitations. In order to honor poetry and its importance as an art form, April has been designated National Poetry Month.

Here are some collections of poetry that have been published recently and are available from the JMRL catalog:

Dome of the Hidden Pavilion: New Poems by James Tate – A series of prose poems takes an absurdist view of everyday life and examines the journey towards its inevitable end.

How to be Drawn by Terrance Hayes – In his daring fifth collection, Terrance Hayes explores how we see and are seen. While many of these poems bear the clearest imprint yet of Hayes’s background as a visual artist, they do not strive to describe art so much as inhabit it.

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine – Collects essays, poetry, and images that expose the racial tensions in twenty-first century life, highlighting the slights, slips of the tongue, and intentional offensives that pervade the home, school, and popular media.

Once in the West by Christian Wiman – Christian Wiman’s fourth collection is as intense and intimate as poetry gets, from the “suffering of primal silence” that it plumbs to the “rockshriek of joy” that it achieves and enables.

Incarnadine: Poems by Mary Szybist – Incarnadine restlessly seeks out places where meaning might take on new color. Szybist’s formal innovations are matched by her musical lines, by her poetry’s insistence on singing as a lure toward the unknowable. Inside these poems is a deep yearning – for love, motherhood, the will to see things as they are and to speak.

Black Cat Bone: Poems by John Burnside – A collection from a British poet and recipient of the T. S. Eliot Prize marks the author’s first American publication and includes odes to thwarted love, disappointment, desire, obsession and stalking.