Native Poetry

This inspiring collection, edited by Pádraig ó Tuama, presents fifty poems about what it means to be alive in the world today. Each poem is paired with Pádraig's illuminating commentary that offers personal anecdotes and generous insights into the content of the poem. Engaging, accessible and inviting, Poetry Unbound is the perfect companion for everyone who loves poetry and for anyone who wants to go deeper into poetry but doesn't necessarily know how to do so.

Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Former U.S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard is a deeply personal volume that brings together two legacies of the Deep South. Through elegaic verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey...

Joy Harjo, the first Native American to serve as US poet laureate, invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her "poet-warrior" road. A musical, kaleidoscopic, and wise follow-up to Crazy Brave, Poet Warrior reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing, poetry with the power to unearth the truth and demand justice.

The Native-Born is Rudyard Kipling in full, booming voice—an ode to homeland, heritage, and the fierce pride of those raised under blazing southern skies. Through vivid imagery and pulsing rhythm, Kipling toasts the people of the far-flung British colonies: the “Sons of the Golden South,” the settlers and workers who carved their lives into vast prairies, tin-roofed towns, and coastlines battered by sun and sea.

Margaretta Matilda Odell's 1834 Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley is the only substantive early source on Wheatley's life. Phillis Wheatley (ca. 1753-1784) is considered the first African American poet to write for a transatlantic audience, and her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) kindled debates about race.

In Living in the Tall Grass: Poems of Reconciliation, Chief Stacey Laforme gives a history of his people through stories and poetry to allow us to see through the eyes of indigenous people. In it, he hits hard on matters of residential schools, the environment, suicide among indigenous youth, domestic abuse, and so on, but also writes poems of love and hope. Chief Laforme’s universal message is, “We should not have to change to fit into society, the world should adapt to embrace our uniqueness.”