Holiday Gift Guide for Poetry Lovers

If you have a loved one with a poet’s soul, chances are you’re looking for a gift for them that is as expressive and imaginative as they are— something unique that will speak to their heart. Well look no further! This gift guide is filled with poetry collections from new and seasoned authors alike.

Check out the titles below, or visit Red Hen to see our entire catalog of poetry books.

In her ninth collection of poems, Ghost Apples, Katharine Coles interrogates and celebrates her relationship with the natural world and the various creatures who inhabit it, and in doing so asks what it means to be sentient and mortal on a fragile planet. From her own pet parrot, Henri, to the birds her husband attracts to their feeders, to the wildlife who live just outside — and regularly cross — her property on the wild edge of Salt Lake City, she uses her capacity for intense observation and meditation to think her way into other lives and possible shared futures, both good and bad.

For more information visit Red Hen, and to purchase click here.

Beloved by contemporary German readers, the poetry of Max Sessner is gathered for the first time in English in Whoever Drowned Here: New and Selected Poems. Painstakingly chosen from Sessner’s celebrated three collections and from new work, these poems employ a matter-of-fact magical realism to engage the profound, philosophical mysteries of the everyday. Sessner makes nimble use of the material world as he choreographs poignant reenactments of human yearning. Smocks in the window of a dry cleaner “trade stolen / caresses” at night. Death tries on your clothes while you sleep and eats your chocolate. A poem tires of being a poem, “a small mortal / thing that no one notices,” and sets off into the world to make a new life. The poems of Max Sessner are like compact, musical fairytales. They delight us and frighten us. They touch us with their ghostly, melancholy fingertips and lead us onward.

For more information visit Red Hen, and to purchase click here.

A rich, complex, heartbreaking, and funny anthology of poems on motherhood — being one and having one. Kim Dower’s poetry has been described by the Los Angeles Times as “sensual and evocative . . . seamlessly combining humor and heartache,” and by O Magazine as “unexpected and sublime.” Acclaimed for combining the accessible and profound, her poems about motherhood are some of her most moving and disarmingly candid. I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom is an anthology of her poems on being a mother — childbirth to empty nest — as well as being a daughter with all the teenaged messiness, drama and conflict, to finally caring for one’s mother suffering from dementia. Culled from her four collections as well as a selection of new work, these poems, heartbreaking, funny, surprising, and touching, explore the quirky, unexpected observations, and bittersweet moments mothers and daughters share. These evocative poems do not glorify mothers, but rather look under the hood of motherhood and explore the deep crevices and emotions of these impenetrable relationships: the love, despair, joy, humor and gratitude that fills our lives.

For more information visit Red Hen, and to purchase click here.

Following her husband’s massive heart attack, Cynthia Hogue began writing poems based on dreams and memories that he, born during WWII in occupied France, had as a child growing up in a time of vast postwar food shortages. Hogue embarked on a quest to discover if there were more such memories in her extended family in France. When asked, family members told her never-before-shared tales of parents who were POWs, collaborators, Resistance fighters, and one most vulnerable — of a hidden child. Hogue spent years researching the lives of civilians during war, work crystallized in her tenth collection of poetry, instead, it is dark. The personal is alchemized as Hogue weaves history and present day in poems that explore how there, here, an individual voice in the stark language of lyric poetry, speaks a complex truth and casts a laser light on violence, resilience, survival, and — the heart of this collection — love.

For more information visit Red Hen, and to purchase click here.

Anna V. Q. Ross plumbs motherhood, migration, childhood, and the cycles of violence and renewal that recur in each. These are poems of math homework and police sirens, where a fox pops out of a fairy tale to dig up the back yard, NPR News spirals the evening carpool into memories of girlhood and trauma, and a city gas leak conjures xenophobic backlash against refugees. In poems of reclamation and warning, Flutter, Kick brings us to the center of our world — a place where “in those days, we were fast and best, but didn’t know it” — with a compassion learned of anger, memory, and joy.

For more information visit Red Hen, and to purchase click here.

This harvest of poems is inspired by the plant medicine latent in Gossypium Herbeceum, or Cotton Root Bark, which was used by enslaved Black women to induce labor, cure reproductive ailments, and end unwanted pregnancies. Through an arrangement of stories, secrets, and memories experienced, read, heard, reimagined, and remixed, gossypiin reckons with a peculiar yet commonplace inheritance of violation, survival, and self-possession. In this way, Ra Malika Imhotep invites us to lean in and listen good as the text interrupts the narrative silence around sexual harm, sickness, and the marks they make on black femme subjectivity.

Within these pages, the poet is joined by a “sticky trickster-self” named Lil Cotton Flower who tells of their own origins and endings in the Black vernacular traditions of the griot and the gossip. Interspersed throughout the collection, Black feminist wisdoms and warnings meld with the poet’s own yearnings and Lil Cotton Flower’s tall tales. Gossypiin is an offering towards the holding and healing of Black beings that exceed the confines of their own bodies.

For more information visit Red Hen, and to purchase click here.

This writing dice set contains 9 color-coded wooden dice that cover character dimension, time, place, theme, conflict, and point of view. An instruction booklet is included as well, with suggested exercises to help you get started. These dice make an excellent gift for authors, writers, students, teachers, or anyone looking to practice creativity via writing. With millions of combinations, it’s practically impossible not to encounter an idea that helps you find your flow. So roll the dice. Write fearlessly. You never know what’s inside you until you try!

To purchase click here.

This subscription from Crate Joy is designed specifically with writers in mind. The Writer’s Block Box is a unique way for all writers to find inspiration and have a little fun. Each month, subscribers receive five useful items that are sure to jumpstart their writing — workbooks, prompts, stickers, tools, and other handcrafted items. This box is the perfect gift for yourself or the writer in your life.

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This collection of magnetic poetry was specially selected from lists of words sent in by Magnetic Poets from around the world. Using their suggestions, MagPo created The Poet Kit, a set of over 300 words perfectly suited for creating lush and evocative lines of poetry. This magnetic muse is guaranteed to spark the imagination and usher you into all kinds of unexplored poetic realms!

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A great book plus a hot cup of tea is pure bliss. These punny literary blends combine two favorite pastimes in one tasteful tin. Each metal container features original artwork inspired by classic books and is filled with an aromatic organic tea flavored to a bookish theme.

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