Reciprocal Borrowing Privileges
Many libraries have reciprocal borrowing privileges, meaning that if you are a card holder in Fairfax County, for example, you can also get a free card in another jurisdiction like Arlington, so you can check out books from their system. The following are a list of each library systems reciprocal jurisdictions:
Fairfax County Public Libraries
Resources at Fairfax County
Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.
In Islamic and Western tradition, age twenty-nine is a milestone, a year of transformation and upheaval. For Hala Alyan, this is a year in which the past—memories of family members, old friends and past lovers, the heat of another land, another language, a different faith—winds itself around the present. Hala's ever-shifting, subversive verse sifts together and through different forms of forced displacement and the tolls they take on mind and body.
A transcendent journey about growth and healing, ancestry and honoring one's roots and expatriation, and rising up to find a home within yourself. Divided into five chapters and illustrated by Kaur, the sun and her flowers is a journey of wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming. A celebration of love in all its forms.
A collection of language-driven, imaginative poetry from the winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series Open Competition. Jennifer Kronovet's poetry is inflected by her fraught, ecstatic relationship with language—sentences, words, phonemes, punctuation—and how meaning is both gained and lost in the process of communicating. In The Wug Test, named for a method by which a linguist discovered how deeply imprinted the cognitive instinct toward acquiring language is in children, Kronovet questions whether words are objects we should escape from or embrace.
Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship.
From the two-term Poet Laureate of the United States Billy Collins comes his first volume of new and selected poems in twelve years. Aimless Love combines fifty new poems with generous selections from his four most recent books— Nine Horses, The Trouble with Poetry, Ballistics, and Horoscopes for the Dead. Collins's unmistakable voice, which brings together plain speech with imaginative surprise, is clearly heard on every page, reminding us how he has managed to enrich the tapestry of contemporary poetry and greatly expand its audience.
Resources at the Alexandria Library
Listen to the Poet investigates two Arizona spoken word poetry groups—a community group and a high school club—that are both part of the same youth organization. Exploring the writing lives and poetry of several members, Wendy R. Williams takes readers inside a writing workshop and poetry slam and reveals that schools have much to learn about writing, performance, community, and authorship from groups like these and from youth writers themselves.
Selected by Joy Harjo as the winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, Emily Skaja's debut collection is a fiery, hypnotic book that confronts the dark questions and menacing silences around gender, sexuality, and violence. Brute arises, brave and furious, from the dissolution of a relationship, showing how such endings necessitate self-discovery and reinvention.
From personal to collective to imagined histories, Dameron's poems explore essential, perennial questions emblemized by natural disasters, family struggles, racism, and the experiences of travel abroad. Though she reaches for conclusions that cannot be unveiled, her investigations exhibit the creative act of poetry as a source of consolation and resolution.
Mr. West covers the main events in superstar Kanye West's life while also following the poet on her year spent researching, writing, and pregnant. The book explores how we are drawn to celebrities―to their portrayal in the media―and how we sometimes find great private meaning in another person's public story, even across lines of gender and race. Blake's aesthetics take her work from prose poems to lineated free verse to tightly wound lyrics to improbably successful sestinas. The poems fully engage pop culture as a strange, complicated presence that is revealing of America itself. This is a daring debut collection and a groundbreaking work. An online reader's companion will be available at http://sarahblake.site.wesleyan.edu.
Practical Water is, like Brenda Hillman's previous two books, Cascadia and Pieces of Air in the Epic, both an elemental meditation and an ecopoetics; this time her subject is water: Taoist water, baptismal water, water from the muses' fountains, the practical waters of hydrology from which we draw our being -- and the stilled water in a glass in a Senate chamber.
Carefully wrought and passionate, Stephan Torre's poetry considers life and work on the edge of wild lands, wrestling with one of the central paradoxes of the human condition: the drive to change and conquer the very wilderness that is the source of sanctuary and spiritual renewal. Wilderness settings permeate Torre's work, from Wyoming's flathead Lake to the south-central coast of California to the spruce forests and subsistence farms of British Columbia's Frazier River Valley. Images evocative of manual labor also abound-axle grease, wood shavings, machinery rusting in abandoned fields- as Torre realizes his themes with unprecedented empathy and lyric intensity.
Resources at the Arlington Library
In her second poetry collection, Barbara Kingsolver offers reflections on the practical, the spiritual, and the wild. She begins with &;how to&; poems addressing everyday matters such as being hopeful, married, divorced; shearing a sheep; praying to unreliable gods; doing nothing at all; and of course, flying. Next come rafts of poems about making peace (or not) with the complicated bonds of friendship and family, and making peace (or not) with death, in the many ways it finds us. Some poems reflect on the redemptive powers of art and poetry itself; others consider where everything begins.
Closing the book are poems that celebrate natural wonders; birdsong and ghost-flowers, ruthless ants, clever shellfish, coral reefs, deadly deserts, and thousand-year-old beech trees; all speaking to the daring project of belonging to an untamed world beyond ourselves.
This luminous collection demonstrates Momaday's mastery and love of language and the matters closest to his heart. To Momaday, words are sacred; language is power. Spanning nearly fifty years, the poems gathered here illuminate the human condition, Momaday's connection to his Kiowa roots, and his spiritual relationship to the American landscape.
For fans of Amanda Gorman's The Hill We Climb and Morgan Parker's There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, comes a diverse poetry collection like no other. From two Black women of two different generations, I am The Rage provides insights that no think piece on racism can; putting readers in the position of feeling, reflecting, and facing what it means to be Black in America.
Through poems that are as unforgettably beautiful as they are accessible, Kate Bear proves herself to truly be an exemplary voice in modern poetry. Her words make women feel seen in their own bodies, in their own marriages, and in their own lives. Her poems are those you share with your mother, your daughter, your sister, and your friends.
In Dearly, Margaret Atwood's first collection of poetry in over a decade, Atwood addresses themes such as love, loss, the passage of time, the nature of nature and - zombies. Her new poetry is introspective and personal in tone, but wide-ranging in topic. In poem after poem, she casts her unique imagination and unyielding, observant eye over the landscape of a life carefully and intuitively lived.
From NPR correspondent and New York Times bestselling author, Kwame Alexander, comes a powerful and provocative collection of poems that cut to the heart of the entrenched racism and oppression in America and eloquently explores ongoing events. A book in the tradition of James Baldwin's A Report from Occupied Territory; Light for the World to See is a rap session on race. A lyrical response to the struggles of Black lives in our world . . . to America's crisis of conscience . . . to the centuries of loss, endless resilience, and unstoppable hope.
Resources at the Prince William Public Library
More and more people are turning to poetry as an antidote to divisiveness, negativity, anxiety, and the frenetic pace of life. How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope offers readers uplifting, deeply felt, and relatable poems by well-known poets from all walks of life and all parts of the US, including inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, and others.
Touching on subjects like first love, lost love, individuality and the passing of time, each poem captures the fleeting moments we all experience and which stick with us, shaping us into the people we become.
Organized in four sections Inception, Longing, Chaos, and Epiphany K.Y. Robinson's debut poetry collection explores what it is to want in spite of trauma, shame, injustice, and mental illness. It is one survivor's powerful testimony, and a love letter "to those who lie awake burning.".
"Today Means Amen" has become an anthem of sorts to thousands, who find themselves reflected in its pain, its fierceness, its tenderness - but also in its triumphant culminating refrain: You made it You made it You made it Here. The poems in Sierra's new book explore the rocky terrains of love, family, and womanhood with this same remarkable honesty and generosity. Today Means Amen brings this important young poet's work to an even broader audience.
R. H. Sin returns with a force in Planting Gardens in Graves: a powerful collection of poetry that hones in on the themes dearest to his readers. This original volume celebrates connection, mourns heartbreak, and above all, empowers its readers to seek the love they deserve.
A BreakBeat Poets anthology, Black Girl Magic celebrates and canonizes the words of Black women across the diaspora.
Resources at the Loudon County Public Library
Grammy Award-nominated, platinum-selling musician Halsey is heralded as one of the most compelling voices of her generation. In I Would Leave Me If I Could, she reveals never-before-seen poetry of longing, love, and the nuances of bipolar disorder
From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. In this new work, Arthur Sze employs a wide range of voices--from lichen on a ceiling to a man behind on his rent--and his mythic imagination continually evokes how humans are endangering the planet; yet, balancing rigor with passion, he seizes the significant and luminous and transforms these moments into riveting and enduring poetry.
A celebration of hope. An encounter with grace. A restoration of the heart. A healing of wounds. An anthem of freedom. All Along You Were Blooming is the ultimate love letter from the pen of popular Instagram poet Morgan Harper Nichols to your mind, to your heart, to your soul, and to your body. Morgan Harper Nichols delivers a striking collection of illustrated poetry and prose, inviting you to "stumble into the sunlight" and delight in the wild and boundless grace you've been given.
Following the success of New York Times bestsellers Dumpty and Trumpty Dumpty Wanted a Crown, award-winning actor, author, and illustrator John Lithgow presents the third book in his runaway hit series. A Confederacy of Dumptys takes us through a history of twenty-five "American Scoundrels" in this all-new collection of Lithgow's satirical poems and illustrations.
A new collection of poetry from one of our most renowned contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham In her latest stunning collection, Jorie Graham engages with her usual subjects'nature, form, human life'in urgent and brilliant new ways. Called "our most formidable nature poet," Graham is an essential voice in this time of environmental and social calamity, urging us to attention and action.
From poet, meditator, and speaker Yung Pueblo, comes a collection of poetry and prose that explores the movement from self-love to unconditional love, the power of letting go, and the wisdom that comes when we truly try to know ourselves. It serves as a reminder to the reader that healing, transformation, and freedom are possible.