Poetry Box Featuring Audre Lorde

The Poetry Box has been curated in collaboration with Poetry Is Not a Luxury, who always inspires us with their commitment to infuse our everyday with poetry. Says Poetry Is Not a Luxury: “Thrilled to be curating monthly Poetry Book Boxes in collaboration with Boxwalla. The first Box will feature three books
and a bookish gift…So much of who and what we are is inside the pages of the books we read, and I am honored to help readers fill their bookshelves.”

The first Poetry Box contains:

1. The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, edited by Roxane Gay.Audre Lorde is the patron saint of the Poetry Is Not a Luxury account, so it was a given that her writing would be in the very first Poetry Box!
   Self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, and one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. This essential reader features some of Lorde’s most impactful writing, selected and introduced by one of our most powerful contemporary voices on race and gender, Roxane Gay.
2. Alive at the End of the World by Saeed Jones.In haunted poems glinting with laughter, Saeed Jones explores the public and private betrayals of life as we know it. With verve, wit, and elegant craft, Jones strips away American artifice in order to reveal the intimate grief of a mourning son and the collective grief bearing down on all of us.
3. Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara.Lunch Poems, first published in 1964 by City Lights Books as number nineteen in the Pocket Poets series, is widely considered to be Frank O’Hara’s freshest and most accomplished collection of poetry. These are the compelling and formally inventive poems―casually composed, for example, in his office at The Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime or on the Staten Island Ferry en route to a poetry reading―that made O’Hara a dynamic leader of the “New York School” of poets.