POC and Poetry

This year as part of my 2015 resolutions I am posting more post about POC authors and characters.  This has been a fun and great idea for me and my blog because I get a chance to show off a few authors and books that don't get that much time in the spotlight.  

Since April is National Poetry Month I thought I would highlight a few books of poetry by POC authors.  Feel free to join me and post a something on your blog about as well. 

What is POC?

Well, basically it stands for Person of Color.  All Colors! All non-white races are counted as POC.
Previous POC posts
POC Books I Want to Read This Year
POC Children Books
Favorite Female POC Authors
Favorite POC Books from 2014

Click on the covers to go to the books Amazon page.

~ Poetry Books By POC Authors ~

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
National Book Award Finalist
#1 Best Seller in Amazon's African American Poetry

Accounts of racially charged interactions, insidious and flagrant, transpiring in private and in the public eye, distill the immediate emotional intensity of individual experience with tremendous precision while allowing ambiguity, ambivalence, contradiction, and exhaustion to remain in all their fraught complexity. . . . Once again Rankine inspires sympathy and outrage, but most of all a will to take a deep look at ourselves and our society. (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

 

   

A Poem I Love by Maya Angelou - Phenomenal Woman

Clouds by Sandra Cisneros

Before you became a cloud, you were an ocean, roiled and

murmuring like a mouth.

You were the shadows of a cloud cross-

ing over a field of tulips.

You were the tears of a man who cried

into a plaid handkerchief.

You were the sky without a hat.

Your

heart puffed and flowered like sheets drying on a line.

And when you were a tree, you listened to the trees and the tree

things trees told you.

You were the wind in the wheels of a red

bicycle.

You were the spidery Mariatattooed on the hairless arm

of a boy in dowtown Houston.

You were the rain rolling off the

waxy leaves of a magnolia tree.

A lock of straw-colored hair

wedged between the mottled pages of a Victor Hugo novel.

A

crescent of soap.

A spider the color of a fingernail.

The black nets

beneath the sea of olive trees.

A skein of blue wool.

A tea saucer

wrapped in newspaper.

An empty cracker tin.

A bowl of blueber-

ries in heavy cream.

White wine in a green-stemmed glass.

And when you opened your wings to wind, across the punched-

tin sky above a prison courtyard, those condemned to death and

those condemned to life watched how smooth and sweet a white

cloud glides.

What poems from a POC poet do you like?  Share in the comments below. 

UPCOMING TOPICS

May 14: POC books on my shelf right now

May 28: POC book covers I love

June 11: POC book spotlight

June 25: POC YA book(s)