Suggested Readings
So you want to start reading long poems?
I try to read Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) once every year or two. It is a mystical, dense, and incredibly intelligent retelling of the Iliad in twentieth-century St. Lucia. Walcott’s language is unmatchable. And it’s a narrative joy, with magical realism, myth, romance, death, history all intertwined with ease. A true poet’s poet.
For a theoretical and stylistic counterpart to Walcott, read Kamau Brathwaithe’s The Arrivants (1973). A jazz-inspired, visceral, and deeply pointed exploration of the generational weight of imperialism, the scar of slavery, and the resilience of a people harmed.
I had a bit of an existential crisis reading Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman, 1855) while doing grueling hours of data integrity for Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada one summer. There’s something about reading the quintessential American poem about unity and hope while scrolling through hundreds of residency applications daily. But the poem itself is surreal and delectable.
Are you interested in a contemporary magical romance, that’s also a mythical retelling? Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (1998). It’s funny, it’s profound, and it’s tender. And, it’s Anne Carson. Is it a poem though, or a novel? Who knows.
Etel Adnan’s long poems in Time (2019) offer such an intimate look into the Lebanese-American’s life, friendships, and torments. The poems consist mostly of ‘postcards’, short vignettes that pack a punch.
The best poem I read in 2025 was Canisia Lubrin’s The World After Rain (2025), a book for her late mother. I am still processing this one. I can not recommend it enough.
Dionne Brand has a few phenomenal long poems, including No Language is Neutral (1990) which meanders effortlessly in a stream-of-consciousness ode to her home Trinidad, her mother, her heritage, and Ossuaries (2010) which is a cryptic, labyrinthine, time-jumping narrative poem about political resistance in the modern era.
The poem that closes off Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin’s Fire Cider Rain (2022), “Mama, Where Does Your Light Leak?” is ripe with language that will make your mouth water. The way the poem honours the power of motherhood, the power of a river, and the power of love, will leave you feeling warm.
Then there’s Ishion Hutchinson’s School of Instructions (2023), with its sensuous, biblical language, its reimagining of history through the eyes of those history have left mostly behind. Effused with lyricism that is both witty and memorable in its profundity.
The Work (2024) by Bren Simmers is heartwrenching. Love and loss reach unseen-before odds as Simmers works through the caring of her ailing parents. There is too much to say about this collection and the long poems that will absorb you into wholeness and brokenness. My favourite poems of 2024.
Octavio Paz’s Sunstone (1957) is a mighty, bright poem tattered with kindness, holiness, and grace. It is a spiritual, yet historical poem, one in which magical lines such as “my thoughts are nothing more than its birds” and “when I am I am another” make you both epiphanous and small.
And the great Gary Snyder’s Mountain and Rivers Without End (1992), a lifetime of writing, a collection rich with long, circular, odes to the more-than-human, to spirituality, and to writing itself. O world, what would you be without art?
Other readings of note: Ezra Pound’s Cantos (if you are brave), Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (if you want to be in the presence of genius), William Carlos Williams’ Paterson (if you really want to learn about Paterson, New Jersey), Seamus Heaney’s “Station Island” (if you want to be a better writer), Natalie Rice’s long poems in Scorch (if you want to feel the pang of climate change), and Louis Dudek’s Europe (if you too remember fondly that cheap airliner that would fly you to Paris for $70 if you spent three days in Reykjavik on the way).