Which Poetry Collection Are You According to Your Star Sign?
12 Poetry Collections for Every Reader Under the Sun
by Mary Kelly
An electric debut, it comes as no surprise that Aries relates to Olivia Gatwood’s New American Best Friend. A moving poetry collection that throws itself deep into girlhood, violence, adolescence, and celebration, New American Best Friend, like an Aries, can undo the knot in all our throats and present joy at the core of everything.
My Grief, the Sun is Sanna Wani’s delicate tracing of love, grief, and language – showing the reader the light that surrounds everything we know. Winner of the 2023 Trillium Award for Poetry and a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, My Grief, the Sun is a balancing act of intimacy and playfulness. Travelling across erasure poems to confessionals, My Grief, the Sun is a sturdy, comforting read, much like all of the Tauruses in our lives.
Like Gemini, Joelle Barron’s Excerpts from a Burned Letter are many things at once; historical and contemporary. Inside and outside the body. Soft and explicit. Excerpts from a Burned Letter is a collection of poetry that is mighty and refuses to shy away from the space of shame that girlhood, queerness, and the body is often wedged into. The curiosity and resilience of Gemini is symbolized in every page and metaphor in Barron’s triumphant collection.
Unyielding and magical, Marina Tsvetaeva’s Selected Poems is searing with care and protection. Like Cancers, there is an ability to find strength even amidst the echoes of hardship. Considered a classic and necessary body of work, Tsvetaeva embeds bravery, as that of Cancer, into every word and punctuation throughout the collection. It was difficult to see this collection as anything other than the cardinal sign of Cancer.
Nobody can stop Hera Lindsay Bird’s debut poetry collection, Hera Lindsay Bird, from making itself heard and seen. Charged and compulsive, Hera Lindsay Bird is a daring collection of poetry highlighting sex, Narnia, queerness, and Monica from Friends. This daring debut is only fitting for Leo, which is to say this collection is enigmatic and unobstructed by anyone and anything.
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and the Whiting Award, Hard Damage is an exemplary collection in which Aria Aber interrogates the self, and citizenship, through personal and cultural Afghan-American relations. There is something deeply juxtaposing about this collection with its detailed and controlled free verse poetry, making Hard Damage an inherent Virgo with how it systematically knows exactly where the narrative leads, and how it aims to get there.
Written as W.S Merwin during the loss of his eyesight, Garden Time is a harmonious reminder of hope and light. As are Libras, Garden Time is a permeation of clarity and small wonders. You cannot help but hold this collection close, re-reading each poem to find something new. How can a book of goodness, simplicity, birds, and charm be anything other than a Libra?
A fearless book, Fariha Róisín’s How to Cure a Ghost brings forward the empowerment of womanhood, motherhood, and queerness. Róisín holds up questions of the self and brings the reader on a journey of shifting bitterness into acceptance and forgiveness. Like Scorpios, How to Cure a Ghost is committed to giving answers to suffering and shame. Each poem presents unparalleled passion, which no Scorpio will be able to turn away from.
Washes, Prays is a novel-in-verse that is both hungry and magnetic, pulling the reader into the portrait of the protagonist, Coocoo. The 2017 RBC Bronwen Wallace winner, Naga writes an ever-shifting collection that shares kinship to Sagittarius’s ability to evolve and adapt to presented challenges. With a complex kind of bravery, Washes, Prays is curious for answers, just like every Sagittarius I know.
Part poetry, part essay. What Kind of Daughter by Rayanne Haines is a collection that balances, carefully, gender, motherhood, grief, and identity through the loss of Haines’ mother. Affirming, strong, and deeply resilient, What Kind of Daughter is a poetry collection that takes charge in navigating unknown parts of the self. As does a Capricorn, What Kind of Daughter presents a wisdom that grounds the reader from the opening line.
Morbid. Critical. Comforting. Animalistic. Aquarius, or Red Rover Red Rover by Bob Hicok? Published in 2021, Red Rover Red Rover is a poetry collection of tangents, allowing the brain to exist on the page as its most curious self. Much like an Aquarius, Red Rover Red Rover only seeks to be as it is, which is to say, absurd and invigorating. There is a deep consciousness to Hicok’s work which finds itself tumbling into the definition of the similarly vibrant air sign.
Gentle and imaginative, All of it Singing is a strong compilation of all of Linda Gregg’s most striking poetry. Sharing similarities with Pisces, All of it Singing is both dreamy and passionate. A collection so vast that one can read from beginning to end, again and again. Gregg writes about the crux of everything we know and experience, love and more love – that the greatest skill is one’s sensitivity, making you wish you were born between February and March.
Mary Kelly (she/her) is an Aotearoa-born writer and editor currently residing on the unceded ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nation. She is a graduate of The University of British Columbia and The Writer’s Studio. You can find Mary editing for SAD Magazine and reading here at ONLY POEMS. Her work is featured and forthcoming in Canadian Literature Journal, Serviette, Ensemble, The Kingfisher, and elsewhere.
