Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue

Take a fascinating and nostalgic look back at children’s nursery rhymes from past times, their origins, their controversies, and their evolution through the centuries.

Thomas Sayers Ellis is one of your contemporary poets to look and for, and one from the African-American community at that too. His first full-length collection, The Maverick Room, won the John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares. And if we're judging his talent and skill from his work, then we can only imagine how far he'd go because Genuine Negro Hero definitely one ups his debut work.

John Ashbery is one of the most complex, philosophical and inventive poets of today's America. And this latest collection of poems is a bold, striking one. Dan Chiasson of the New York Times said, "[Ashbery's] game is to make an intentionally frivolous style express the full range of human feeling, and he remains funnier and better at it, a game he invented, than his many imitators." And wow, you just have to read it for yourself to see what he means.

"My heart throws its head against my ribs, / it's denting every bone it's venting something it has known since I arrived and felt it beat"

Powerful, powerful poems by Kate Tempest — because she appeals to the visceral and the raw. It's tearing apart and going deep into the concepts of sex and love, wealth and poverty, community and alienation. This is one collection that will leave you going wow.

U.S. Poet Laurete Juan Felipe Herrera brings us SkateFate, the life and story of Lucky Z in unique form. Short diary entries and a series of confident, colorful poems introduce readers to Lucky, a wheelchair-bound former skater and drag racer who became paralyzed after a car accident. Herrera's lyrical poems full of colourful imagery and amazing rhythm makes us truly yearn for more.

Now this is something you might want to slowly savour. It's not all poetry -— BAX 2015 is the second volume of an annual literary anthology compiling the best experimental writing in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. This year’s volume, guest edited by Douglas Kearney, features seventy-five works by some of the most exciting American poets and writers today, including established authors—like Dodie Bellamy, Anselm Berrigan, and Thomas Sayers Ellis. And trust us -— you'll get some amazing poems in there.

Understand the supernatural beliefs from all over the world with this insightful and beautifully written haikus by first-time poet Elancharan Gunasekaran. Get transported into the darkest parts of the underworld, and believe that you're definitely not alone when you travel into the good night.

Allen Ginsberg is your go-to if you want to read works of the Beat Generation. And "Howl", and "A Supermarket in California" is considered to be one of the principal works of that era. Also, fun fact: Lawrence Ferlinghetti immediately offered to published Ginsberg's work the moment he heard him perform "Howl".

For an understanding of modernist literature, T.S. Eliot is your go-to guy — he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his outstanding contribution to poetry in 1948. His collection of poems are a reflection of modernist Americana, and is definitely essential reading for anyone itching to learn more.

Emily Dickinson's poems were unique for its form and structure, as well as its subject. Her poems were often short, lack titles, and often makes use of unconventional capitalization and punctuation. This unique style definitely set her apart from a lot of her contemporaries from that era.

And to add to her aura of mystery, she always focused on death and immortality. Her poetry was a reflection of the death, illness and tragedy that plagued her throughout life. And this collection is truly an insight into what she may have been going through.

The brainiest poet to write in English could somehow wrench the language around and still make it speak in sonorous, memorable cadences: his ambition in Paradise Lost is breathtaking, but so is the fact that he delivered.

These are considered the best sonnets ever, and the best love poems ever. The poet puts his craft to situations that call for all his musicality and reason; the results attain a kind of perfection.