6 books like Lunch Poems

By Frank O'Hara,

Here are 6 books that Lunch Poems fans have personally recommended if you like Lunch Poems. Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Book cover of Today in the Taxi

Tina Cane Author Of Are You Nobody Too?

From my list on not all poets are dead.

Why am I passionate about this?

I learned how to write poetry by reading. Books have always been my main teachers. I try to read all kinds of work because there are so many different kinds of minds to learn from. When I discovered poetry as a teenager, it fascinated me on the level of the line. I spent a lot of time just looking at poems, without necessarily even reading themlet alone understanding them—because the form on the page was a revelation. It amazed me that people were allowed to do that! That I could choose to do that with wordsto explode a sentence across the white space or smash all the words together. 

Tina's book list on not all poets are dead

Tina Cane Why did Tina love this book?

I love prose poems, and they are a great introduction to poetry for those unfamiliar with the genre. I admire Sean Singer's singular sensibility, as he weaves the dailiness of driving a taxi with intimations of jazz, the divine, and insights into the human condition. I find this collection mesmerizing, and return to it over and again.

By Sean Singer,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Today in the Taxi as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Sean Singer's radiant and challenging body of work involves, much like Whitman's, nothing less than the ongoing interrogation of what a poem is. In this way his books are startlingly alive... I love in this work the sense that I am the grateful recipient of Singer's jazzy curation as I move from page to page. Today in the Taxi is threaded through with quotes from Kafka, facts about jazz musicians, musings from various thinkers, from a Cathar fragment to Martin Buber to Arthur Eddington to an anonymous comedian. The taxi is at once a real taxi and the microcosm of…


Book cover of Don't Call Us Dead: Poems

Tina Cane Author Of Are You Nobody Too?

From my list on not all poets are dead.

Why am I passionate about this?

I learned how to write poetry by reading. Books have always been my main teachers. I try to read all kinds of work because there are so many different kinds of minds to learn from. When I discovered poetry as a teenager, it fascinated me on the level of the line. I spent a lot of time just looking at poems, without necessarily even reading themlet alone understanding them—because the form on the page was a revelation. It amazed me that people were allowed to do that! That I could choose to do that with wordsto explode a sentence across the white space or smash all the words together. 

Tina's book list on not all poets are dead

Tina Cane Why did Tina love this book?

I believe Danez Smith is an important voice. I find Smith's poems powerful, poignant, and relevant. This collection has irreverence and reverence, humanity, fury, love, and a deep sense of urgency. It speaks to our country's history and present and demands we consider where we are headed.

Smith also has another stellar collection called Bluff, which was just released and promises to be a crucial contribution to contemporary poetry.

By Danez Smith,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Don't Call Us Dead as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection

“[Smith's] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy.”―The New Yorker

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality―the dangers…


Book cover of Any God Will Do

Tina Cane Author Of Are You Nobody Too?

From my list on not all poets are dead.

Why am I passionate about this?

I learned how to write poetry by reading. Books have always been my main teachers. I try to read all kinds of work because there are so many different kinds of minds to learn from. When I discovered poetry as a teenager, it fascinated me on the level of the line. I spent a lot of time just looking at poems, without necessarily even reading themlet alone understanding them—because the form on the page was a revelation. It amazed me that people were allowed to do that! That I could choose to do that with wordsto explode a sentence across the white space or smash all the words together. 

Tina's book list on not all poets are dead

Tina Cane Why did Tina love this book?

I think Virginia Konchan is one of the fiercest voices in contemporary poetry. This collection, in particular, harnesses an eloquent fury that is humorous, scathing, vulnerable, and resolute. Each poem crackles in a way that I find fascinating and exhilarating. 

Anyone who has suffered heartbreak will connect with Konchan's vulnerability and trenchant commentary.

By Virginia Konchan,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Any God Will Do as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

“There are no machine guns, or cameras, here.”

Any God Will Do is a collection that investigates the lines between worldliness and asceticism, belief and delusion, chance and design, desire and its transcendence. Internal and end rhyme structure these pithy and compact poems that are rife with classical, pop culture, and poetic allusions. They culminate in an argument that intimacy and creation through language are not only possible within a capitalist framework, but indeed may be the only ballasts we know.


Book cover of In the Language of My Captor

Tina Cane Author Of Are You Nobody Too?

From my list on not all poets are dead.

Why am I passionate about this?

I learned how to write poetry by reading. Books have always been my main teachers. I try to read all kinds of work because there are so many different kinds of minds to learn from. When I discovered poetry as a teenager, it fascinated me on the level of the line. I spent a lot of time just looking at poems, without necessarily even reading themlet alone understanding them—because the form on the page was a revelation. It amazed me that people were allowed to do that! That I could choose to do that with wordsto explode a sentence across the white space or smash all the words together. 

Tina's book list on not all poets are dead

Tina Cane Why did Tina love this book?

I love this book, because it fuses personal history with American history in the most searing, heartbreaking, and incisive ways.

I taught this book to high school students, alongside the work of James Baldwin, since they both call to account America's founding, its brutality, the moral injury and legacy of slavery, and also the corrosive nature of popular culture. My students were stunned. It woke them up and demanded that they pay attention.

By Shane McCrae,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked In the Language of My Captor as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry (2017)

Acclaimed poet Shane McCrae's latest collection is a book about freedom told through stories of captivity. Historical persona poems and a prose memoir at the center of the book address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. In the book's three sequences, McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, he confronts the myth that freedom can be based upon the power to dominate others, and, in poems about the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis in the last year of the Civil War, he interrogates the infrequently…


Book cover of Place: New Poems

Leah Naomi Green Author Of The More Extravagant Feast: Poems

From my list on spiritual ecological thought.

Why am I passionate about this?

Leah Naomi Green is the author of The More Extravagant Feast, selected by Li-Young Lee for the Walt Whitman Award of The Academy of American Poets. She received the 2021 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award for compassion, courage, truth-telling, and commitment to justice, as well an Academy of American Poets 2021 Treehouse Climate Action Poetry Prize. The More Extravagant Feast was named “one of the best books of 2020” by The Boston Globe, is a silver winner of the 2020 Nautilus Book Awards, and was featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered”. She lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia where she and her family homestead and grow or find much of their food for the year.

Leah's book list on spiritual ecological thought

Leah Naomi Green Why did Leah love this book?

There is not a better poet writing in English. For Graham, language is a beautiful, purposeful tool and she is using it, without pretense, to dig deeper and deeper into the ground of being. She asks the questions beneath the questions, and though she does not pretend to answer them, the reader shares and marvels in her asking, in her attention to being human and alive.

By Jorie Graham,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Place as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

“Graham’s poetry is among the most sensuously embodied and imaginative writing we have.”
—New York Times

“One of the most important living poets.”
—Library Journal

Place is a new collection of poems from Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham. An extraordinary American artist whom The New Yorker calls “a mesmerizing voice” Graham is renowned for poetry that is startling, original, and deeply relevant, and has been placed in the poetic lineage of such masters as T.S. Eliot and John Ashbery. In Place, Graham explores the ways in which our imagination, intuition, and experience aid us in navigating a world moving towards…


Book cover of The Drunken Boat: Selected Writings

Rosanna Warren Author Of Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters

From my list on France modern art, culture, and political conflict.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a poet, literary critic, translator, and biographer, and I grew up partly in France. I became obsessed with Max Jacob when I was twenty. Max Jacob—mystic, poet, painter, and suffering lover—took hold of me, and I found myself writing poems to him, in his voice, in my sketchbooks. They were among my first published poems: he redirected my life. A few years later I stumbled into writing his biography, never imagining that it would take thirty-five years: it came out from W. W. Norton in 2020, along with my most recent book of poems So Forth. I teach Comparative Literature in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Rosanna's book list on France modern art, culture, and political conflict

Rosanna Warren Why did Rosanna love this book?

Rimbaud is the inescapable, volcanically talented, revolutionary poet of late 19th century France, the boy who had mastered the classical idioms and forms of the art by the time he was fifteen, and by age eighteen was reinventing poetic language both in the prose poems of Illuminations and in visionary irregular lyrics. He stopped writing poetry at age twenty, but the poems he left behind helped to open the door to modern poetry around the world.

By Arthur Rimbaud, Mark Polizzotti (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Drunken Boat as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A new translation of the best and most provocative work by France's infamous rebel poet.

Poet, prodigy, precursor, punk: the short, precocious, uncompromisingly rebellious career of the poet Arthur Rimbaud is one of the legends of modern literature. By the time he was twenty, Rimbaud had written a series of poems that are not only masterpieces in themselves but that forever transformed the idea of what poetry is. Without him, surrealism is inconceivable, and his influence is palpable in artists as diverse as Henry Miller, John Ashbery, Bob Dylan, and Patti Smith. In this essential volume, renowned translator Mark Polizzotti…


3 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in ecology, New York City, and spirituality?

Ecology 82 books
New York City 1,137 books
Spirituality 314 books