100 books like neckbone

By Avery R. Young,

Here are 100 books that neckbone fans have personally recommended if you like neckbone. Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of I'm Always so Serious

Olatunde Osinaike Author Of Tender Headed

From my list on contemporary poetry books revisiting music.

Why am I passionate about this?

I listen to about eight albums of music per week. At least one per day and another of that bunch gathers a re-listen, though more warrant the same! Listening is my favorite hobby. I name it like one would rock climbing or gardening, and though we are here connecting through words and swapping ideas, it all starts with my ear. I most want to feel what I’d like to know, and it is possible that music sometimes held the work of thinking on my behalf. In writing my book, I was most interested in what it meant to be offered the world in such a personal yet composed way each day. 

Olatunde's book list on contemporary poetry books revisiting music

Olatunde Osinaike Why did Olatunde love this book?

I am always on the verge of returning home. Sometimes, it’s the food; other times, it’s the memory. I am not from New Orleans, but this book is phenomenal in its guidance of a city and what it means to name any place home.

From its onset, this collection moves through music and mythology as a means for sorting through devastation while placing life a step ahead of it.

I’d recommend this book to any seasoned (or first) reader of poetry on the search for beauty around the corner and a reminder of how close we are to it.

By Karisma Price,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked I'm Always so Serious as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.


Book cover of Mausoleum of Flowers

Olatunde Osinaike Author Of Tender Headed

From my list on contemporary poetry books revisiting music.

Why am I passionate about this?

I listen to about eight albums of music per week. At least one per day and another of that bunch gathers a re-listen, though more warrant the same! Listening is my favorite hobby. I name it like one would rock climbing or gardening, and though we are here connecting through words and swapping ideas, it all starts with my ear. I most want to feel what I’d like to know, and it is possible that music sometimes held the work of thinking on my behalf. In writing my book, I was most interested in what it meant to be offered the world in such a personal yet composed way each day. 

Olatunde's book list on contemporary poetry books revisiting music

Olatunde Osinaike Why did Olatunde love this book?

Love is made more possible by every violence it has overcome.

Throughout Summerhill’s sophomoric collection, I found myself turning toward play, both in the pause that suddenly arrived after a line that hits and in the music I turned on after a line that urged reconsideration.

Even for the avid fan of Frank Ocean’s discography, this book serves as a vital push toward questioning what it is we deem valuable. A must-read for self-declarations of grace and hope in the face of racial, historical, and social brutality. 

By Daniel Summerhill,

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

A poetry collection that celebrates Black culture, creativity, and memory.

From Kendrick to Kanye, to a Sunday in Oakland with Frank Ocean's falsetto in the foreground, Mausoleum of Flowers is still life set against the backdrop of demise. Daniel Summerhill's sophomore collection grabs fate by the throat and confronts it. What does it mean to continue living when your friends are dying beside you? This collection melds an exploration of spirituality and rebellion with Black tradition. Summerhill's poems invite the reader near in order to self-excavate and explore tones of loss, love, and light.


Book cover of PlayHouse: Poems

Olatunde Osinaike Author Of Tender Headed

From my list on contemporary poetry books revisiting music.

Why am I passionate about this?

I listen to about eight albums of music per week. At least one per day and another of that bunch gathers a re-listen, though more warrant the same! Listening is my favorite hobby. I name it like one would rock climbing or gardening, and though we are here connecting through words and swapping ideas, it all starts with my ear. I most want to feel what I’d like to know, and it is possible that music sometimes held the work of thinking on my behalf. In writing my book, I was most interested in what it meant to be offered the world in such a personal yet composed way each day. 

Olatunde's book list on contemporary poetry books revisiting music

Olatunde Osinaike Why did Olatunde love this book?

Noting my fortune to have been a reader of this book before its official surfacing to the national public, I was first drawn to those poems that again gave me back my memory. Poems reminisced on Migos, Blu & Exile, and others.

Soon after, it's display of self-portraiture unfolded into a mastery of wit, celebrating how music is always a task of discovery first.

“I saw stranger; looked again, I saw friend,” Watkins writes with an intelligence marked by the fruit of reorientation and heart that comes with inhabiting and celebrating your own tribe.

By Jorrell Watkins,

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

Poems on Black joy, masculinity, and the music that transforms a space into a home

Jorrell Watkins's debut poetry collection is a polyvocal, musically charged disruption of the United States's fixation on drug and gun culture. The poems in Play|House embody many identities, including son, brother, fugitive, bluesman, karate practitioner, and witness. Throughout, Watkins inflects a Black/trap vernacular that defamiliarizes the urban Southern landscape. Across three sections of poetry scored by hip-hop, blues, and trap, Watkins considers how music is a dwelling and wonders which histories, memories, and people haunt each home. Past figures such as John Coltrane, Billie Holiday,…


Book cover of Imperial Liquor: Poems

Olatunde Osinaike Author Of Tender Headed

From my list on contemporary poetry books revisiting music.

Why am I passionate about this?

I listen to about eight albums of music per week. At least one per day and another of that bunch gathers a re-listen, though more warrant the same! Listening is my favorite hobby. I name it like one would rock climbing or gardening, and though we are here connecting through words and swapping ideas, it all starts with my ear. I most want to feel what I’d like to know, and it is possible that music sometimes held the work of thinking on my behalf. In writing my book, I was most interested in what it meant to be offered the world in such a personal yet composed way each day. 

Olatunde's book list on contemporary poetry books revisiting music

Olatunde Osinaike Why did Olatunde love this book?

Both keen and forgiving, this book traces the amorous and lofty histories of Black masculinity in America while also delighting in the surprises surrounding its speaker(s).

No song is without a community to which it belongs. We sing our songs together. This realization is especially stark and exacting in this book as it chronicles the bounty of lyrics from Marvin Gaye to the Delfonics.

By Amaud Jamaul Johnson,

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

Imperial Liquor is a chronicle of melancholy, a reaction to the monotony of racism. These poems concern loneliness, fear, fatigue, rage, and love; they hold fatherhood held against the vulnerability of the black male body, aging, and urban decay. Part remembrance, part swan song for the Compton, California of the 1980s, Johnson examines the limitations of romance to heal broken relationships or rebuild a broken city. Slow Jams, red-lit rooms, cheap liquor, like seduction and betrayal - what's more American? This book tracks echoes, rides the residue of music "after the love is gone."


Book cover of Felon: Poems

Keri Blakinger Author Of Corrections in Ink: A Memoir

From my list on to read in prison.

Why am I passionate about this?

Now, I’m a journalist who covers prisons—but a decade ago I was in prison myself. I’d landed there on a heroin charge after years of struggling with addiction as I bumbled my way through college. Behind bars, I read voraciously, almost as if making up for all the assignments I’d left half-done during my drug years. As I slowly learned to rebuild and reinvent myself, I also learned about recovery and hope, and the reality of our nation’s carceral system really is. Hopefully, these books might help you learn those things, too.

Keri's book list on to read in prison

Keri Blakinger Why did Keri love this book?

I read so much poetry in prison—words about survival, and loss, and absence. But one thing I did not read was poetry about people who’d been in prison like me, and wish I had. This poetry collection wasn’t out then, but I think I would have loved it if it were. 

By Reginald Dwayne Betts,

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

In fierce, agile poems, Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration-canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood and grace-and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of post-incarceration existence in traditional and newfound forms, from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume's radiant conclusion.


Book cover of Tougaloo Blues

James E. Cherry Author Of Edge of the Wind

From my list on contemporary African American authors.

Why am I passionate about this?

I'm a contemporary African American writer born and raised in the South. It was this sense of place that has shaped my artistic sensibilities. I was in my mid-twenties, searching, seeking for answers and direction on my own, when other Black southern writers were instrumental in pointing me in the right direction: Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, Ernest J Gaines, Alice Walker, Arna Bontemps, Albert Murray, just to name a handful. Their writings were revelatory. The same issues that they were dealing with a generation earlier were the same ones I was struggling with every day. It opened my eyes, mind, heart and creativity to put into perspective what I was feeling. 

James' book list on contemporary African American authors

James E. Cherry Why did James love this book?

Kelly Norman Ellis is the Chairperson for the Department of English, Foreign Languages, and Literatures at Chicago State University. And like those who have made the “Great Migration” before her, she too has taken the South with her in this wonderful debut collection of poetry. In this book, she deftly taps into the Blues ethos to conjure vivid imagery of a Mississippi unique with its patois, cuisine, and customs that have unmistakably shaped her worldview as an adult. It was the South that would try to degrade and dehumanize Black life. But it was the same South where family and a village would instill pride, confidence, and self-worth. This is a book of a poet coming to terms with where she has come from and celebrating the journey. It reinforces the notion that everywhere you go, home is already there.

By Kelly Norman Ellis,

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

This collection of poems explores the author's southern roots through a blues/narrative voice and revisits her Mississippi youth, while revealing the contemporary voice of a Black woman searching for place and community outside of her southern past.


Book cover of Electric Arches

Sidik Fofana Author Of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs

From my list on poetry collections with the best sense of voice.

Why am I passionate about this?

I love hip hop. It’s basically poetry with a beat. I'm always thinking of literature in terms of rhythm and delivery. Creatively, my inspirations come from lyricists. I look at poets the same way. They accomplish wonderful feats with words. From years of listening to classic albums, I can feel the aliveness of a good verse. It’s also an element I try to tap into as a fiction writer. I'm a recipient of the 2023 Whiting Award and was also named an Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction in 2018. My work has appeared in the Sewanee Review and Granta. He is the author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs. 

Sidik's book list on poetry collections with the best sense of voice

Sidik Fofana Why did Sidik love this book?

Eve wrote a separate poem to incarcerated youth encouraging them to embrace their emotionality.

She said their tears were rain that they showed existed. It is a powerful poem, an incredible gesture to those working to overcome personal battles. Electric Arches, similarly, is everything you’d hope that a millennial would write. It updates the culture.

She has this poem about Emmett Till as an old man grocery shopping. The normalcy of this imagined life is the sadness of the piece. It basically said that if this man were alive, he'd be a regular guy going about his errands.

By Eve L Ewing,

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

Electric Arches is an imaginative exploration of Black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose. Blending stark realism with the surreal and fantastic, Ewing's narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago to an unspecified future, navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstances - Koko Taylor is a tall-tale hero; LeBron James travels through time and encounters his teenage self. Electric Arches invites conversations about race, gender, the city, identity, and the joy and pain of growing up.


Book cover of I am The Rage: A Black Poetry Collection

Lynda Allen Author Of Grace Reflected

From my list on life-changing world-rocking books.

Why am I passionate about this?

I think of myself as a listener and life in progress. As a poet and author, I’m always listening to the words that move through my heart. I’m also a spiritual seeker, always looking for the Divine in the world around me and almost always surprised by the ways it shows up when I’m paying attention. Yet, there’s another part of me that is a Jersey girl through and through, looking for humor or irreverence in the face of life’s challenges. All these aspects come together in an unusual harmony, creating an openness to being changed by the things that come into my life. Hence, a list of life-changing books.

Lynda's book list on life-changing world-rocking books

Lynda Allen Why did Lynda love this book?

This book was released at a time of great personal reflection for me. I was involved with an organization called Coming To the Table, through which I was learning more about the legacy of enslavement in the United States. Dr. McGowan’s book provides an opportunity for deep listening to the experiences of a Black woman in America. The words and experiences were challenging to sit with because of the depth of the pain, but that is what deep listening is about, being able to be still with what I am hearing and do my best to be with it. 

The poems in this collection allowed me to take a glimpse into Dr. McGowan’s life for a short time and feel the darkness she is surrounded by in our country simply because of the color of her skin. It was not an easy or comfortable experience to read i am the…

By Martina McGowan, Diana Ejaita (illustrator),

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

I am the Rage is not just a poetry book. It is a call-to-action.
This evocative collection of thirty poems puts readers in the position of feeling, reflecting, and empathizing with what it means to be Black in America today. Dr. Martina McGowan, a doctor and grandmother who has been a victim of and an advocate against social, racial, and sexual injustices, uses powerful free verse poetry to express the range of emotions, thoughts, and grief she had following the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, and the ongoing attacks against the Black…


Book cover of Brown Girl Dreaming

Akana Phenix Author Of The Empire Wars

From my list on oppression for young adults.

Why am I passionate about this?

Visceral, transformative books have the capacity to improve lives. I am impassioned about books of oppression because of their ability to lend a voice to unspeakable, excruciating accounts of subjugation. Voices that might’ve otherwise went unheard or not as deeply understood as within the integral pages of a book to readers. Therefore, I believe it's important to recommend life-changing books to the youth to inform them of world oppression. As they, themselves, enter into responsibility and power. Whether it’s through brilliant, allegorical fiction or pivotal nonfiction, we can educate the future of humanity itself. Together, we can all foster a better world.

Akana's book list on oppression for young adults

Akana Phenix Why did Akana love this book?

For young readers of poetry, this is an excellent read. It’s set in the Jim Crow and Civil Rights Eras, and it truly is an age-defining book. I loved the memoir aspect of it, and I found myself caring not only about each word in this book but every soul. 

By Jacqueline Woodson,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked Brown Girl Dreaming as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 10, 11, 12, and 13.

What is this book about?

The compelling story of a young Black girl growing up in 1960-70s America - a multi-award winning New York Times bestseller and President Obama's 'O' Book Club pick.

Brown Girl Dreaming is the unforgettable story of Jacqueline Woodson's childhood, told in vivid and accessible blank verse. She shares what it was like to grow up as an African-American in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, never truly feeling at home, and discovering the first sparks of an incredible, lifelong gift for writing. It's packed with wonderful reflections on family and on place, in a way that will appeal to…


Book cover of Book of Hours: Poems

Jan Richardson Author Of Sparrow: A Book of Life and Death and Life

From my list on grief when you don’t want to read about grief.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am an artist, writer, and director of The Wellspring Studio, LLC. When my husband and creative partner, the singer/songwriter Garrison Doles, died unexpectedly just a few years after we were married, I found that I very much did not want to read about grief. I especially did not want to read about managing it or coping with it. Still, there were books that mysteriously found their way to me and drew me in, not with strategies for getting through the grief but with creative, poetic, artful, sometimes offbeat tellings of living with sorrow. These are some of my favorites among them.

Jan's book list on grief when you don’t want to read about grief

Jan Richardson Why did Jan love this book?

Kevin Young traces the inextricable bonds of death and love in this poetry collection that encompasses the accidental death of his father and, in the thick of that loss, the birth of his son and the beginning of his own fatherhood.

I am drawn to how he writes about the repetitions and informal rituals of grief—the necessary ones involved in the immediate aftermath of loss, and the ongoing ones that ask for our attention again and again, becoming a doorway into what still waits for us. Young is wonderfully stubborn in keeping his eyes open to the searing awfulness of losing as well as to the breathtaking, complicated wonder of life that persists.

By Kevin Young,

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

A decade after the sudden and tragic loss of his father, we witness the unfolding of grief. “In the night I brush / my teeth with a razor,” he tells us, in one of the collection’s piercing two-line poems. Capturing the strange silence of bereavement (“Not the storm / but the calm / that slays me”), Kevin Young acknowledges, even celebrates, life’s passages, his loss transformed and tempered in a sequence about the birth of his son: in “Crowning,” he delivers what is surely one of the most powerful birth poems written by a man, describing “her face / full…


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