I’ve always found poetry to be a consistent lifeline for navigating grief and this fall, more than ever it seems, reading about school shootings filled me with a kind of grief that keeps shifting between sadness and anger. I felt compelled to address the different nuances of this chaotic feeling by reaching for books that might respond to this particular grief on a spectrum.

As I’m sitting down to write these words, CNN reports show that there have been 46 school shootings since September 6th, 2024. By the time these words get to you, there may have been more. In light of these facts, the reading list I’m offering you has crystalized around trying to navigate an environment that uses social media to fast-track the desensitization to gun violence against underprivileged groups which, as of September 6th, once again includes ALL school-aged children in the US until June 2025.  I don’t know where to begin relating to a young human living a “back to school” experience that involves lockdowns and active shooter drills, but these six books might offer a way to begin.

The World that the Shooter Left Us by Cyrus Cassells

This collection will feel like a deeply political detour in the context of this list, but I often view poetry as an act of resistance, particularly in times of crisis. These poems pull back the curtain and force the reader to look at the brutality of white male America by showing its effects on those outside that specific category. While they make no excuses, the poems feel less like acts of punishment, and more like teachable moments, giving the reader an opportunity to choose witnessing either the bullet hole or the poem growing out of it. A poem from this collection that’s stayed with me is Harum-Scarum Photo Op, a straightforward narrative filled with many key actors with whom a reader can identify on the side of creating or consuming content, when neither side benefits the victim, the bawling, orphaned baby.

Words for Empty and Words for Full by Bob Hicok

This poetry collection is largely built around unraveling the world through language. Hicok pushes the limits of syntax and vocabulary the same way one may repeat a word so many times that it loses all meaning, a loss of control mirrored by situations in the speaker’s life. But as soon as the words and lines seem to descend into chaos, he refocuses the meaning and message in ways that give the reader a sense of hope, teaching how even trying to do the right thing IS the right thing to do.

The truly heartbreaking aspect of this book is the speaker’s continuous attempt to understand how a boy/man (yes, always a boy/man) can start the day by putting on lotion to soften the skin and then go on to shoot bullets into other humans. It’s remarkable how in this attempt to understand, the speaker takes responsibility for being complicit in a social environment that breeds and supports toxic masculinity to this extent. I credit that to Hicok being a professor, a crucial poetic perspective in the landscape of school shootings.

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Are you nobody too?  by Tina Cane

This collection comes directly from the perspective of a child speaker telling stories through poems that detail their experience as a Chinese-American student starting 8th grade at a new school. This collection had the potential to transport me back to an age where the human experience itself felt ill-fitting and difficult to control. Cane’s straightforward, even-toned poems helped me settle into that discomfort while reminding me that, much like protagonist Emily finds in Emily Dickinson’s poems, finding comfort in relatable literature is a tried-and-true practice at any age.

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Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates

This collection has the potential to rip the reader’s heart out. It offered me the opportunity to see real-life “back to school” narratives in the context of an “animal led to slaughter” metaphor. Bates’s poems focus on fragility and forced transformations by way of both experiencing and witnessing a transformative event. The danger looming in these poems feels almost casual by virtue of being a normal part of the animal world where beasts are expected to tear each other apart along the food chain hierarchy, normal and normalized to the extent that “your neck looks so breakable” becomes a love statement. The highlight of this collection for me, as I too feel “split between compassion and fury:” The Dog.

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When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

by Chen Chen

This collection feels like a series of therapy sessions. Many of the poems explore childhood traumas in ways that give both the speaker and reader the ability to name and own past events as a catalyst for healing. Chen Chen is a master at transporting the reader to angsty teenage times in a way that feels detached and observational, rational even, making all the younger versions of myself I had forgotten feel seen and validated. And it’s with this rational cloak of validation around a young human’s turmoil that Chen Chen approaches a whole spectrum of emotion between speaker and mother throughout the collection, making these poems relatable both to a parent and to anyone still experiencing complicated feelings towards their primary caregivers. A poem I will go back to many times from this collection: If I should die tomorrow, please note that I will miss the particular.

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Your Favorite Poet by Leigh Chadwick

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You can open this book to any page, to any poem, and it feels like opening up a wound into the absurd, in a meaningful way. The wounds show speaker, daughter, husband, and common dynamics between them being navigated in a surreal take on contemporary events border-lining   a dark sitcom reality. The pieces read like journal entries that use humor and sarcasm as survival mechanisms in a society where logic and common sense only breed frustration and despair. On every page, expect messages such as “It is more likely that you will get shot in the face than fall in love” or “FREE BULLETS WITH THE PURCASE OF EVERY GUN” vs. “BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED.” The poems all move seamlessly between a first-person speaker and a “you” being constantly addressed as if being offered instructions for survival in a world that no longer makes sense.

The Iris of Creation by Marvin Bell

Finally, this is purely a grief collection. And while there’s so much grief poetry to choose from, I choose Bell’s because his poems make the distinction between grieving the impermanent nature of things versus grieving the symbols they represent to the grief-stricken. Many of the poems in this collection offer an expansive degree of calm, soothing the nervous system. I come back to An Elegy for the Past over and over for the line “Someone died, and then the universe seemed larger.” In grieving the impermanence of things, Bell manages to uplift and celebrate the moment and the mundane, the light-giving act in the destructive burning of a candle. For that mood alone, I choose to end this list with the following Dark Brow stanza:

“All of us have felt the fatigue of dark water,
the burden massed at yard’s edge,
and in the line of the garden
beyond the onions, there are fresh tears.
I do not say we should live forever,
for who could bear it,
only that we should one day enter completely into life.”