April is National Poetry Month

Dreams

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

by Langston Hughes

Now maybe you, like me, are not as comfortable delving into a poetry collection as you are a political thriller or romance novel. National Poetry Month is an invitation to readers everywhere to take a break from prose and give verse a whirl.  Poets concern themselves with the same themes that fiction writers do: love, death, sex, pain and pleasure, and how we humans connect and disconnect in oh so many ways. Behind the lines, spaces, rhythms, and cadences of a poem are all the stories, real or imagined, that informed the poet's point of view. The short but powerful poem above, by Langston Hughes, is to whet your appetite for more works by so many other great American poets like Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe, Anne Sexton, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Maya Angelou. Do you have a favorite poet?

Natasha Trethewey, the current U.S. Poet Laureate, and Kevin Stein, the current Illinois Poet Laureate, are both talented and accessible writers with a lot to offer fiction readers. Click to check out  Flounder by Natasha Trethewey, from Domestic Work and Poem Buried within a Time Capsule to Be Unearthed Spring 2097 by Kevin Stein from Chance Ransom, or any of the selections on the list below to find the stories that live within the lines.