List: poetry

I really really like Kästner's poems. They get dark, they get snarky, they are political, they don't stop for anybody, except for their author's sentimentality. He doesn't do sentimentality very well – but he knows it, and he can laugh about it.

The first Kästner poems I ever read – overlaps with the others, but reading a Kästner poem twice is good for the soul, anyways.

More Kästner poems, these here designed to help you during your everyday life. And – surprisingly – they do. Well, some of them do, but that's how every collection of poem works.

Rilke-style modern poetry, targeted to adolescents and adults. I don't read much poetry, but I am a fan of Rilke, for reference.

War Music is art. Christopher Logue transformed the Iliad into a modern poem, and it's all kinds of awesome. The story is the real deal: Heroes of old, clad in bronze, fighting for a city and for honour and most of all for an honourable way back home. And yet, it's clearly written by somebody living in our age. Free-form poetry, modern comparisons – but all steeped in the awe of a gigantic, real, old story. I'm extremely into it. You might be too! This book might be more enjoyable when you can place all the names and comments (like "Dido might have become a grandmother / And Rome not had its day"), but it's still a lot of fun when you're just into the language and the story.

Werewolf packs in LA might seem like an urban fantasy staple (and it is), but not like this: Toby Barlow tells the brutal (but not edgy! never that) story of the werewolves and their surroundings in form of an epic, 300 page modern poem.

Confession: this is my first time reading Beowulf, in any translation. So of course I picked a new, modern, controversial one: what else? Maria Dahvana Headley had previously written The Mere Wife, Beowulf with Grendel's mother as protagonist, and she has some very intriguing criticism of longstanding translation traditions.

Long time since I've read Poe – but the clever (if old-school) language and the fine sense for vibes and rhythm have stuck with me, far beyond the famous raven.