Welcome to the Rumi Room!
It rhymes!
It's poetry!

Welcome to the Rumi Room!
It rhymes!
It's poetry!

The Last Shift by Philip Levine

Everything I’ve written here is true, and the cities—Brooklyn and Detroit— are actual, and people still live in them...

Confessions of a firework : poems & prompts by Angela Aguirre

Confessions of a Firework is a personal invitation to the reader to take a journey with me back to some of the most formative moments in my life, and ultimately it is an opportunity to extract the lessons from those moments for themselves.

Floaters : poems by Martín Espada.

And the dead have a name: floaters, say the men of the Border Patrol, keeping watch all night by the river, hearts pumping coffee as they say the word floaters, soft as a bubble, hard as a shoe as it nudges the body, to see if it breathes, to see if it moans, to see if it sits up and speaks.

Valentines by Ted Kooser

For Valentine’s Day 1986, Ted Kooser wrote “Pocket Poem” and sent the tender, thoughtful composition to fifty women friends, starting an annual tradition that would persist for the next twenty-one years.

The light at the edge of everything by Lisa Zimmerman

I have a German shepherd the sheriff's department would love for his giant chest, his hundred and twenty pound frame, his desire for honest work. He helps me feed the horses rummaging for mice behind the grain bin. When the mares get pushy his bark booms across the frozen lake and foxes slink away in their thin red sleep.

Everyday mojo songs of Earth : new and selected poems, 2001-2021 by Yusef Komunyakaa

These songs run along dirt roads & highways, crisscross lonely seas & scale mountains, traverse skies & underworlds of neon honkytonk, Wherever blues dare to travel.

The collected poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010

i throw myself into/ Howard Johnson’s bed/ and long for home,/ that sad mysterious country/ where nobody notices/ a word I say

The Breakbeat poets : new American poetry in the age of hip-hop / Kevin Coval, Quraysh Ali Lansana, & Nate Marshall, editors

The BreakBeat Poets is for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture, for people who've never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for.

When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz

According to the white oval sticker, she holds apple #4016. I’ve read in some book or other of four thousand fifteen fruits she held before this one, each equally dizzied by the heat in the tips of her fingers.

Acolytes by Nikki Giovanni.

"I choose always as best I can to keep truth and compassion in my life."