How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope - Paperback

by James Crews (Author), Ross Gay (Foreword by)

An Indie Poetry Bestseller!

What the world needs now - featuring poems from inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith and more.

More and more people are turning to poetry as an antidote to divisiveness, negativity, anxiety, and the frenetic pace of life. How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope offers readers uplifting, deeply felt, and relatable poems by well-known poets from all walks of life and all parts of the US, including inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, and others. The work of these poets captures the beauty, pleasure, and connection readers hunger for. How to Love the World, which contains new works by Ted Kooser, Mark Nepo, and Jane Hirshfield, invites readers to use poetry as part of their daily gratitude practice to uncover the simple gifts of abundance and joy to be found everywhere. With pauses for stillness and invitations for writing and reflection throughout, as well as reading group questions and topics for discussion in the back, this book can be used to facilitate discussion in a classroom or in any group setting.

Back Jacket

Discover the gift of poetry!

From humorous and uplifting to meditative and moving, these poems provide something for every mood and moment. One hundred of our best-loved and emerging writers offer these relatable reminders to slow down, rediscover the beauty and gifts of ordinary life, and reconnect with the things that matter most. Includes poems from:

Tracy K. Smith
Ross Gay
Naomi Shihab Nye
Ellen Bass
Joy Harjo
Mark Nepo
Jane Hirshfield
Ted Kooser
Amanda Gorman
January Gill O'Neil
Danusha Lameris
Alberto Rios

Accompanied by prompts for reflection, these are poems you'll return to often for inspiration and creative exploration of life's daily gifts.

Author Biography

James Crews is the editor of several bestselling poetry anthologies, including The Wonder of Small Things, The Path to Kindness, and How to Love the World, which has over 100,000 copies in print, Healing the Divide, and is the author of is the author of the essay collection, Kindness Will Save the World. He has been featured on NPR's Morning Edition, and in People Magazine, The Boston Globe, The New York Times Magazine, The Sun Magazine, and The Washington Post. He is the author of four prize-winning books of poetry, and his poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The New Republic, and other journals. Crews lives with his husband in the woods of Southern Vermont. jamescrews.net
Ross Gay is the New York Times bestselling author of the essay collections The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy and four books of poetry. His Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award; and Be Holding won the 2021 PEN America Jean Stein Book Award. Gay is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at Indiana University.