Poems That Make Grown Women Cry

The internationally bestselling collection of poetry so powerful that it has moved readers to tears. “Anthony and Ben Holden remind us that you don’t have to be an academic or a postgraduate in creative writing to be moved by verse” (The Wall Street Journal).

One hundred women—distinguished in literature and film, science and law, theater and human rights—share poems that have stayed with them long after reading. The poems here range from the eighth century to today, from Rumi and Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath, W.H. Auden to Carol Ann Duffy, Pablo Neruda, and Derek Walcott to Imtiaz Dharker and Warsan Shire. Their themes range from love and loss, through mortality and mystery, war and peace, to the beauty and variety of nature. From Yoko Ono to Judi Dench, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Elena Ferrante, Tina Brown, Michelle Williams, and Sarah Waters to Kaui Hart Hemmings and Joan Baez to Nikki Giovanni, this unique collection delivers private insights into the minds of women whose writing, acting, and thinking are admired around the world. Their selections include classics by visionaries, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Pablo Neruda as well as contemporary works by masters, including Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, and Warsan Shire, with introductions to their work as powerful as the poems themselves.

Poems That Make Grown Women Cry is a collection which represents a variety of aesthetic sensibilities and the full spectrum of human emotion. It is also a reminder of how poetry can touch minds and hearts, and how easily it will do so for readers of all stripes if they turn the first page.