Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Poetry

  • A Ghost at Heart’s Edge: Stories and Poems of Adoption

    A Ghost at Heart’s Edge: Stories and Poems of Adoption

    Edited by Susan Ito and Tina Cervin

    Sixty short stories and poems reveal the sometimes heartbreaking, often affirming tales of adoption. Written from the point of view of birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees, this unique anthology spans nations and cultures. Editors: Susan Ito, Tina Cervin Adoptee Authors: Mi Ok Song Bruining, Lisa Buchanan,…

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  • A Moment in Time

    A Moment in Time

    by A J Bialo

    Imagine, if you can, if you could trace your beginnings to a specific moment in time. If that specific moment had never happened, your existence–and everything and everybody you have influenced–would never have happened. This is the focus of the title poem in A Moment…

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  • Adoption and Suicidality: An Anthology of Stories, Poems, and Resources for Adoptees, Families, Healthcare Professionals, and Allies

    Adoption and Suicidality: An Anthology of Stories, Poems, and Resources for Adoptees, Families, Healthcare Professionals, and Allies

    by Beth Syverson and Joseph Nakao; foreword by Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao

    This book is a wake-up call to those impacted by adoption and to those who interact with them. According to preliminary results of a groundbreaking study out of Winston-Salem State University (final report targeted for release in 2025), adopted people are 36.7 times more likely…

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  • After the Morning Calm: Reflections of Korean Adoptees

    After the Morning Calm: Reflections of Korean Adoptees

    Edited by Sook Wilkinson, PhD, and Nancy Fox

    Korean adult adoptees speak out in this anthology. Through memories, reflections, and poetry, adoptees speak to the range of issues that accompany adoption: feelings of belonging and difference, self and other, culture and accomodation, love and loss. We now know that it is in late…

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  • All Morning the Crows

    All Morning the Crows

    by Meg Kearney

    Kearney draws on her acute powers of observation, a lively curiosity, and her gift for gorgeous imagery to take us on a journey of personal exploration, discovery, and reconciliation. Surprising poems bring together the parallel but discreet worlds of humans and birds, which speak to…

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  • An Unkindness of Ravens

    An Unkindness of Ravens

    by Meg Kearney

    In An Unkindness of Ravens, Meg Kearney’s poems weave voices of estrangement and redemption: mothers, daughters, lovers of gin and dead things. In the middle poems, the protagonist confronts “Raven”: a figure of guises and disguises, revealing the speaker’s fears and angst. National Book Critics…

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  • An-Ya and Her Diary: Reader and Parent Guide

    An-Ya and Her Diary: Reader and Parent Guide

    Edited by Diane René Christian

    Professional adoptees discuss all aspects of the novel An-Ya and Her Diary. Included are lessons on how to lead an adoption discussion, how a parent can use the novel to emotionally guide their child through the book, as well as writers who eloquently express their…

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  • Arabilis

    Arabilis

    by Leah Silvieus

    Arabilis integrates the ordeal of othering into the fundamental uncertainty of life to produce a collection that is honest in its pain, confusion, and joy. Beautiful and desolate as a rural upbringing, these poems delve into the complex relationship between the self and the indifferent world…

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  • Assembling Self

    Assembling Self

    by Karen Belanger

    Born and adopted in 1959, at the age of two weeks, Karen had an inherent yearning her whole life to find more out about her biological background. Plagued by what seemed to be genetic health problems and illness the need for current family medical history…

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  • Becoming

    Becoming

    by Laramie Harlow

    15 unforgettable prose-poems and over 20 true short stories by NDN author Laramie Harlow. Becoming is the title of her impressive (and controversial) second collection. Her sensational first book SLEEPS WITH KNIVES was published in 2012 by Blue Hand Books. Her writing about being a…

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  • Birth Mother Mercy

    Birth Mother Mercy

    by Alex M. Frankel

    Poetry. Adoptee Author: Alex M. Frankel Publication Year: 2013 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews:  Other Reviews:  All Bookshop and Amazon links on this site are affiliate links. We earn a small commission to help keep Adoptee Reading running whenever items are purchased via these links, at no additional…

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  • Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory

    Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory

    by James Cagney

    The poems in Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory interrogate identity, family, loneliness, and the expectations of masculinity. Using dreams, blues, and a chorus of voices, this collection of poems examines the complexities of intimacy for an adopted person trying to find…

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  • Blackbirds

    Blackbirds

    by Greg Santos

    In Blackbirds, Greg Santos delves into the raw, private mythologies of parenthood, adoption, ethnicity, and uncertain histories. These lyrical poems bring us from Lisbon’s winding ways, to cramped Paris quarters and sacred spaces, to Cambodian street markets–all those rooms, wombs, and ruins that make up…

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  • Bloodshot Monochrome

    Bloodshot Monochrome

    by Patience Agbabi

    A glorious poetic take on all things black, white, and read. Reinventing the sonnet, Patience Agbabi shines her euphoric, musical lines on everything from growing up to growing old, from Northern Soul to contract killers, from the retro to the brand new. Whether resurrecting the dead…

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  • Called Home, Book 2: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects

    Called Home, Book 2: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects

    Edited by Patricia Busbee and Trace A. DeMeyer

    From recent news about Baby Veronica to history like Operation Papoose, this book examines how Native American adoptees and their families experienced adoption and were exposed to the genocidal policies of governments who created Indian adoption projects. The editors Trace A. DeMeyer and Patricia Busbee, both…

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  • Cleave

    Cleave

    by Tiana Nobile

    In her debut collection, Tiana Nobile grapples with the history of transnational adoption, both her own from South Korea and the broader, collective experience. In conversation with psychologist Harry Harlow’s monkey experiments and utilizing fragments of a highly personal cache of documents from her own…

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  • Dear Wonderful You: Letters to Adopted & Fostered Youth

    Dear Wonderful You: Letters to Adopted & Fostered Youth

    Edited by Diane René Christian and Mei-Mei Akwai Ellerman, PhD

    A powerful book filled with thoughtful and inspiring letters. This anthology was written by a global community of adult adoptees and adults who were fostered. Each letter was penned to the upcoming generation of adopted and fostered youth. Editors: Diane René Christian, Mei-Mei Akwai Ellerman Adoptee…

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  • Desire: A Haunting

    Desire: A Haunting

    by Molly Gaudry

    Traumatized by the events of We Take Me Apart, the unlikely heroine of Desire: A Haunting leads a silent life in the cottage that has been in her family since Hester Prynne first bequeathed it to Pearl–whose endearingly cranky spirit remains. So begins this strange friendship between “dog”…

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  • Flip the Script: Adult Adoptee Anthology

    Flip the Script: Adult Adoptee Anthology

    Edited by Diane René Christian, Amanda H.L. Transue-Woolston, and Rosita González

    Flip the Script: Adult Adoptee Anthology is a dynamic artistic exploration of adoptee expression and experience. This anthology offers readers a diverse compilation of literature and artistry from a global community of adoptees. From playwrights to poets, filmmakers to photographers, essay writers to lyricists—all have…

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  • Gardening Secrets of the Dead

    Gardening Secrets of the Dead

    by Lee Herrick

    Memory, history, family, the future: these are the preoccupations of Lee Herrick’s Gardening Secrets of the Dead. Adoptee Author: Lee Herrick Publication Year: 2012 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews:  Other Reviews:  All Bookshop and Amazon links on this site are affiliate links. We earn a small commission to…

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  • Ghost Face

    Ghost Face

    by Greg Santos

    In his third DC Books title, Ghost Face, Greg Santos explores what it means to have been a Cambodian infant adopted by a Canadian family. Through a uniquely playful and self-reflective series of poems that pay moving homage to his adoptive parents, and explore the fantasies…

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  • Going Unarmed Into the Wail

    Going Unarmed Into the Wail

    by Karen Wangare Leonard

    Going Unarmed Into the Wail is an intense, intimate chapbook that wrestles with what it is to be a product of the adoption-industrial complex. With rich visuals, the poems in this chapbook create space that leaves room to interrogate relationships with historic and present systemic violence,…

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  • Gold from the Stone: New and Selected Poems

    Gold from the Stone: New and Selected Poems

    by Lemn Sissay

    Lemn Sissay was seventeen when he wrote his first poetry book, which he hand-sold to the miners and millworkers of Wigan. Since then his poems have become landmarks, sculpted in granite and built from concrete, recorded on era-defining albums and declaimed in over thirty countries.…

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  • Home by Now

    Home by Now

    by Meg Kearney

    The characters of Meg Kearney’s gritty second poetry collection travel the shadows and edges of modern life. Searching for home and knowing that, once found, home might dissolve without warning, Kearney carves a richly lyric poetry. You will hear the voices of this striking book…

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  • In Praise of Late Wonder

    In Praise of Late Wonder

    by Lee Herrick

    In his most personal collection of poems to date, California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick writes with openness about his adoption from Korea in more than 25 new memoir-like prose poems. This expansive collection also includes a section of new poems, as well as highlights from…

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  • In The Veins

    In The Veins

    Edited by Patricia Busbee

    Part of this book’s proceeds will support Standing Rock Water Protectors and #NoDAPL. Twenty-eight poets from across Turtle Island contributed, including First Nations poet David Groulx (Anishinabe Elliott Lake); Assiniboine playwright William Yellow Robe; Ojibwe scholar Dr. Carol A. Hand, who wrote an introduction; notable…

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  • Interrogation Room

    Interrogation Room

    by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs

    In Interrogation Room, award-winning poet Jennifer Kwon Dobbs’s second collection, poems restore redacted speech and traverse forbidden borders to confront the unending Korean War’s divisions of kinship, self, and imagination. Adoptee Author: Jennifer Kwon Dobbs Publication Year: 2018 Critical Reviews: Adoptee Reviews:  Other Reviews:  All Bookshop and Amazon…

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  • Landlock X: Poems

    Landlock X: Poems

    by Sarah Audsley

    Sarah Audsley’s debut poetry collection, Landlock X, joins a growing body of adoptee poetics. By examining the consequences of the international transracial adoptee experience–her own–Audsley’s collection finds more questions than solid answers. Employing a variety of poetic forms, co-opting the pastoral tradition to argue for belonging…

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