How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope

This beautifully curated selection of 100 uplifting poems of gratitude by well-known and emerging poets invites gratefulness into daily life and includes opportunities for reflection and writing, topics for discussion, and reading group questions. 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 U. S. , including 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. AUTHOR: James Crews is the author of four collections of poetry: The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment. He is also the editor of the popular Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The New Republic, The Christian Century, and have been reprinted in Ted Koosers American Life in Poetry and featured on Tracy K. Smiths podcast, The Slowdown. Crews holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a PhD in writing and literature from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He worked with former U. S. poet laureate Ted Kooser on his weekly newspaper column, American Life in Poetry, which reaches millions of readers across the world. He teaches poetry at SUNY-Albany and lives with his husband on an organic farm in Shaftsbury, Vermont.