I found this poetry prompt to be quite creative and a good personal review. You simply pull books off your shelf and use the titles as lines.  It’s like taking a walk through your recent history — so cast your eyes to your own book shelves and write your own Book Spine Poem; I’d be happy to receive them here in the comments.  Bibliophiles never tire talking about books.

There are some books that I read for pleasure, others that I read for information and some of for direction.  Some in each category become formative, sometimes even transformative (I also believe fiction can be transformative too).  There are examples from the stack that fall into each of these categories. A couple of books were chosen for the way they’d work in the poem (the equivalent of judging a book by its cover) but I’d recommend them all for different reasons so if you’d like the author’s name, please ask.

Book Spine Poem

Chronic Sorrow
A Long Obedience
Where God Happens
in Every Riven Thing

Rules for the Dance
In the Palm of Your Hand creating
Good Poems for Hard Times – The Solace
of Fierce Landscapes; Looking, Longing,
Living; The Power and the Glory
Making All Things New

The Way of Simplicity
Wisdom Distilled from the Daily
Friends for the Journey
Black Coffee; The Bird Detective
An Altar in the World; Sacred Companions
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Becoming Human
Between Their World and Ours
The Out-of-Sync Child has Fun and
God Knows Caregiving Can Pull You Apart
To Pause at the Threshold
A Thousand Mornings

In God’s Time
Mornings and Mourning
The Sparrow – we are
Children of God
Beginning to Pray
With Open Hands

© 2016 – Laurel Archer