Reddit mentions: The best caribbean & latin american poetry books

Here are my favourites:

Philip Larkin -- one of the greatest English poets, who uses the English language in its most elegant, plain and beautiful way. Often deals with death and love. A sample poem about the fear of death

Derek Walcott -- A poet of the Caribbean, known for epic poems. A sample poem about love

ee cummings -- a popular American poet who played with form. A sample poem

Emily Dickinson - maybe one of the most famous American poets, you can read a lot of her poetry online

Also online are the other big famous poets: Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, W.B. Yeats, Walt Whitman, Keats, William Blake, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery. For each of these I'd just suggest googling and seeing what you like.

But I'm going to suggest to you some poetry by some new, rising poets, who are still alive and writing.

Sam Sax -- a young queer American poet who was the winner of the National Poetry Series. His work is incredible. Here is a video of him performing one of his earlier poems

Meg Freitag -- another young American poet who writes intimately about the self, heartache, etc, with gorgeous imagery. A sample poem

Kaveh Akbar -- an Iranian-American poet who has won a ton of awards.

Claudia Rankine is not young or up-and-coming given that she won a MacArthur and a Pulitzer prize but she is one of the most important poets writing today, and her work often revolves around blackness in America. She also writes prose poetry.

Maggie Nelson is also already famous -- Bluets is the most beautiful book, a meditation of grief and the colour blue.

I would honestly just go browse through https://www.poetryfoundation.org. It's so fun, and you can read poets by theme. That's a very good way to get into both classical and contemporary English language poetry.

Wislawa Szymborska, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature, is pretty great. Check out a collection of her work titled "View with a Grain of Sand" (https://www.amazon.com/View-Grain-Sand-Selected-Poems/dp/0156002167)

Pablo Neruda, who won the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature, is maybe my favorite writer of any kind. He's the king of imagery, IMO. One of his most famous books is "100 Love Sonnets." You can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/100-Love-Sonnets-sonetos-American/dp/0292760280

Ovid, who never won a Nobel Prize because he is like 2000 years old, is really funny and writes a lot about how to pick up girls - in ancient Rome. He lived around the time of Christ and it's cool to read something from that period that's so vividly human. "The Erotic Poems" are winners. (https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/35010/the-erotic-poems/)

Other commenters have suggested Whitman, Emerson, and Bukowski. Those writers are all killers too.

I'm inordinately fond of Neruda's Plenos Poderes (typically translated as Fully Empowered and occasionally Full Powers). It's a master of the art in one of his greatest works, it has all the energy and insight of his odes with the sense of scope and depth that he displays earlier in Canto General.

I recommend reading The Sea or The Night in Isla Negra from it.

Here's a link to Alistair Reid's excellent translation on Amazon:

[Fully Empowered] (http://www.amazon.com/Fully-Empowered-Pablo-Neruda/dp/0374513511)

Also, for the uninitiated with Neruda, I recommend [Full Woman, Fleshy Apple, Hot Moon] (http://www.amazon.com/Full-Woman-Fleshly-Apple-Moon/dp/0061733571). Stephen Mitchell is my personal favorite translator of Neruda's work, and this collection focuses mainly on the strong middle period of his life.

Pablo Neruda is my poetic spirit animal. His words are incredibly lush, deeply evocative, and wildly sensual. I would recommend The Essential Neruda for a wonderful introduction to his work, and One Hundred Love Sonnets to stir the soul and make you weak in the knees. :)

Octavio Paz is absolutely brilliant. This translation is great. It has the English on one page and the Spanish on the other. I honestly cannot recommend him enough.

Yrsa Daley-Ward writes similar things but with much more beautiful and profound language IMO. There's a few others to spelunk around her.

salt by Nayyirah Waheed is similar to the stuff in the OP but I think a lot better.

edit: bone by Daley-Ward is cool as hell.

• Blood and Volts: Edison, Tesla, & the Electric Chair At the dawn of the twentieth century, General Electric (using Thomas Edison's direct current) and Westinghouse (employing Nikola Tesla's groundbreaking alternating current) were locked in combat to determine which would dominate the technological fate of the nation.
  
  
• Gone to Croatan: Origins of North American Dropout Culture This excellent anthology explores Colonial Subject Peoples abandoning civilization and creating tribal units with American Indians, creating vital, nonimperial creole cultures.
  
  
• You Can't Win is a journey into the hobo underworld—freight hopping around the still Wild West, becoming a highwayman and member of the yegg (criminal) brotherhood, getting hooked on opium, doing stints in jail, or escaping, often with the assistance of crooked cops or judges.

I have this book which has side by side Spanish and English. Several good editions in this thread though, and you can't go wrong with any of them.

How about Nicolás Guillén? He was a Cuban poet. I enjoyed some of his works when going over them in an American(as in North and South) Literature class.

I don't know how widespread his works are, but I hadn't heard of them before the class.

You can buy a bilingual copy of El Gran Zoo on Amazon.

Personally, I think there's nothing that compares to this. Huge, comprehensive, and without the pedagogy of the editors / translators. Some poems in his native tongue, but even those that are done in Spanish are also in English. A variety of translators as well.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Poetry-Pablo-Neruda/dp/0374529604/ref=sr_1_6/189-5702309-6224162?ie=UTF8&qid=1413851229&sr=8-6&keywords=pablo+neruda

I own this book. I can't say if it has all of his poems in the original spanish, but it has a lot of them.

http://www.amazon.com/Twenty-Love-Poems-Song-Despair/dp/0142437700

...especially if you can read the spanish

I second this. Donald D. Walsh's translation of The Captain's Verses, especially.

https://www.amazon.com/Captains-Verses-Poems-Directions-Books/dp/081121821X

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JH7WS2F/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_ep_dp_Z-iYBbCFPBEMH
Try this one.