4 Sweet Poetry Collections to Read Alongside Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet Album Release
It’s been a Sabrina Carpenter summer. With her singles “Espresso” and “Please Please Please” taking over both playlists and TikTok, listeners are loving her music’s catchiness and effervescence. Her August release, Short n’ Sweet, marks the follow-up to her 2022 album Emails I Can’t Send, and a departure in almost every way. While Emails I Can’t Send delved into heartbreak, betrayal, and existentialism, Short n’ Sweet—as the title suggests—is its lighter antidote. On its songs, Carpenter embraces flirtiness, fun, and frivolity, ushering her music into a bold and joyful new era. These four poems match Short n’ Sweet’s light-heartedness and of-the-moment energy.
1. A Poem for Every Summer Day, edited by Allie Esiri
It seems far from coincidental that Short n’ Sweet was timed for a late summer release. These bops are the perfect tracks for pool parties, run clubs, outdoor book swaps, and more. You’ll be sure to sing them with your car windows down or while getting ready for a night out. To lean even more into the summery spirit of the album, pick up A Poem for Every Summer Day, a collection edited by Allie Esiri that brings together wide-ranging poems celebrating the jubilance, heat, and open-ended possibility of the season.
2. Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud, edited by Robert Pinsky
If Emails I Can’t Send was best known for its lyricism—including emotion-driven, heart-rending lines and the viral, constantly shifting “Nonsense” outros during tour dates—Short n’ Sweet emphasizes sonic quality and musicality. In Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud, award-winning editor Robert Pinsky highlights the same elements in poetry, focusing on poems that come most alive when performed or recited, rather than simply read on the page. Like the songs on Short n’ Sweet, these poems lend themselves to theatricality.
3. Appetite: Food as Metaphor, edited by Jeanne Foster Phyllis Stowell
In the breakout hit “Espresso,” Carpenter likens the frantic buzz and sleeplessness of a crush to caffenation. “Taste” also plays with culinary images and language as metaphor. With this playful and sensual use of food-based language, Short n’ Sweet adapts a long-standing poetic trend. Appetite: Food as Metaphor explores the many different themes that food can come to represent, including culture and migration, love and lust, family, and more. The anthology specifically contends with how women use food imagery, leaning both toward and away from the domestic space.
4. She Followed the Moon Back to Herself by Amanda Lovelace
Short n’ Sweet represents the journey from a dark time into a lighter time, into which Carpenter also took new lessons, awareness, and growth. Best-selling poet Amanda Lovelace’s tenth collection, she followed the moon back to herself, exemplifies a similar hopefulness, guiding the reader through her journey of losing and finding herself again. Both Short n’ Sweet and she followed the moon back to herself are an assertion of confidence and an act of reclamation.
Happy reading—and listening! Looking for more poetry recommendations based on top album releases? Check out our Maggie Rogers poetry pairings and collections to read if you loved Noah Kahan’s Stick Season.
