Does poetry tickle your fancy? Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky and check out these few different lists of the best poetry books of 2015, from sources like The Guardian and Tin House. Our own Year in Reading series is also chock full of poetry recommendations.
Best of Poetry
The Wildebeest
At Page-Turner, Daphne Merkin reads Catherine Lacey’s Nobody Is Ever Missing, which follows the journey of a disenchanted New Yorker as she hitchhikes her way through New Zealand. The novel, Merkin writes, features what Leslie Jamison, in her recent essay collection, termed a “post-wounded woman.”
Brackets Busted
How’s your bracket doing? Upsets abound not only on the hardwood but also in The Morning News’s Tournament of Books. Celebrate your victory over lesser bracketologists (or, alternately, mourn your defeat against the onslaught of superior bracketologists) with this compendium of basketball poetry compiled by the folks at the Poetry Foundation.
The Little Bookstore That Could
This independent bookstore in Alabama has a novel concept–selling only signed copies of books. Alabama Booksmith is just one of many independent bookstores looking for new ways to survive in the world. This Millions interview with Janet Geddis, the founder of Avid Bookshop in Athens, Ga, is both hopeful and inspiring.
Emergent Criticism
The National Book Critics Circle has announced its inaugural class of Emerging Critics, including our own Ismail Muhammad! Read his first piece for us, “Frank Ocean and the Black Male Body,” here.
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Where the Wild Things Are
“After breaking down the data by neighborhood and age group, it became clear: Children’s books are a rarity in high-poverty urban communities. The likelihood that a parent could find a book for purchase in these areas ‘is very slim.’” On book deserts across America.
Kindles to Kenya
David Risher founded the nonprofit Worldreader program in 2009 to distribute Kindles to children in the developing world. His aim was to increase literacy. Today the program has shared over 200,000 e-books with children in Ghana and Kenya, and Risher and his colleagues hope to allocate 10,000 reading devices by 2013.