best poetry book reviews

10 Poetry Collections to Read Again and Again

Here is the verse that we just can’t get out of our heads.

As editors who review poetry for The Atlantic , we read a lot of poems. Each week, there are new PDFs in our inboxes; our desks are covered with chaotic piles of books we’ve yet to crack open, and our shelves are already packed with old favorites. We’re also frequently asked, “What poetry should I read?” The question couldn’t be more reasonable, but embarrassingly, it tends to make our minds go blank. There are a trillion different collections for every mood: some cerebral; some wrenching; some playful, goofy, even strange. “That depends,” we’re tempted to say. “Do you want to cry? Or chuckle? Or wrestle with history, or imagine faraway futures, or think about the human condition?”

Perhaps the most honest approach is just to share some of the books that stick in our heads: ones that keep pulling us back, whether they comfort, shake, or perplex us. Still, choosing 10 collections was difficult. We wanted poems rich with detail and poems frugal with their words. We wanted poems that refreshed conventions and poems that took the top of our heads off, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson. In the end, the volumes we chose have very little in common except a belief that language, when compressed, rinsed, and turned even slightly from its everyday use, still has the power to move us.

The Mooring of Starting Out , by John Ashbery

Ashbery is the poet I take the most reliable pleasure in rereading, because of the multitudes his lines contain: I am just as happy to visit his late-20th-century meditation on an encounter with a 16th-century painting, in the poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” as I am to return to his experimental collages such as “The Tennis Court Oath.” More than anything else, though, I love Ashbery’s wistful lyricism, and the five books in The Mooring of Starting Out show him at his best. The poet has an ear for everyday, conversational English, which he scrambles and rearranges until the most tossed-off phrase seems like a love lyric from an old song you half remember. “A Blessing in Disguise,” to my mind his single greatest poem, concludes its ecstatic post-meet-cute delirium with the only thing left to say: “And then I start getting this feeling of exaltation.”  — Walt Hunter

Sun in Days , by Meghan O’Rourke

Early in her 2017 collection, O’Rourke refers to life’s “inevitable accumulation of griefs”: the losses that build over time in any human existence. This book charts her own accumulating sorrows—losing her mother, struggling to conceive, developing a debilitating chronic illness. It’s filled with particularities: As a child, she talks to her mother through Styrofoam cups connected with string; as an adult, she obsessively watches videos of a gymnast, longing for a body that won’t fail her. But even the specific details unfold into universal, existential questions. (“I just need to find one of those Styrofoam cups / and what about you,” she asks her mother. “Where did you / go what kind of night is it there.”) Sun in Days reminds me that beauty and loss are inextricable—and random, in a way that’s both shattering and strangely relieving. “A life can be a lucky streak, or a dry spell, or a happenstance,” O’Rourke writes. “Yellow raspberries in July sun, bitter plums, curtains in wind.”  — Faith Hill

Blacks , by Gwendolyn Brooks

This book collects many of Brooks’s volumes, including A Street in Bronzeville , from 1945; the poetic 1953 novel Maud Martha ; and the extraordinary 1968 epic In the Mecca , half of which is set in a Chicago apartment building where Brooks worked in her youth. Additionally, one of the last sections in Blacks features her late and undersung lyrics of Black diasporic consciousness. Many of her vignettes illuminate the lives of Black women and families for whom the whole idea of making art from life has a “giddy sound,” to borrow from the poem “kitchenette building”—tantalizing, but also made difficult by economic exploitation and racism. Anyone who wants to understand 20th-century American poetry could start by reading straight through Brooks.  — W. H.

The Study of Human Life , by Joshua Bennett

Bennett’s collection is divided into three sections, and the last revolves explicitly around his first child, born a year before the book’s release. The whole thing, though, is a meditation on what it means to create life—or to sustain it—in a world hostile to your existence. In the first third, Bennett writes about growing up in Yonkers, trapped by poverty and racism and low expectations, and about getting out—while knowing that he might not have, and that others didn’t. The second is an assemblage of speculative fiction, imagining the resurrection of Malcolm X and a young Black man killed by police. The last is similarly concerned with omnipresent danger and injustice (Bennett fears for his son), but it’s also about love’s redemption; as a father, he overflows with joy and wonder. Altogether, the book is a tender celebration of vulnerability and the strength that blooms quietly in its presence. An ode to tardigrades, microscopic invertebrates that can endure extreme temperatures, seems incongruous, but actually proves Bennett's later thesis: “God bless the unkillable / interior bless the uprising / bless the rebellion … God / bless everything that survives / the fire.”  — F. H.

Read: What makes a poem worth reading?

The Interior Landscape: Classical Tamil Love Poems , translated by A. K. Ramanujan

The publisher New York Review Books’s poetry series has done extraordinary service to verse in translation over the past 10 years, but my favorite of its volumes is this beautiful introduction to Tamil poetry. Written by both men and women during the first three centuries of the Common Era, these short love poems feature intimate, finely etched scenes of yearning that are set in a series of vivid landscapes, including forests and riparian environments. Ramanujan, a celebrated poet and scholar, provides a detailed chart of poetic devices that helps orient the reader to what may be an unfamiliar set of conventions—and to the old idea that convention itself, rather than novelty, might be a virtue.  — W. H.

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On , by Franny Choi

In one poem in her third collection, Choi imagines a note “from a future great-great-granddaughter.” The letter writer’s world sounds dystopian—but then, so does our current one. She wants to know what it was like to exist in the 21st century, rotten as it was with corruption, violence, and algorithm-driven mindlessness. “Did you pray / ever? Hope, any?” she writes. “You were alive then. What did you do?” That question haunts the book, which charts a number of tragedies, past and present—the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the climate crisis, the pandemic—and asks what is to be done. Choi captures the absurdity of carrying on while everything is falling apart, and the impossibility of choosing anything else. But she also suggests that just envisioning a different world is something, even if it’s not everything. “What you gave me isn’t wisdom, and I have no wisdom in return,” the great-great-granddaughter writes. Still: “We’re making. Something of it. Something / of all those questions you left.”  — F. H.

Adagio Ma Non Troppo , by Ryoko Sekiguchi, translated by Lindsay Turner

This short, dreamlike collection by the Japanese poet Ryoko Sekiguchi takes its cue and its source material from letters written by the 20th-century Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa to his love, Ophelia. A fantasy plucked from the days before we texted “On my way,” these letters describe Pessoa’s plans to traverse the city in order to meet up with Ophelia. Translation typically involves some element of loss, as meaning is quite literally “carried across” from one language to another. In their narrative of desire for the encounter between lovers, Sekiguchi and Turner lead us astray with the ultimate missed connection: translation itself. This might be the only trilingual edition I’ve ever read, with Sekiguchi’s Japanese and French, and Turner's English translation of the French, printed on facing pages.  — W. H.

Read: Why (some) people hate poetry

The Good Thief , by Marie Howe

In The Good Thief , things are just slightly amiss: Scissors appear in strange places; a house seems to move farther and farther from the street; the sound of a laugh echoes in a shattering glass. The scenes contain an uneasy glimmer of the supernatural, and, indeed, the book takes its name from the Gospel of Luke. As Christ is crucified, so are two men on either side of him. One—the “bad thief”—mockingly demands to be saved, but the other is penitent; Christ promises he’ll remember that one and deliver him to paradise. Like the good thief, Howe’s narrators seem stuck between this world and another, brushing up against transcendence but still wretchedly mortal. How very human, that ache—the sneaking suspicion that perhaps there is more, or should be or could be, but it’s always just out of reach.  — F. H.

Jonathan Swift , by Jonathan Swift, edited by Derek Mahon

Most people know Swift from his 1726 narrative, Gulliver’s Travels . But this collection of his short verse, edited by the Irish poet Derek Mahon, shows the tremendous range of the Anglo-Irish satirist. One of the greatest composers of occasional poetry (a genre that addresses specific moments or events) in English, and also one of the snarkiest, Swift could apparently write about almost any topic, including a sudden city shower, Irish politics, and his lifelong friendship with Esther Johnson, nicknamed “Stella.” His handful of birthday poems to Stella, written over decades, remain some of the most moving tributes to a companion in verse. As time passes, Swift ages, and Stella falls ill; the compression of the poet’s couplets tightens the heartstrings until they nearly break. Swift smiles through tears to make one last tribute: “You, to whose care so oft I owe / That I’m alive to tell you so.”  — W. H.

Read: Why teaching poetry is so important

Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980 , by Lucille Clifton

Clifton’s oeuvre is so singular and so expansive that it feels impossible to pick just one of her books. Over the course of her career, she published 13 collections, and her writing expresses the gamut of joy, grief, fury, and love—frequently with incredible concision. A great one to start with, then, is Good Woman , which includes four of her collections as well as her memoir, Generations . Clifton is known for being a precise chronicler of the Black working-class experience, but to say that her focus was simply on the everyday—on “family life,” as many critics have put it—does a disservice to her ambition and intellectual heft. Her poems are concerned with justice, solidarity, and retribution; human limitations; autonomy and fate; history and mythology; the capacity for good and evil. None of them feels forced or affected—just wise, often funny, and always profound.  — F. H.

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11 great poetry collections from 2023

Among the year’s highlights were new works by Kim Hyesoon, Ishion Hutchinson and Robyn Schiff

From a new translation of Homer’s “Iliad” to the strange new world of AI verse , it’s been an epic year for the art of poetry. Only a god or an algorithm would presume to list the best poetry collections published in 2023, but here are some of the most exciting books one mortal among many had the good fortune to read this year.

‘April,’ by Sara Nicholson

Over the centuries, poets from Geoffrey Chaucer to T.S. Eliot have made April their muse. Nicholson’s crafty collection reclaims National Poetry Month for a timely — and timeless — feminist art. “When I learned the big words/ Like primogeniture, eschatology, and love,” Nicholson writes, “I became a person/ Aghast at midnight.” Her beautifully broken lines mark the life and times of “a person who grew to hate/ The sweet flower of April.”

‘The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos,’ by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari

Chatbots are only the most recent arrivals to the unfinished history of imaginary people. The unassuming Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (whose surname means “person”) dreamed up a company of multiple personalities and pen names for himself over a lifetime of writing. In Costa and Ferrari’s definitive translations, Pessoa’s literary alias Álvaro de Campos comes to life, through a glass darkly, to confess: “When I look at myself I see a stranger.”

‘Hydra Medusa,’ by Brandon Shimoda

The ancient myth of Medusa is petrifying in itself — but a Hydra Medusa that sprouts snaky new heads when decapitated sounds like a metaphor for global capitalism writ large. “I had a dream last night that a rainbow was burning,” Shimoda writes. “I had a dream last night that the war fit on the tip of a finger.” The essays, poems and talks in “Hydra Medusa” testify to the heroic dream-work of literary resistance in its many forms.

‘Information Desk: An Epic,’ by Robyn Schiff

“I used to man the Information Desk in the center of the Great Hall/ of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Schiff writes in this groundbreaking, epic memoir. The wry infinitive “to man” propels Schiff’s searching inquiry into art history, natural history and personal history through the intricacies of poetic form. Like visitors exiting the Met’s galleries, readers will emerge from “Information Desk” bedazzled by the transformative horizons of art.

‘The Lights,’ by Ben Lerner

“I’m here awaiting/ test results, but know I don’t get service in/ medieval wings.” Fans of Lerner’s celebrated novels will recognize the intimate, skeptical and visionary speaker of “The Lights.” Lerner’s poems rearrange motifs from his fiction — the film “Back to the Future,” a worrisome dilation of the aortic root and Donald Judd’s minimalist sculpture — into prismatic lyric constructions that refract story into poem, self into persona and art into utopia.

‘mahogany,’ by erica lewis

As she cared for her dying mother, lewis revisited the music of Diana Ross, which had illuminated their family life together: “maybe i’m not here/ to be a superstar,” this poetic caregiver comes to realize, “but for some/ soft nameless joy/ am resurrected.” Her book is a songbook of loss and transcendence: “ Mahogany showed me how absolutely beautiful we were and could be,” lewis writes of the 1975 film starring Ross. The same could be said about this exuberant and elegiac collection.

‘Phantom Pain Wings,’ by Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi

Death speaks across, and beyond, many languages. “I came to write ‘Phantom Pain Wings’ after Daddy passed away,” the Korean poet and shamanistic mystic Hyesoon writes. “I called out for birds endlessly. I wanted to become a translator of bird language.” In Choi’s empathic translations, Hyesoon’s poetry takes flight into a resonant and deathless English: “My bones are hollow like a flute/ so every one of them can sing and whistle.”

‘School of Instructions,’ by Ishion Hutchinson

Hutchinson decolonizes the epic in this chronicle of West Indian soldiers who fought for the British army in the Middle East during World War I: “They shovelled the long trenches day and night./ Frostbitten mud. Shellshock mud. Dungheap mud. Imperial mud.” Interwoven with episodes from the life of a Jamaican schoolboy in the 1990s named Godspeed, these soldiers’ histories contribute a new chapter to the story of modern poetry.

‘The Thomas Salto,’ by Timmy Straw

Recently banned from competitive gymnastics, the “Thomas salto” is a perilous floor exercise that ends “not, as is customary, on the feet, but in a forward roll,” Straw writes in their extraordinary debut. “It’s this landing that makes the move so risky.” Straw’s acrobatic verses tumble through histories of damage and repair to end in a forward roll through our haunted ever after: “and could never after/ leave/ what we had named.”

‘What You Want,’ by Maureen N. McLane

“My given/ name autocorrects/ to moron,” writes one of our most erudite, witty and sagacious contemporary American poets. Maureen N. McLane’s mercurial meditations on extinction, desire, history and art make the first-person feel both “given” and made. With brio and rue, “What You Want” celebrates our slapstick fantasies of addressing one another: “And I sneeze/ into my phone/ which transcribes/ the explosion as ‘you.’”

‘Whatever’s Forbidden the Wise,’ by Anthony Madrid

Ghazals, limericks and nursery rhymes are only a few forms from the history of world poetry that animate Madrid’s voracious literary imagination. “To eat the fudgsicle without tasting the stick?” the poet asks his readers. “You have to throw some away.” When you get down to it, this is a book about the all-consuming art of love: “With regard to the belovèd’s body, it’s the same. If you have it all — you taste the stick.”

Srikanth Reddy is the poetry editor of the Paris Review. His book of lectures on poetry and painting, “The Unsignificant,” will be published in 2024.

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The Best Reviewed Poetry Collections of 2020

Featuring natalie diaz, danez smith, jorie graham, margaret atwood, robert hass, and more.

Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem , Danez Smith’s Homie , Jorie Graham’s Runaway , and Margaret Atwood’s Dearly all feature among the best reviewed poetry collections of 2020.

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz (Graywolf)

17 Rave • 2 Positive Read a poem from Postcolonial Love Poem here

“Violence against Indigenous people is not just historical but ongoing, systemic and institutional, Diaz reminds us … This knowledge, however fraught, emboldens Diaz to celebrate her survival as a queer Aha Makhav woman living in the 21st century … the book rejects stereotypes that cast Indigenous people as monocultural … Postcolonial Love Poem  is charged by the often violent intersection of colonizing languages (in this case, first Spanish and then English) with an Indigenous one (Mojave). That’s not to say the poems long for a pre-colonial culture … There is an extreme lushness to the language Diaz uses, especially about love, sex and desire … This book asks us to read the world carefully, knowing that not everything will be translated for us, knowing that it is made up of pluralities … Diaz’s collection is no doubt one of the most important poetry releases in years, one to applaud for its considerable demonstration of skill, its resistance to dominant perspectives and its light wrought of desire.”

–Emma Phillips  ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. Homie by Danez Smith (Graywolf)

11 Rave • 2 Positive Listen to an interview with Danez Smith here

“…by hiding the real name of the book, Smith only makes it available to those who take the time to read it. If the poetry were less earnest, this could come off as a gag—just another conceptual stunt. But the writer’s commitment to making black life visible while simultaneously expanding blackness’s scope when people are looking imbues this title with a different weight … In its plainspoken yet voluminous vocabulary, its full-scale embrace of the body, and its ecstatic rendering of everyday life, Smith’s distinctive song of the self inevitably recalls Whitman … Smith’s writing presents an identity tempered by a society that is slow to administer acceptance. Smith is a poet of profound abundance and empathy, and in this collection the moments that stay with you the longest are the ones that reflect on abandoning the socialization of a prolifically cruel world.”

–J. Howard Rosier  ( 4Columns )

3. Summer Snow by Robert Hass (Ecco)

8 Rave • 5 Positive

“It’s a big book, but never feels exhaustive or overstuffed. Some may find that Hass has grown too comfy in his effusive style and his old lefty politics but to me it all sounds like mastery, like singular virtuosity attained on a very popular instrument—common American speech … Summer Snow  is rife with elegies. It’s something of a Who’s Who of great writers who have died in recent decades … The unthinking cruelty of fate is too vast and unfathomable to summarize or explain, so Hass just sits with it with us, aghast, stumped and sad, but also unwilling to leave us behind or be left alone with all that weight … Yes, life is  a breath, and what kills us is never actually what kills us, and the fabric of our days dissolves, leaving only paltry lists of achievements … Of course I had no idea what Hass was talking about when I was 20, no idea that he had anything to offer me. But he does now, and when I return to this book in 20 years, or in 40 if I’m so lucky, it will still be waiting for me, with something new to say.”

–Craig Morgan Teicher  ( The New York Times Book Review )

3. Ledger by Jane Hirshfield (Knopf)

8 Rave • 5 Positive Listen to an interview with Jane Hirshfield here

“Granted, some poems are thorny, difficult tangles requiring significant work from the reader to comprehend. But some, like the ones in Jane Hirshfield’s new book…are small gifts: morsels of meaning that slide right past your poetry defenses and lodge in your head … it’s a measured approach, calm and contemplative … Hirshfield’s poems treat the natural world as something marvelous and rare, something to be cared for and loved … This is what Hirshfield does so well: She gives you the observation of life as we’re all living it and the personal tragedy life entails, and then she slips in themes of planetary crisis. It’s the kind of gut punch good poems provide, the solid fist inside the velvet glove … She is responsible with every word choice, every line a deliberate beat, each poem its own chrysalis of meaning … This is a book to read front to back, then at random, then front to back again … Hirshfield’s poems are no less rich for being generally likable and accessible. You don’t have to love poetry to love these poems. There is no secret key required to unlock them. They speak and we all hear them loud and clear.”

–Elizabeth Crane  ( Vox )

5. In the Lateness of the World by Carolyn Forché (Penguin)

7 Rave • 3 Positive Read two poems from In the Lateness of the World here

“In order to understand what Forché is doing on the page, you have to look between the rows of type, and see what she leaves in the white space of your imagination. You have to rejigger, if not jettison entirely, your ideas or preconceptions about political writing and about what makes a poem. Forché’s stately stanzas—her writing is never hurried—are the work of a literary reporter, Gloria Emerson as filtered through the eyes of Elizabeth Bishop or Grace Paley. Free of jingoism but not of moral gravity, Forché’s work questions—when it does question—how to be or to become a thinking, caring, communicating adult … In In the Lateness of the World,  one feels the poet cresting a wave—a new wave that will crash onto new lands and unexplored territories. To read the book straight through is to see connections between her earlier work and her new poems because, by looking at the world, she has made a world, one in which her past is as present as her future … as much as life takes, it gives, including the poet’s voice and its myriad possibilities, among them how to render silence.”

–Hilton Als  ( The New Yorker )

6. Three Poems by Hannah Sullivan (FSG)

4 Rave • 5 Positive Read a poem from Three Poems here

“Sullivan’s voice has a suppleness that canters within the formal constraints she imposes on it … she can be mischievous in her rhyming … At times it feels like it’s overreaching, taking in philosophical discussions of nothingness and Shelley’s ars poetica; but…it is always pulled back by Sullivan’s astonishing capacity for the seen, the telling analogy, or visual set-piece … Sullivan’s choice of register is one of her main assets … chatty and offhanded, while evoking both spring’s excess and a certain insubstantiality. She’s an exquisite image-maker and analogist … Sullivan never forgets to bring her celestial concerns down to the human scale.”

–Declan Ryan  ( The New York Review of Books )

7. Obit by Victoria Chang (Copper Canyon Press)

3 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed Read a poem from Obit here

“… remarkable … these  obits take the genre in an entirely new direction—Chang inverts the impersonal third person perspective, creating a reliable/unreliable first-person speaker who mourns and commemorates the death of a variety of ideas, objects, emotions, and people … We know we are in the hands of a master. Restrictions in form can often lead to aesthetic and thematic liberation, and I was wholly engrossed by how much Chang accomplishes within the confines of the obituary’s obituary-ness—whether it’s the intense justified verticality to the use of dates, to the mix of objective and subjective intelligence … That these poems do such complete work with so few tools from the poetry toolbox is humbling. Each poem is a masterwork of compression and compassion … One of the many marvelous accomplishments of this book is how Chang makes private mourning and public mourning part of the same process.”

–Dean Radar  ( The Kenyon Review )

8. Dearly by Margaret Atwood (Ecco)

6 Rave • 1 Mixed Read a poem from Dearly here

“This collection of poems, her first in over 10 years, is a reckoning with the past that comes from a place of wisdom and control. Now 81, she harnesses the experience of a lifetime to assume a wry distance from her subjects—as if, in an astounding world, nothing could throw her off balance. This mastery, even at her most subversively fantastical, is part of what makes her an outstanding novelist. But poetry is different. Atwood is an undeceived poet and, even though the collection is full of pleasures, reading her work makes one consider the extent to which poetry is not only about truth but about the importance of being, at times, mercifully deceived—what Robert Lowell dubbed the ‘sanity of self-deception’.”

–Kate Kellaway  ( The Observer )

9. Runaway by Jorie Graham (Ecco) 6 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Pan

“She knows how to get your attention. As you move through the book…poems like ‘I’m Reading Your Mind’ and ‘Rail’ dare you not to get pulled into their riptides. From its opening page until its final lines, Graham’s 15th collection of poetry has the heightened urgency of a young writer’s debut. True to its title, it hurtles forward. Poems pour forth, frothing and pooling and threatening, at times, to overflow their banks … Runaway  taps into a free-floating end-of-the-worldness (is there a German word for that?) that so many of us feel even if we can’t express it … Runaway  feels as though it has been written for right now, especially as we find ourselves in the midst of a pandemic, but also for a target audience that might emerge 100 years on. You imagine someone in the future flipping through it, finding a record of a great unraveling, and spending hours trying to decipher it … the churn of Graham’s language settles into a benediction that couldn’t be clearer[.]”

–Jeff Gordinier  ( The New York Times Book Review )

10. Still Life by Ciaran Carson (Wake Forest University Press)

4 Rave • 2 Positive

“ Still Life  is a book written in full cognizance of the approach of death, and as such cannot help but wear a testamentary air. Yet freshness and surprise are central to its success … With Still Life , Carson has achieved the remarkable feat of closing his oeuvre with a book that recapitulates his previous creative chapters, while at the same time striking out in a new direction. It emerges from a lifelong passion for art, and a deep engagement with other ekphrastic poems across the Irish, British, American and French traditions … In the even-tempered poems of Still Life  it is, perhaps surprisingly, flourishes of despair that are in short supply … An unexpected central role in Still Life  goes to the vintage onyx pencil used by Carson to write his poems. Like Beckett’s Malone, Carson will often move between descriptions of his everyday routines and descriptions of the pencil as it commits them to paper. Sometimes, again in Beckettian style, this throws up narrative paradoxes, as when a poem in the present tense describes the breaking of a pencil nib, but the poem presses on regardless … Still Life  is among Carson’s very best work, and anglophone poetry is immeasurably the poorer for his passing.”

–David Wheatly  ( The Times Literary Supplement )

The Book Marks System: RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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Best Poetry Book Review Blogs in 2024

Showing 30 blogs that match your search.

What Jamie Read

https://whatjamieread.com/

What Jamie Read is a book review blog focused on uplifting the voices of diverse authors and stories.

Blogger : Jamie Schultz

Genres : Poetry

🌐 Domain authority: 2

👀 Average monthly visits: 1,500 p/mo

💌 Preferred contact method: Website contact form

⭐️ Accepts indie books? Yes

The Taurus Reads

https://avaeshaffer.wixsite.com/website

Hi there! My name is Ava, and i'm a sophomore creative writing major in university. I like to review books (typically YA, New Adult, contemporary, and romance) but I've been known to post some short stories as well. If you're looking for quirky reviews from a gen-z reader who spends more time scrolling through #booktok on TikTok than actually reading- check out my blog!

Blogger : Ava Shaffer

🌐 Domain authority: 15

👀 Average monthly visits: 65 p/mo

💌 Preferred contact method: Email

https://bookvue.wordpress.com/

Book Vue was born out of the editor's restless desire to share with the world thoughts and opinions on some of the greatest books out there. The honesty behind each review is the essence of the blog.

Blogger : Chitra Iyer

🌐 Domain authority: 5

👀 Average monthly visits: 100 p/mo

Read and Rated

https://readandrated.com/

Read and Rated, where all good books come to be reviewed! Find me on twitter too @ReadandRated

Blogger : Lisa Hall

🌐 Domain authority: 17

👀 Average monthly visits: 6,000 p/mo

9th Street Books

https://www.9thstreetbooks.com

9th Street Books is the place to go for everything about the literary life, including book reviews, lists, and more.

Blogger : Grace Pursel

🌐 Domain authority: 14

👀 Average monthly visits: 1,800 p/mo

A Thin Slice of Anxiety

http://www.athinsliceofanxiety.com/

A Thin Slice of Anxiety is an independent publication which strives to nurture and promote the best up-and-coming writers of our generation.

Blogger : Cody Sexton

🌐 Domain authority: 16

👀 Average monthly visits: 2,000 p/mo

One Book More

https://onebookmore.com/

One Book More is a blog for lovers of all things bookish and includes reviews, author interviews, memes and more. As a life-long bibliophile and ex-English teacher, I read a wide variety of literature including romance, fantasy, young adult, science fiction, women's fiction, non-fiction, historical fiction, mysteries, classics, poetry, and more.

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Alternative-Read

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Please feel free to contact me via my contact page, should you have any PR questions.

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Bookish Santa

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Bookish Santa's blog will help you find your next read! Read book reviews, find best book recommendations, learn more about your favorite authors, their lifestyle, and so much more.

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I'm All Booked Up

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We write book reviews, list posts and author interviews. We're open to guest posts.

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Book Nerdection

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Book Nerdection is a place where we offer book reviews, recommendations and write about books because we love them. We are a group of people dedicated to deliver the best book content.

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Reedsy Discovery

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Give your indie book the launch that it deserves! Submit your book to over 150 reviewers and gain exposure to thousands of readers in your genre. If our reviewers like what they read, your book will get a high-quality review and will be promoted on the Discover feed, where readers upvote their favorite titles. The top books from each week will be featured in our weekly newsletters.

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My Writing Life

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I Blog about unique reads.

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Midwest Book Review

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Established in 1976, the Midwest Book Review is an organization committed to promoting literacy, library usage, and small press publishing.ÊWe post our reviews on the Internet with a number of thematically appropriate web sites, databases, and online discussion groups such as alt.books.reviews. Print books are reviewed free of charge. However, there is a charge of a $50 "Reader Fee" for reviewing ebooks, galleys, pre-publication manuscripts, uncorrected proofs, ARCS and .pdf files

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Heyit'sCarlyRae Book Club

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I'm an Instafamous Book Blogger who loves all genres of novels. Reading is my passion!

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So you want to find a book blog?

If you’re a voracious reader, you might think of a book blog as an oasis in the middle of the desert: a place on the Internet that brims with talk about books, books, and more books.

Well, good news — we built this directory of the 200 of the best book blogs  to satiate your thirst. Take a walk around, use the filters to narrow down your search to blogs in your preferred genre, and feel free to bookmark this page and come back, as we do update it regularly with more of the best book blogs out there. 

If you’re an aspiring author, you might see a book blog more as a book review blog: a place where you can get your yet-to-be published book reviewed. In that case, you’ll be glad to know that most of the book blogs in our directory are open to review requests and accept indie books! We expressly designed this page (and our book marketing platform, Reedsy Discovery ) to be useful to indie book authors who need book reviews. If you’re wondering how to approach a book blog for a review request, please read on. 

You’ve found a book blog. Now what? 

Let’s say that you’re an author, and you’ve found a couple of book blogs that would be perfect fits to review your book. What now? Here are some tips as you go about getting your book reviews:

• Be sure to read the review policy. First, check that the book blog you’re querying is open to review requests. If that’s the fortunate case, carefully read the blog’s review policy and make sure that you follow the directions to a T.  
• Individualize your pitches. Book bloggers will be able to immediately tell apart the bulk pitches, which simply come across as thoughtless and indifferent. If you didn’t take the time to craft a good pitch, why should the blogger take the time to read your book? Personalize each pitch to up your chances of getting a response. 
• Format your book in a professional manner before sending it out. Ensure that your manuscript isn’t presented sloppily. If the book blogger asks for a digital ARC, you might want to check out apps such as Instafreebie or Bookfunnel. 
• Create a spreadsheet to track your progress. Wading through so many book blogs can be troublesome — not to mention trying to remember which ones you’ve already contacted. To save yourself the time and trouble, use a simple Excel spreadsheet to keep track of your progress (and results). 

Looking to learn even more about the process? Awesome 👍 For a detailed guide, check out this post that’s all about getting book reviews . 

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Zalika Reid-Benta and Britta Badour among finalists for 2024 Trillium Book Awards

The prize recognizes the best fiction and poetry books from writers in ontario.

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Zalika Reid-Benta and Britta Badour are among the finalists for the 2024 Trillium Book Awards presented by Ontario Creates.

Established in 1987, the prize annually recognizes the best book and best poetry collection from writers in Ontario.  

The winners in both the English and French categories of the Trillium Book Award will receive $20,000, while the winner of the poetry category will receive $10,000.

Reid-Benta is shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for  River Mumma .

River Mumma   is a magical realist story inspired by Jamaican folklore. The main character is a young Black woman. Alicia, having a quarter-life crisis while adventuring through the streets of Toronto. One evening, River Mumma, the Jamaican water deity, appears to inform Alicia that she has 24 hours to find her missing comb in the city.

Why River Mumma chose her is a mystery. Alicia barely remembers the legends she was told about the deity as a child. Still, Alicia embarks on her quest through the city which turns into a journey through time — to find herself, but also what the river carries.

• Zalika Reid-Benta's new novel  River Mumma  is a magical realism take on the quarter-life crisis

Reid-Benta is a Toronto-based author who explores race, identity and culture through the lens of second-generation Caribbean Canadians in her work. The Columbia MFA graduate's debut novel  Frying Plantain  was on the  2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist .  CBC Books  named Reid-Benta  a writer to watch in 2019  and she served as jury chair for the  2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize .

Badour is shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for poetry for  Wires that Sputter .

Wires That Sputter   is an intimate collection of poetry which plays with form and punctuation. Badour explores pop culture, sports, family dynamics and Black liberation.

Britta Badour's powerful poetry is inspired by her family, community and her experience of Blackness

Badour, better known as Britta B., is an artist, public speaker and poet living in Toronto. She was also the recipient of the 2021 Breakthrough Artist Award from the Toronto Arts Foundation. She teaches spoken word performance at Seneca College. In 2023, Badour made the CBC Poetry Prize longlist .

She was named one of  CBC Books '  2023 writers to watch . 

The CBC Poetry Prize is open for Canadian writers from April 1 to June 1

Other notable writers on the shortlists include Nina Dunic and A. Light Zachary. 

Dunic's  The Clarion  is a finalist for the Trillium Book Award. 

The Clarion  is a novel about two siblings struggling to find a sense of purpose and belonging. Peter is a trumpet player and kitchen staff and his sister Stasi is making her attempt to work in corporate which ultimately leads to therapy. As the siblings endure the many trials and tribulations of their generation like promotions and absent lovers, can they find their sense of self and keep their connection strong?

The Clarion  was on  the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist . 

• Nina Dunic explores the power of human connection in her debut novel The Clarion

Dunic is a freelance writer and journalist living in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough. She has been longlisted for the  CBC Short Story Prize  four times: in 2023 for  The Artist ,  in 2022 for  Youth , in 2020 for  Bodies  and in 2019 for an earlier version of  Bodies . 

Zachary is nominated for the Trillium Book Award for poetry for their debut collection,  More Sure . It's about the process of finding oneself again and again through time, experience and community. The poet explores themes of queerness, neurodivergence, labour, love and family. 

Zachary is a writer, editor and teacher living in Toronto and Grande-Digue, N.B.  More Sure  is their debut poetry collection .  Zachary was longlisted for the  2021 CBC Poetry Prize  for their poems  Two Girls   and  Why bury yourself in this place you ask . The full shortlists for the 2023 Trillium Awards are below.

Trillium Book Award:

• Sleep is Now a Foreign Country: Encounters with the Uncanny by Mike Barnes
• The Clarion by Nina Dunic
• North of Middle Island by D.A. Lockhart
• Anecdotes by Kathryn Mockler
• River Mumma by Zalika Reid-Benta

Trillium Book Award for Poetry:

• Wires that Sputter by Britta Badour
• More Sure by A. Light Zachary
• Continuity Errors by Catriona Wright

Prix Trillium:

• La fin de nos programmes by Martin Bélanger
• Plonge, Freya, vole !  by Andrée Christensen
• L'aurore martyrise l'enfant by David Ménard
• Le parfum de la baleine by Paul Ruban
• Vivre ou presque by Nicolas Weinberg

The winners will be announced on June 20, 2024.

Last year's winners were Stuart Ross for  The Book of Grief and Hamburgers   and Sanna Wani for  My Grief, the Sun .

Previous Trillium Award winners include  Margaret Atwood ,  Dionne Brand  and  Alice Munro .

Corrections

• This post has been updated to reflect the correct pronouns for A. Light Zachary. May 08, 2024 7:41 AM ET

Related Stories

• CBC Poetry Prize
• SPRING PREVIEW 52 works of Canadian fiction coming out in spring 2024
• Spring Preview 37 poetry collections to watch for in spring 2024
• SPRING PREVIEW 15 Canadian books for teens and young adults to check out in spring 2024
• Spring Preview 18 Canadian comics and graphic novels to check out in spring 2024

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2024 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize

We are pleased to announce that Cole Swenson will serve as the final judge for the 2024 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize. Each year one winner gets $1,500 and publication. We also publish three finalists, each of whom receives $200. Entry requirements: No simultaneously submitted work. An entry may include one, two, or three poems, but no more than a total of ten standard pages in 12-point or larger type. Work previously published in any form will not be considered.

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In a Poem, Just Who Is ‘the Speaker,’ Anyway?

Critics and readers love the term, but it can be awfully slippery to pin down. That’s what makes it so fun to try.

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By Elisa Gabbert

Elisa Gabbert’s collections of poetry and essays include, most recently, “Normal Distance” and the forthcoming “Any Person Is the Only Self.” Her On Poetry columns appear four times a year.

The pages of “A Little White Shadow,” by Mary Ruefle, house a lyric “I” — the ghost voice that emerges so often from what we call a poem. Yet the I belonged first to another book, a Christian text of the same name published in 1890, by Emily Malbone Morgan.

Ruefle “erased” most words of Morgan’s text with white paint, leaving what look like lines of verse on the yellowed pages: “my brain/grows weary/just thinking how to make/thought.” (My virgules are approximate — should I read all white gaps as line breaks, even if the words are in the same line of prose? Are larger gaps meant to form stanzas?)

On another page, we read (can I say Ruefle writes ?): “I was brought in contact/with the phenomenon/peculiar to/’A/shadow.’” It would be difficult to read Ruefle’s book without attributing that I to the author, to Ruefle, one way or another, although the book’s I existed long before she did.

This method of finding an I out there, already typed, to identify with, seems to me not much different from typing an I . An I on the page is abstract, symbolic, and not the same I as in speech, which in itself is not the same I as the I in the mind.

When an old friend asked me recently if I didn’t find the idea of “the speaker” to be somewhat underexamined, I was surprised by the force of the YES that rose up in me. I too had been following the critical convention of referring to whatever point of view a poem seems to generate as “the speaker” — a useful convention in that it (supposedly) prevents us from ascribing the views of the poem to its author. But in that moment I realized I feel a little fraudulent doing so. Why is that?

Perhaps because I never think of a “speaker” when writing a poem. I don’t posit some paper-doll self that I can make say things. It’s more true to say that the poem always gives my own I, my mind’s I, the magic ability to say things I wouldn’t in speech or in prose.

It’s not just that the poem, like a play or a novel, is fictive — that these genres offer plausible deniability, though they do. It’s also that formal constraints have the power to give us new thoughts. Sometimes, in order to make a line sound good, to fit the shape of the poem, I’m forced to cut a word or choose a different word, and what I thought I wanted to say gets more interesting. The poem has more surprising thoughts than I do.

“The speaker,” as a concept, makes two strong suggestions. One is that the voice of a poem is a kind of persona. In fact, when I looked for an entry on the subject in our New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (a tome if there ever was one, at 1,383 pages), I found only: “Speaker: See PERSONA.” This latter term is an “ancient distinction,” writes the scholar Fabian Gudas, between poems in the poet’s “own voice” and those in which “characters” are speaking.

But, as the entry goes on to note, 20th-century critics have questioned whether we can ever look at a poem as “the direct utterance of its author.” While persona seems too strong to apply to some first-person lyrics, the speaker implies all lyrics wear a veil of persona, at least, if not a full mask.

The second implication is that the voice is a voice — that a poem has spokenness , even just lying there silent on the page.

The question here, the one I think my friend was asking, is this: Does our use of “the speaker” as shorthand — for responsible readership, respectful acknowledgment of distance between poet and text — sort of let us off the hook? Does it give us an excuse to think less deeply than we might about degrees of persona and spokenness in any given poem?

Take Louise Glück’s “The Wild Iris,” “a book in which flowers speak,” as Glück herself described it. One flower speaks this, in “Trillium”: “I woke up ignorant in a forest;/only a moment ago, I didn’t know my voice/if one were given me/would be so full of grief.” (I find a note that I’ve stuck on this page, at some point: The flowers give permission to express .)

“Flowers don’t have voices,” James Longenbach writes, in his essay “The Spokenness of Poetry” — “but it takes a flower to remind us that poems don’t really have voices either.”

They’re more like scores for voices, maybe. A score isn’t music — it’s paper, not sound — and, as Jos Charles writes in an essay in “Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems That Matter Most,” “the written poem is often mistaken for the poem itself.” A poem, like a piece of music, she writes, “is neither its score nor any one performance,” but what is repeatable across all performances. Any reader reading a poem performs it — we channel the ghost voice.

There are poems that have almost no spokenness — such as Aram Saroyan’s “minimal poems,” which might consist of a single nonword on the page (“lighght,” most famously, but see also “morni,ng” or “Blod”). Or consider Paul Violi’s “Index,” whose first line is “Hudney, Sutej IX, X, XI, 7, 9, 25, 58, 60, 61, 64.” Is anyone speaking the page numbers?

And there are poems that have almost no persona, as in the microgenre whose speaker is a poetry instructor (see “Introduction to Poetry,” by Billy Collins).

Yet I’m not interested only in edge cases. There are so many subtle gradations of “speaker” in the middle, so much room for permission. A speaker may seem threatening, as in June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights”: “from now on my resistance … may very well cost you your life.” A speaker may seem dishonest — Tove Ditlevsen’s first published poem was called “To My Dead Child,” addressing a stillborn infant who had in fact never existed.

Auden would say it’s hard not to “tell lies” in a poem, where “all facts and all beliefs cease to be true or false and become interesting possibilities.” So, we might say, the “speaker” is the vessel for the full range of lies that the poet is willing to tell.

“Poetry is not for personal confessions,” George Seferis wrote in a journal; “it expresses another personality that belongs to everyone.” This suggests poetry comes from some underlying self. If, by invoking “the speaker,” I avoid a conflation of the I and its author, I may also crowd the page with more figures than I need: a speaker and an author, both outside the poem. I wonder sometimes if there’s anyone there, when I’m reading. Does the speaker speak the poem? Or does the poem just speak?

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