Best-selling Books
BEHIND THIS WEEK'S LIST
Patti Smith's recently re-issued Coral Sea appears near the top of the Contemporary Bestseller List for the second week in a row. Originally published in 1996, the collection's linked prose poems describe a man on an ocean journey to see the Southern Cross, and they allude metaphorically to the life and death of her friend and collaborator Robert Mapplethorpe. Also new to the list: Jenny Boully's The Body, which appears at #20. The collection blends poetry, essay, and scholarly digression into a text that Christian Bök describes as "a fantastic biography from another reality, referring only to itself as a kind of dream within a dream." Alan Shapiro's Night of the Republic appears at #21. The Cortland Review borrows Saul Bellow's term and calls Shapiro a "first-class noticer."
About the List
Our poetry best-seller lists are based on data received from Nielsen BookScan, which tracks sales from more than 4,500 retail booksellers. Retailers included in the list include both large, high-volume retailers such as Borders and Amazon.com, and more than 400 smaller, independent bookstores. We generate the lists each week by tallying the number of books sold for recently published volumes of contemporary poetry, poetry anthologies, and children's poetry. The contemporary poetry best-seller list is meant to reflect the current market for new poetry, and so excludes translations and new editions of classical works. Our small press list is based on Small Press Distribution's poetry sales to bookstores and individual customers, which are reported to us on a monthly basis.
