Poetry of the year at the Poets House annual showcase in NYC

“When you see the books and chapbooks represented at Poets House in any given year," poet Kimiko Hahn tells the New York Times, "you can see how poetry is not in the margins of people’s lives. It’s really at the center of people’s lives.”

With nearly 2,200 books of or about poetry in 26 languages, the annual Poets House showcase puts the genre’s vitality on display. At this Battery Park City exhibition, poems take on a very tactile life of their own. There’s even a set of poetry baseball cards and a poem in a prescription bottle.

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Ms. Briccetti has worked there since 1989, when it was based out of a home economics room in a school on West 18th Street. (It now occupies a bright, airy building just a few steps from the Hudson River, where it is a rent-free tenant of the Battery Park City Authority.) She says the showcase is useful both as a cultural document — “This is a way to track the bounty of the whole field and to ask some questions about what’s happening in poetry today” — and as a way for poets to “participate in being part of the document of their art in our time."