Books
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.
Week of January 17, 2010
| Contemporary | |
| 1 | Leavings by Wendell Berry (Counterpoint) |
| 2 | Evidence by Mary Oliver (Beacon Press) |
| 3 | Red Bird (paperback) by Mary Oliver (Beacon Press) |
| 4 | The Shadow of Sirius (paperback) by W. S. Merwin (Copper Canyon Press) |
| 5 | New and Selected Poems: Volume Two (paperback) by Mary Oliver (Beacon Press) |
| READ MORE » | |
| Anthology | |
| 1 | The Best American Poetry 2009 Edited by by David Wagoner and David Lehman (Scribner) |
| 2 | Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds Billy Collins (Editor), David Allen Sibley (Illustrator) (Columbia University Press) |
| 3 | The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Shorter Fifth Edition edited by Margaret Ferguson, Jon Stallworthy, & Mary Jo Salter (W.W. Norton) |
| 4 | Love Haiku: Japanese Poems of Yearning, Passion, and Remembrance by Patricia Donegan (Shambhala) |
| 5 | Good Poems for Hard Times edited by Garrison Keillor (Penguin) |
| READ MORE » | |
| Children's | |
| 1 | A Light in the Attic: Special Edition by Shel Silverstein (HarperCollins) |
| 2 | Truckery Rhymes by Jon Scieszka (author), by David Shannon (Illustrator), Loren Long (Illustrator), and David Gordon (Illustrator) (Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing) |
| 3 | Dirt on My Shirt by Jeff Foxworthy, Steve Bjorkman (illustrator) (HarperCollins) |
| 4 | Mary Engelbreit's Mother Goose: One Hundred Best-Loved Verses by Mary Engelbreit (illustrator) (HarperCollins) |
| 5 | The Tree That Time Built: A Celebration of Nature, Science, and Imagination Mary Ann Hoberman (Author), Linda Winston (Author), Barbara Fortin (Illustrator) (Sourcebooks Jabberwocky; Har/Com edition) |
| READ MORE » | |
| Small Press | |
| 1 | The Last 4 Things by Kate Greenstreet (Ahsahta Press) |
| 2 | Face by Sherman Alexie (Hanging Loose Press) |
| 3 | Humanimal: A Project for Future Children by Bhanu Kapil (Kelsey Street Press) |
| 4 | Scary, No Scary by Zachary Schomburg (Black Ocean) |
| 5 | Breaking Poems by Suheir Hammad (Cypher Books) |
| READ MORE » | |
BEHIND THE LIST
Bluets, a book of linked prose poem meditations on the color, feeling, and sense of “blue” by Maggie Nelson, makes its debut on the contemporary best seller list this week at number 29. Nelson is a prolific author of poetry, prose, and critical work, including Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions, a study of poetry and painting, and the hybrid work of mystery fiction and poetry, Jane: A Murder.
Returning to the list this week is Kevin Young’s For the Confederate Dead, a collection of poems of grief, loss, and homesickness that echoes—at times humurously—Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead. Also coming back for another taste of selling best is Zachary Schomburg’s second book Scary, No Scary, which earned this praise from Kevin Sampsell at the Huffington Post: “Schomburg is possibly the man who will save poetry for all of those readers who are about to give up on the genre.”
