Book Picks

What if wonder is not a feeling but a discipline? In this astounding little anthology, Maria Popova pairs her own essays with classic and contemporary poems that explore this question from the fertile borderland where poetry and science meet, accompanied by stunning illustrations by artist Ofra Amit. The Universe in Verse considers black holes and birdsong, entropy and evolution, mushrooms and mortality—not as separate subjects but as different dialects of the same human astonishment.

Popova writes that “we live our human lives in the lacuna between truth and meaning,” between the measurable world and our felt experience of it. Science helps us meet reality on its own terms; poetry helps us discover what that reality means to us. Together, they become complementary instruments of attention, inviting us into “a wakefulness to reality aglow with wonder.” Throughout the collection, wonder emerges not as naïveté but as a rigorous way of seeing. Poetry offers “a new way of comprehending what is already there but not yet noticed and not yet named,” while scientific inquiry expands perception beyond the confines of the self. The result is a book that enlarges the reader’s sense of participation in the universe, revealing how beauty and meaning can coexist with its vastness and uncertainty.

“It may be that art is simply what we call our most constructive coping mechanism for the incomprehension of life and mortality,” Popova writes. The essays and poems find in both scientific discovery and poetic imagination not certainty but companionship. Neither discipline resolves the perplexity of existence; instead, each teaches us how to remain open to it. And so, this is a book for readers drawn to the crossroads of knowledge and feeling, seeking not answers so much as deeper questions. Popova’s greatest achievement is her insistence that wonder carries an ethical dimension: to be wonder-struck by reality is also to become responsible to it. By the collection’s end, the ordinary world returns transformed—broadened, magnified, and alive with possibility.

“All of our longings, all of our despairs, all of our reckonings with the perplexity of existence are aimed at one or the other. In the aiming is what we call creativity, how we contact beauty—the beauty of a theorem, the beauty of a sonnet.”

I wake up in the morning
           with the sound of words
all around me

Jordan Scott’s autobiographical picture book, I Talk Like a River, is a deeply empathetic story of a young boy’s journey toward self-acceptance and compassion as he navigates the experience of being bullied for his stutter. Scott’s spare, haunting text is augmented by dreamlike, watery illustrations by Sydney Smith, which perfectly capture the fluid nature of the narrator’s speech patterns. I Talk Like a River doesn’t shy away from showing the difficulties the narrator is experiencing, while also modeling his strategies for resilience: connection with nature, a loving and supportive parental relationship, and ultimately, the reframing of his own thoughts about himself, which all grant him a newfound confidence. Readers of all ages looking to offer themselves kindness will find a gentle resting place in this wise and generous text.

I’m enamored of Rickey Laurentiis’s second collection, Death of the First Idea. It is an elusive and exquisite palimpsest seeking the fore-ongoingness of sense, reborn, and feminine soundings out, daring revisions of the First Idea, reusing the body’s thorned material as Rescued Language from the threshold of the End of the World (New Orleans, you know the spot). Antiquely modern, Laurentiis’s mad and maddening syntax seduces like the changeling ritual of “wandering to belong,” singing in rhapsodic praise of crossings “between eternities” (tainted, “T’ain’t one & t’ain’t the other”). Hers is a mystical and blueprint: a spellcasting gospel of dangerous trans antecedents and black-hole privacies, of burning keys and wounds and later slower knowledges—“but, hush, come welcome Mystery, no, Baby, let’s steal away…” 

This is a generous book that revels in excess, in the mess of the self, writing thru crisis and the cries of history, from a somber reflection on traveling to the Palestine Festival of Literature to suffering the blows of repeated assaults. Laurentiis rides with Death (following Emily Dickinson) and learns “Death is the Maker of Origins,” of sense reborn, ergo art, ergo love, singing the erotic in the key of Audre Lorde, “I love this world. I love this world.”

Don’t miss her reading at the Poetry Foundation on April 2. 

I’ve been reading James Baldwin’s essays on the theater and came to his collection Jimmy’s Blues, republished in 2014 with six poems from his limited-edition collection Gypsy and an illuminating introduction by Nikky Finney as Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems (Beacon Press). I found Baldwin’s awareness of theater echoed in the fourth section of “Staggerlee Wonders,” when he speaks of the self-aggrandization of American heritage that treats its history as “the Star, / whose name, above our title, / carries the Show, making History the patsy, / responsible for every flubbed line, / every missed cue.” This first poem sets the tone for the rest of the collection as a series of laments—Baldwin’s titular blues—on the nature of the country he loves and its rejection of the Black Americans it created.

Baldwin’s most poignant expression of this tension between a homeland and a people scorned imagines it as romantic heartbreak. In “A Lover’s Question,” he pleads for understanding before reciprocation: “you do not know / how desperately I hoped / that you would grow / not so much to love me / as to know / that what you do to me / you do to you.” It’s especially tragic alongside poems illustrating the American mutilation of body and land (“Staggerlee Wonders”) and the recurring nightmare of political persecution (“Gypsy”), warning of a self-destructive tendency in a way that only a lover would care to do. 

Tucked between these are gentle poems of hope and reassurance, most with dedications to fellow artists (Lena Horne, Simone Signoret) or other more obscured figures in Baldwin’s life (Skip, Y.S.) suggesting that in spite of an America “hurling stones” is an America made up of friends, lovers, and creative beacons.

Alison C. Rollins’s 2019 debut collection reads like a cabinet of wonders—a book that feels, page by page, like stepping into a reading room of the mind. Drawing from Jorge Luis Borges’s fascination with libraries, Rollins treats the archive not as a neutral repository but as a living, volatile terrain where memory, history, belief, and the body collide.

As a library worker in my final semester of my Master’s of Library and Information Sciences program, I was especially struck by Rollins’s interrogation of classification and order. In one poem, she addresses the Dewey Decimal System directly, asking, “How will I organize all the bodies?” Cataloging becomes an ethical problem rather than a technical one, exposing the limits of systems built on bias, designed to return things “back to where they belong.” The realities of the human condition, of grief, faith, desire, race, and violence, refuse containment, insisting instead on mess, overlap, and contradiction.

Throughout the collection, Rollins represents art as an act of endurance—something made in the midst of fear, anger, and loss. Love becomes a chosen vulnerability; memory a force with its own gravity. The poems move between personal and collective catastrophe, reminding us that “memory is an art form / forgetting is a science / poems are the living dead.” Poetry, in all its haunting, ethereal glory, resides precisely in this precarious space between preservation and disappearance.

Library of Small Catastrophes ultimately asks what it means to move into the future while carrying the weight of the past—and still choose to make art. It is fitting that, like the best libraries, this collection does not offer easy answers, but instead teaches us how to hold complexity and contradiction, how to question the systems that shape our world, and, perhaps most importantly, how to read with care.

“A blind poet takes up the pen 
in the same way the sun eats fire. Self-destruction a form 
of craft, an illustration of what a stanza can withstand. 
All religion is art. Art is pain suffered and outlived.”

Robyn Schiff’s dazzling book-length poem, Information Desk, brings readers inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Schiff was employed some 30 years previously. Much as it is for visitors, the titular Information Desk serves as both starting point and anchor as Schiff’s epic roams the halls of museum and memory, burrowing deeper and deeper into the process of art making and the grain of all her poem touches. Dense with allusions to art, literature, and the natural world, Information Desk traces the narrator’s fascination with creation, moving from the grinding of Rembrandt’s pigments to create “bone black” from animal bones, to the parasitic method wasps employ to supplant another wasp’s eggs. Schiff’s voracious interest in detail is never merely ornamental, but central to her poetics, as in the following lines:

                                           Who told 
you that 
   one paints with emotions? 
One makes use of emotions, 
   but only paints with material.

The movement of these poems is never expected. Wry humor and an ever-present awareness of the void nestle together, as when Schiff traces the origin of the phrase date rape:

     1973, 
        so technically is as old as 
     me. We grew up together 
        in the semifinished basements 
     of the suburbs 
        listening to the upstairs plumbing rush the  

     shit of our fathers 
        into the earth.

Through six formally and emotionally sophisticated long poems, Information Desk offers readers a journey that is singular, nostalgic, and ultimately, a lot of fun.

I want to begin with the admission that Bridget Lowe is a dear friend. One of the five poets in my MFA workshop, I learned to read and write poems at her side. Hers were the ears I most trusted. Hers the poems I wished I had written, thorned with serifs and shining. Among many, many other things, she taught me that poems are portals of contact, of connection, between the living and the dead, the present and the past, the inside and the outside. Hearts and brains and guts and eyes.

The poems in her collection, My Second Work, marvel at the grotesque, the abject, with a language that is forensic, singular, naked, and unafraid. They refuse neat endings, false resolutions, regurgitated arcs of redemption and instead wade into the sick, the sad, the shame where a feral and weird beauty thrives, like the radiotrophic fungus feeding inside the contamination radius ringing Chernobyl: “My chain, my chain, its golden links/ can split one sun into millions of suns. My head/ is a planet, a golden planet, full// of love I don’t understand.”

There is a bald longing and budding metaphysics here that feels like both the beginning and ending of me. “I once was blind and then I got blinder/ and then—then—I could see.”

“Water is the first medicine. It affects and connects us all.”

This tenet flows through every page of Carole Lindstrom’s We Are Water Protectors, a picture book that reads like an incantation. Each line pulses with rhythm and reverence, calling readers to honor and defend the natural world. Inspired by real-life Indigenous-led movements across the United States, the text moves like water—a lyrical, deliberate, unrelenting refrain urging us toward collective responsibility for our planet. Michaela Goade’s Caldecott Medal-winning illustrations deepen that current, her watercolor blues and greens swirling around images of resilience, community, and care.

Though written for children, We Are Water Protectors speaks powerfully to readers of any age. It is both poem and protest, prayer and pledge—uplifting Indigenous traditions while reminding us that language can awaken action. In its final pages, the invitation is clear: to stand up, listen, and protect what sustains us.

In honor of Native American Heritage Month, We Are Water Protectors will be on display in the Young People’s Poetry section of the Poetry Foundation library alongside other works by Indigenous writers and artists. If you find yourself in the Chicagoland area, I encourage you to visit the library and explore the collection.

Sing a Song of Seasons is a captivating anthology of poems for readers of all ages, where classic poems by Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson sit alongside more contemporary works by Jack Prelutsky and Anslem Hollo. Organizing the poems by season creates an accessible entry to a vast range of poetic themes, styles, and tones. Beautifully illustrated by Frann Preston-Gannon, Seasons is an excellent introduction to poetry for young readers, and a great gift idea for parents and teachers.

The first poem in Paul Hlava Ceballos’ collection, banana [ ] rebegins a world: “The first day in the garden, God was/ an immigrant who planted gulls/ in clouds.” The poems that follow unfold multiple individual and shared stories, plucked and grafted from the poet’s lived experience and a variety of oral and textual sources, that reveals the landscapes Ceballos moves through to be one, interconnected ecosystem.

Multiple elegies are dedicated to the murdered victims of police officers, Border Patrols agents, and ICE in the U.S. The heart of the collection, “Banana [ ]: A history of the Americas,” a 39-page poem woven of sentences and fragments of found sources that include the word “banana,” incorporates the violent murders of banana workers by guerillas and private security agents and paramilitaries in banana-producing Latin American countries. 

The lines in these poems move like vines that split, cover, and smother the architecture of the plantation. Ceballos again and again turns to the rootworks, the webs of interconnection that life depends upon, that refuse to not flourish, even within the strangling systems and structures of monoculture. In banana [ ], the elegies are as vibrant and vital and complex as the poems that speak to and provide portraits of the living.

Stories, languages, voices, like roots, can break and crumble the foundations of the oldest and strongest of houses. They can make breadcrumbs fall from clouds like snow, white cotton veils bridge one country to another, the dead glow inside a screen inside a hand. The worlds Ceballos is writing of and from and the worlds he is writing into being, hold the impossible contradictions of living in a world he is not meant to survive.

“She belonged here 
when she spoke, and she spoke 
history into being, a country separate from harm.” 

“I aimed my blade at you because 
skin is where the skin grows hardest.”

Planetaria is a groundbreaking collection of visual poetry that remaps the cosmos through a feminist, diasporic lens. Emerging from Monica Ong’s acclaimed exhibition at the Poetry Foundation back in 2022, the book transforms classic astronomical instruments, such as volvelles and planispheres, into poetic mechanisms that explore erasure, visibility, and the role of women in science and mythology. Ong has carefully woven Chinese star charts, scientific illustrations, and her own family photographs with lyrical text, inviting the reader to uncover hidden narratives and challenge the star lore borne of patriarchy and imperialism. In the book’s introduction, John Yau writes, “Scientifically minded, which is to say a pursuer of truths, Ong’s work is not about superstition, but the long shadows such beliefs cast over time. Discovering the different ways culture has defined the space between the truth-seeking individual and the indifferent universe, she re-envisions that gap.”

Planetaria expands the boundaries of what poetry can be, fusing language, image, and object into a multisensory experience. Readers are not just observers but explorers, navigating rotating poems and lunar diagrams that map narratives often left out of the stars. Luminous, intimate, and insurgent, Ong’s work is a celestial atlas for our time, and nothing short of a triumph.

“To notice is to hold the self open
wholly as a grail
steady as a brush
in silken sweeps across soft
veils of valerian sky.”

It is an enormous, ancient forest

That has not yet been fully explored.

These lines begin Ricardo Bozzi’s visually breathtaking and deeply emotional picture book, The Forest. Exquisitely illustrated by Violeta Lópiz and Valerio Vidali, the book’s meaning unfolds in the interplay between its lush illustrations of verdant foliage and delicately rendered portraits of human travelers, whose faces appear almost imperceptibly within its pages, embossed as uncolored indentations within the paper itself. This tactile addition draws attention to the physicality of reading and underscores for the reader that this is a story of the body: a universal story that has been told since time out of mind, and one that always ends in loss. Journeying through the forest, Bozzi’s travelers age from childlike wonder to mature determination, arriving at the culmination of Bozzi’s spare, haunting text: “What may lie beyond the forest, no one knows.” Bozzi, Lópiz, and Vidali, aided by the deft translations of Debbie Bibo, have given readers a singular and unforgettable reading experience, one as mysterious, transformative, and poignant as the landscape it evokes. 

Recently, a friend asked for reading recommendations for surviving facism. We listed poets who have lived and written within and through fascist regimes. It is a long list, one that continues growing. Mine has started to sprawl to include various liminal poetics of resistance. Russell Edson’s surreal, subversive, and unnerving prose poems remind me that much of what is now accepted as the nature of things was imagined by someone. And there are other ways to imagine and so understand what we have created and who we can become.

In See Jack, the difficult and uncomfortable is mantled in humor, the abject made palatable. We laugh when Jack falls from the sky and becomes “a sack of broken bones, blood weeping from his weave” as we do when the cartoon bomb detonates and leaves an animated coyote’s face in a blackened blast pattern, or an actor pratfalls in a sitcom. Or when a man is consumed by what he has consumed in “The Hunger:”

A man puts his head in a hat. But the hat thinks he’s feeding it, and begins to swallow his head.
No, no, Hat, I’m just completing my costume!
But his hat begins to suck his head like a huge mouth nursing a breast, sucking the milk of his thoughts into its crown.

Edson’s work boils with genitals, breasts, taboo sexual practices, rats, and turds. Here the nearly infinite violences of American culture are revealed to be what is truly obscene: maximal  individualism, the narrow and confining roles of the nuclear family and heteronormative relationships; the waste and refuse generated by extreme materialism and compulsive consumerism; the commodification of the non-human; the dehumanization of other humans; the obscene violence of our defining mythologies; even, or especially, our language, as in “Eggs:” 

Beat them before they’ve found their beaks and claws.

Separate yolks from whites. Beat whites into a feathery froth. Beat yolks in a back room with a fly swatter.

Quickly combine yolks with whites before they forget what might have been…

I, like many, find myself returning to this poem every spring. It depicts a narrator who, while enroute to London, watches several weddings from the window of his train. This poem captures the familiar surprise of springtime. It is easy to become totally enthralled by winter, struggling through the endless cold; then, suddenly, it is spring, and there are buds on the trees. While our heads were down, time has moved forward. The narrator of this poem, too, seems surprised to find himself in the midst of a new season, here announced by the cyclical rhythm of strangers’ lives:

We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls   
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,   
All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

As if out on the end of an event
    Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant   
More promptly out next time, more curiously,   
And saw it all again in different terms:  

As someone who frequently finds themself surrounded by strangers on buses and trains, Larkin plays a familiar game: look at these unknown people and try to guess at their lives. Larkin allows himself to be drawn into these scenes and moved by them. In this poem, and throughout this collection, his characters rise above simple tropes that spur them, as if he is challenging us to rise above our own innate cynicism. Larkin’s delicate portrait of these couples and their families is bittersweet, filled with the sense of his own wonder and disconnect. He is just a passenger, joined to these strangers only by a moment of his attention. And yet he is still affected by this small glimpse into their world:

…it was nearly done, this frail   
Travelling coincidence; and what it held   
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power   
That being changed can give.

It’s hard to imagine a more fitting read for National Poetry Month than Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets. Alexander, Colderley, and Wentworth have crafted a stunning tribute to the power of poetry and the poets who have shaped our world. Each poem seamlessly weaves the authors' voices with those of history's most celebrated poets, creating original pieces inspired by their signature styles or recurring themes—the star-studded lineup, spanning centuries and continents, includes Gwendolyn Brooks, Mary Oliver, Rumi, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Maya Angelou, and many more. Accompanied by vibrant mixed-media illustrations by Ekua Holmes, every page is a feast for the eyes and ears, showcasing how even the smallest poem can carry immense beauty and emotional depth.

Ideal for readers of all ages, Out of Wonder nurtures a love for language while celebrating the diversity of poetic expression and imagination. In his introduction, Alexander shares that the book’s title was inspired by a quote from the prolific poet Lucille Clifton: “Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.” Poetry requires a fierce curiosity—a willingness to listen to the world and let it open up around you. Alexander continues, “A poem is a small but powerful thing. It has the power to reach inside of you, ignite something within, and change you in ways you never imagined.” 

Happy National Poetry Month! May you revel in the wonder of words and be forever changed by the poems you encounter.

Take immortality, God, but give 
me this cold apple cellar. Take the souls 
and other toys, but let us live: not-Adam and not-Eve, not your son’s— 
my son’s life.

Dmitry Bliznyk, translated by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky

Is there a light on inside?—Yes, he’s always at home. 
Knock at the door of the horseradish. 
Knock on the door of his hut. 
Knock, he will let you in.

Oleh Lysheha, translated by James Brasfield

February 24 marked the third anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, inaugurating the escalation of an ongoing war that has displaced over 10 million Ukrainians and killed thousands of civilians. In the Hour of War: Poetry from Ukraine, published in 2023, gathers English-language translations by 27 contemporary Ukrainian poets writing in the shadow of Russian aggression. In addition to serving as an urgent reminder of the unbearable human cost of war, the poems in this anthology are an excellent introduction to the varied and vibrant landscape of contemporary Ukrainian poetry. Readers will encounter works by poets with many published collections, as well as works that have been less widely translated. The remarkable poems in this essential collection offer a window into the ongoing experience of the Ukrainian people, and will invite deeper engagement with individual poets' work.

One purpose or function or value of poetry is that it works to say what is unsayable, to encapsulate in language what is beyond language. Love is one word that yawns beyond any dictionary definition. Horror is another.

How to say what is unsayable? How to speak of anything else? How, in the aftermath of horror, to say anything at all?

There are many worthy and important translations of Paul Celan’s poetry. Here I am recommending Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, translated by John Felstiner, because it is the first translation of Celan’s work that I remember reading. Even now, holding this book brings back that quiet click of teeth meeting their mirror in a dark keyway.

There are poems I have memorized so that I can carry them as long and as far as I can maintain my poor memory. Felstiner’s translation of “There was earth inside them,” from Celan’s 1961 collection Die Niemandsrose, is one. 

How to live, not just survive, in a world of increasing suffering, cruelty, and violence? How to write a poem about horror with love? I offer the last stanza of Celan’s poem, four lines that I carry with me, a key to open a door to whatever world comes next:

O one, o none, o no one, o you: 
Where did it go then, making for nowhere? 
O you dig and I dig, and I dig through to you, 
and the ring on our finger awakens. 

In A Face Is a Poem, Julie Morstad embarks on an exploration of the human face, transforming it into an exquisite work of art and poetry. With delicate, dreamlike illustrations and lyrical text, Morstad captures the unique shapes, expressions, and stories that our faces reveal. Each page presents a reflection on the subtle power of our facial features, from the curve of a smile to the depth in a gaze, reminding us that the ways we present ourselves to the world cast light upon the histories we carry.

As with all of Morstad’s work (her 2021 book, Time Is a Flower, is another personal favorite, and a fitting companion for A Face Is a Poem), this new title is a perfect read for children and adults alike, encouraging a deeper appreciation for the quiet beauty of everyday things. Whether you're reading it to spark a conversation about self-expression or simply to marvel at the enchanting visuals, A Face Is a Poem is an invitation to see faces (particularly those of our loved ones) not merely as an assortment of features, but rather as a kind of visual poem, precious in its singularity, just waiting to be read, contemplated, and enjoyed.

“A face is a poem with all the parts put together, adding up to someone you love.”

Raisa Tolchinsky’s debut collection, winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, stuns the reader with a blistering beauty. These tightly crafted poems detail the narrator’s immersion in the gendered world of boxing, an immersion that is framed as a descent. The poems trace a simultaneously toxic and compelling landscape in which “the days bleed like cuts”, as the speaker chases salvation through an underworld presided over by “Coach”, an abusive trainer who “kept changing shape”.

In Glass Jaw, the quest for redemption leads the narrator through increasingly punishing physical routines until a moment of clarity arrives during a fight:

I hit her hard 
because he said that’s how you win. 
and I hit her until I remembered 
it was him who was afraid—

For the narrator of Glass Jaw, liberation ultimately arrives through the act of writing. The poem Canto 2 movingly details the process of learning to speak one’s truth with courage. This December, as the year draws to its longest darkness, these poems offered me a visceral, hard won journey towards light.

Describing visual poetry feels like playing a game of telephone with the strange and wondrous figures that reside in Mita Mahato’s brilliant poetry comix collection, Arctic Play: rocks that are cuts of meat, 12-14 gold-whiskered walruses, the many individual colors existing within a single sea. What follows is meant as a kind of postcard sent from deep inside the world she brings into being, an invitation inside a missive: Dear— In this far-away space and time, thinking of you. 

Play here functions both a genre, a noun, and verb, a description of the ways Mahato explores language and text in constellation with the visual media and materials by salvaging, splicing, fragmenting, weaving, layering, shaping, tincturing, erasing, obliterating, and spacing. 

The discarded materials appear as physically tactile, fragile, and ephemeral as the beings encountered here, their individual and communal life spans clipped short, fragmented, by the climate catastrophes that are no longer approaching but arrived. With the dedication and care of an archivist, Mahato gathers, arranges, creates and recreates, composes and decomposes. Her practice is preservation and devotion, and offers an elegy that is always, at its marrow, an ode, a love poem. 

Arctic Play is a landscape that asks us to experience and navigate the place in the poem and the poem as a place. From the bounds of the comix panel, the dimensions of a poem, a page, a book, the bent edges of a postcard, a beloved writes Wish you were here.