Books like Open Shutters

By the time I reached Native Guard’s central crown of sonnets, Trethewey already had me with her blues poem and palindrome.

I love the formal-mindedness of this collection—also its authority and fearlessness. I admire the way Trethewey unites personal history (the speaker’s memories of childhood; her experience as a woman of color; her mother’s tragic death) and collective history (the unremembered Native Guard; systemic racism; the legacies of slavery and the Civil War).

Her poems help us ask the big questions together: what memories are held or erased by a community of people? How might collective grief inform private grief and vice versa? What happens if our stories are not remembered, and what work can writing do to help us not forget? And also: “Incident” is one of the best pantoums out there.

In line after line, Gilbert proves that poetry—more than any other medium—has the power to fully encapsulate the human condition and express emotions that very often seem beyond the power of speech.

I read this book as a lament and elegy. The title poem charts her mother’s descent into dementia and death, all recounted with a journalist’s sense of detail and an artist’s sense of compassion. I love the way her deft handling of form—in this case, a sonnet sequence—drags the reader into the slow decline.

The fourteen poems create sort of a meta (or mega) sonnet, with the last line of one poem repeated or echoed in the first line of the next. Every page has a line or phrase that stops me cold—I just have to reread it and let it fully sink in. Gilbert is well known for her books of feminist criticism, but in my view,… show more.

There was a time in our lives when we all loved poetry; this book will remind you why.

Stallings is the standard-bearer for new formalist poetry, which often looks to classical Greek myths for inspiration. I love the way she recasts familiar myths in a way that elucidates our modern condition. As with her other books, I was impressed—awed—by her ability to breathe new life into traditional forms and devise entirely new forms.

A prime example is “Three Poems for Psyche,” which veer(s) toward a contemplation of motherhood while recasting themes of domestic strife and time’s impassivity. I was floored by the first poem—essentially a palindrome, with each line of the first stanza repeated in the second—in reverse.

I love when poetry does things that prose simply cannot do, and you can rely on Stallings to do exactly that. The end words in “Alice in the Looking Glass,” for example,… show more.

This book once again shows that dead white men do not hold a monopoly on great formalist verse. Espaillat hails from the Dominican Republic, and Spanish is her first language.

Many of the poems in this book deal directly with the difficulties, ambiguities, and opportunities of straddling two languages and cultures—particularly the troubling association with colonialism and imperialism inherent in both English and Spanish (conquistadors, anyone?).

I admire her easy handling of traditional forms—sonnets are apparently her favorite. What I love most is how these poems behave like the poems we knew as children, with satisfying rhyme and meter, while entertaining the themes we ponder as adults—power, history, exile, and language itself.

I find it interesting that this book—her first—was published relatively late in her life; perhaps that’s why it marries the energy of an author’s first book with the wisdom and understanding of an author’s last. 

Lisa Rosenberg’s background as a physicist and space program engineer informs poems that probe the beauties and mysteries of existence.

I first encountered her work in 2022 when she read in the Virtual STEM Poetry Series sponsored by Farmingdale State College in New York. Her poems are vivid, juxtaposing biology and cosmology: “The aster blooms. The supernova cools.” They are also rich in sound repetitions (“blooms,” “cools”) and musicality.

In Weeds and Stars, Rosenberg both invents new poetic forms and makes existing ones—like the sonnet, prose poem, villanelle, pantoum, and cento—her own. Her book came out in 2026 and is therefore a relative, not an ancestor, of my own poetry. In fact, Rosenberg’s poems and mine share some common ancestors, including Robert Frost and Sylvia Plath. 

James Merrill (1926-1995) was a son of Charles Merrill, the man famous for bringing Wall Street to Main Street (Merrill Lynch. et al.).

He grew up in luxury—Manhattan, Long Island, Palm Beach— went to Amherst college, and was a poet born and bred.

A gay man at a time when it was still dangerous to be out, he wrote many superb, deeply moving lyric poems of “love and loss,” and an entire epic poem based on seances around a ouija board, which is still turning heads and bewildering readers.

Merrill’s own life and loves were as rich and varied as anything he produced in his work. Hammer spent 12 years on this book, and it is both long and utterly gripping.

Brigit Pegeen Kelly finds the profoundest of truths in these poems set in an imaginary garden full of ruined statuary, and, more than that, she finds stories. From the garden, she brings forth myths and fables that riveted me. A sleeping child found nestled around a black swan, a dog that is a wolf that is a dog.

I have never been so deeply affected by a collection of contemporary poetry. The depth of her poetic vision will shake your world.

You’d probably be forgiven if when you think of poetry you think of love, natural beauty, or at worst, melancholic sadness. But with just 17 syllables, the author manages to bring all the grit, gore, and mayhem of the zombie apocalypse into pleasant verse. Haiku is a popular, easily approachable form of poetry (i.e. not pretentious), which makes this book a fun, light read despite its blood-spattered pages.

I suspect that I was led to take The Malady of Death from my shelf by a subconscious directive. I admit that I am afraid of this book, its relentless probing, afraid I will never understand it however much I struggle. Confounded by it twenty-five years ago, I put it aside until my consciousness could mature. (Ha!) The fault must be mine, since her style, language, and structure are as limpid as Ernaux’s or Davis’s, although Duras’s prose carries a poetical charge deliberately absent in the other two writers. I begin to think that the trouble lies in my sex, that as a man, an Other to women, I can’t possibly know what Duras’s narrator is being made to gradually reveal not with the leer of a striptease artist but with the solemnity of a priestess presiding over ancient feminine mysteries.

Would feminists accuse me of being obtuse… show more.

The “I” is elusive: no one knows this better than Basho. He shows us that if we are finely attentive to anything at all, we can learn an enormous amount about ourselves. Basho thought he was dying when he started his great haiku narrative, but he also sought to find the road that leads deeply into himself.

His lyrical journey was his true way home. When we think about interiority, we must always think of Augustine’s Confessions (for the West) and Basho’s book, listed here (for the East). We learn most about ourselves by reading them.