Craig Morgan Teicher

In the final installment of our 2021 poetry preview, we bring you books that demonstrate the incredible capaciousness of poetry — and that we hope will be sustaining company for the year ahead.

Poetry helps us express feelings that don't fit neatly into sentences; confusion and fear but also hope and joy. Here's the second installment of our look ahead at the most exciting poetry of 2021.

This year, critic Craig Morgan Teicher says American poetry has become too big for just one person to cover, so he's invited five colleagues to bring their own perspectives to our 2021 poetry preview.

The poet laureate's collection tells a tale of a fierce and ongoing fight for sovereignty, integrity, and basic humanity. It's a plea that Americans take responsibility for what's done in our names.

As he approaches his 100th birthday, the legendary Beat poet and publisher has a new book. Billed as his "literary last will and testament," Little Boy is part memoir, part rambling free-association.

At her best, Nomi Stone is able to make an anthropological excavation into something beautiful and haunting, laced with double meanings. But at times she stands in her own way, obscuring our view.

Many of the books of poems coming out this year are sad, but also powerful; full of poets processing their lives, looking into pains both personal and political through the cracked glass of poetry.

John Koethe explores the minutia of daily life and the disillusionment that comes with age in his tenth volume of poetry, The Swimmer.

2016 brings with it an exciting crop of poetry books. Here are our picks for the best verse of the new year.

The veteran poet's beloved 1994 novel Chelsea Girls has been reissued alongside a new collection, I Must Be Living Twice. Myles' poems chronicle a life of art and sex in gritty 1970s New York City.