I should retitle this to read “My Favorite Book of Poetry and Four Recent Books I’ve Fallen In Love With,” because there’s no way I could actually make the first list happen. It’s an impossible task, I think, to narrow the field in such a way, especially given the way my feelings toward books can change depending on my mood. So instead, I’ll give you the list I want to give you, which is my all-time favorite book along with four books from last year that I thought were really awesome.

Favorite Book: A Selection of Poems by E. E. Cummings

I was already writing poems when I was a junior in high school, but they were very formal, filled with forced rhymes and inverted syntax, clichés and abstractions. Then, in what I imagine must have been an act of desperation to get us to pay attention, my teacher, Ms. Nancy McKee, started writing out “in Just” on the chalkboard. I could tell she hadn’t planned it out—she didn’t have the text of the poem with her and she openly acknowledged that she couldn’t really explain it—but even if she didn’t get another student to perk up, she got me. I went to the local bookstore and got them to order this book, and paid for it with the money I was earning slinging chicken at a local fast food chain, and given that I was making $3.35 an hour, that was a solid shift’s worth of work.

I stopped writing like Cummings eventually, but I’ve never forgotten the feeling I had when I saw that poem going up on the chalkboard and saying to myself “you can do that?” I still have my copy of that book today, 25 years later.

Four Great Books From Last Year, In No Particular Order

Diwata by Barbara Jane Reyes is creation myth and song and foot-stomping rhythm and glorious metaphor throughout. I still pick up this book every few days and read a few pages and revel in them.

Julie Sheehan’s Bar Book, Poems and Otherwise proclaims that it’s not just poetry from the title, but it’s still one of my favorite books of poems from last year. Part of my enjoyment stems, no doubt, from the fact that I (like many other writers, I suspect) spent considerable time behind a bar during a part of my student days. I never worked in a bar as nice as the one Sheehan inhabits, and I never married one of my customers, though I did have one move in with me for a while. Long story. Sheehan veers from witty prose to strongly formal poems with ease, and some of the funniest parts are in the footnotes, which you absolutely must read.

Shahid Reads His Own Palm by Reginald Dwayne Betts is one of the most beautifully honest books I’ve ever read, with incredible range. And he uses the ghazal better than most contemporary practitioners of the form.

The Network by Jena Osman was one of the books I selected for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club, and I chose it because I wasn’t even sure it was poetry. It stretches the boundaries of the genre in complex ways I can’t even begin to describe. This is a book you have to experience on your own.

The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds When I read Sharon’s poem “The Victims,” in which the narrator “fires” her father—I was hooked. That book gave me license to “go there” in my own work.

Good Woman: Poem and a Memoir, 1969-1980 by Lucille Clifton. Reading Ms. Clifton’s work (little or no punctuation, all words in lower case) forced me to reexamine the notion of a traditional poem.

Local Time by Stephen Dunn. Dunn’s poems are the right combination of sensitivity and craft in this collection.

Words Under the Words, Selected Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye Some of my favorite poems come from this collection, drawn from Nye’s Palestinian-American heritage.

Nappy Edges by Ntozake Shange Read the poem “With No Immediate Cause,” and then get back to me.

BIO: January Gill O’Neil is the author of Underlife (CavanKerry Press, December 2009).Underlife was a finalist for ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award, and the 2010 Paterson Poetry Prize. She was featured in Poets & Writers magazine’s January/February 2010 Inspiration issue as one of its 12 debut poets. One of her poems has been nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize. She is on the advisory board/planning committee of the 2011 Massachusetts Poetry Festival. A Cave Canem fellow, January is a senior writer/editor at Babson College, runs a popular blog called Poet Mom, and lives with her two children in Beverly, Massachusetts.

But here are five books I turn to if not daily, then nearly every day, touchstones, texts that provide sustenance, inspiration, consolation. To this list I would add The Bible, King James Version, a collection of Tang Dynasty verses, and the unabridged edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language.

William Shakespeare, The Complete Plays. For me, Shakespeare’s most breath-taking poetry is in the plays: Caliban, Ariel, Mad Tom (“Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt and the water; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cow-dung for sallets, swallows the old rat and the ditch-dog, drinks the green mantle of the standing pool”), Ophelia, Hamlet, Macbeth, Juliet, Othello – all offering those incomparable lyric speeches, forging self and truth through language.

Emily Dickinson. The Selected Letters, the Master Letters, the Poems. Who writes like Dickinson? That psychological intensity, word jones, the float of eroticism, despair, God-hunger, meta-poetic awareness, and salvific trust in language? She is infinitely challenging, infinitely illuminating, infinitely daunting: “The soul has moments of escape – / When bursting all the doors – / She dances like a Bomb, abroad, / And swings upon the Hours . . . .”

Gerard Manley Hopkins. Poems and Prose. I love the spiritual and linguistic difficulty of Hopkins’s inimitable music. And the soul in crisis, the courage in the poems, especially the “dark sonnets,” helps me to live: “Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; / Not untwist – slack they may be – these last strands of man / In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; / Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.”

Charles Wright. The World of the Ten Thousand Things. I can’t pick a favorite Charles Wright book (his brand-new Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems is a stunner), but The World of the Ten Thousand Things contains work from four books Wright published from 1981 – 1990, and it includes his masterful series of “self-portrait” poems, the iconic homage (to Cezanne, Lorrain, Pavese), and those gorgeous journal poems, their cyclic engagements with skepticism and belief. “Lust of the tongue, lust of the eye, out of our own mouths we are sentenced. . . . .” Such metaphysical mojo.

John Keats. The Complete Poems & Letters. Could I live without Keats? The Odes burn with the romance of oblivion and ecstasy’s vision, that conspiracy of mutability and the beauty of artifice, the “viewless wings of Poesy”: “Ay, in the very temple of Delight / Veiled melancholy has her Sovran shrine, / Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue / Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine; / His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, / And be among her cloudy trophies hung.”

BIO: LISA RUSS SPAAR is the author of Satin Cash: Poems (Persea Books, 2008), Blue Venus: Poems (Persea Books, 2004) and Glass Town: Poems (Red Hen Press, 1999), for which she received a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers in 2000. A new collection, Vanitas, Rough, is forthcoming from Persea Books in 2012. Her poems appear in numerous anthologies, most recently in Best American Poetry 2008 (Scribner, 2008). She is the author of two chapbooks of poems, Blind Boy on Skates (University of North Texas Press/Trilobite, 1988) and Cellar (Alderman Press, 1983), and is editor of Acquainted With the Night: Insomnia Poems (Columbia UP, 1999) and All That Mighty Heart: London Poems (University of Virginia Press, 2008). Her work has appeared in many literary quarterlies and journals, including Image, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Slate. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere. The recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Spaar directs the Area Program in Poetry Writing at the University of Virginia, where she is Professor of English, an Advising Fellow, and the winner of an All-University Teaching Award (2009), a Harrison Award for Undergraduate Advising, and a Mead Honored Faculty Award. She was awarded a 2010 Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia and a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2009-2010. She serves as poetry editor for the Arts & Academe feature of The Chronicle of Higher Education Review.

Song and Dance by Alan Shapiro: This beautifully wrought collection of poetry is pure elegy, and yet Shapiro takes us with him on this personal journey of loss and grief, and reminds us that the language of elegy can inhabit us not only with solace but with beauty.

Vinculum by Alice Friman: If you haven’t read a book by one of our most articulate contemporary poets, this marvelous new collection is a good place to begin. Friman understands the fragility of nature, the human body, and our often fractured spirit, and her sense of humor is winning.

Late Wife by Claudia Emerson: In this Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Emerson maps the terrain of the often encumbered human heart. The book is beautifully organized and emotionally resonant. Emerson is a poet who matters.

Then, A Thousand Crows by Keith Ratzlaff: This is one of my favorite books by one of my favorite contemporary poets who deserves much more recognition. Ratzlaff brings together disparate threads and weaves them together deservingly and surprisingly, always with the alarmingly powerful results.

BIO: Andrea Hollander Budy (pronounced BEW-dee) is the editor of When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women (Autumn House Press, 2009) and the author of three poetry collections: Woman in the Painting (Autumn House Press, 2006), The Other Life (Story Line Press, 2001), and House Without a Dreamer (Story Line Press, 1993), which won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Her other honors include the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize for prose memoir, the Runes Poetry Award, the Ellipsis Poetry Prize, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two from the Arkansas Arts Council. Budy splits her time between Portland, Oregon, and Mountain View, Arkansas. Since 1991 she has worked as the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she was awarded the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Her website is www.andreahollanderbudy.com.

James Merrill, Divine Comedies (1976)
Here, Merrill hits his stride, managing, somehow, to make personal material epic and epic material personal. Divine Comedies contains some wonderful single poems (“Lost in Translation,” for instance), but for me the standout is The Book of Ephraim. With the genesis of Ephraim and the other spirits of the Ouija board, Merrill set in motion the 500+ page epic that would occupy him for the rest of his life.

Marianne Moore, What are Years (1941)
A mid-career book, this is Moore at her best, from the title poem to “He ‘Digesteth Harde Yron” to the “The Paper Nautilus.” The poems are strange and dense, but there’s a palpable sadness, too.

Wallace Stevens, Harmonium (1923)
Of all the poetry published in the boom of the early twenties, this is the book I don’t get tired of, home to maybe my all-time favorite poem, “The Emperor of Ice Cream.”

Mark Strand, Blizzard of One (1998)
A short book, every piece is in its proper place, Blizzard of One opens with one of my favorite poems (by Strand or anyone else), “Untitled,” which I first read in the New Yorker when I was in high school. (I clipped it and left it thumbtacked to the cork board in my bedroom for years.) Also, who can resist “Five Dogs,” a series spoken by, that’s right, five dogs?

BIO: Caki Wilkinson is the author of the poetry collection Circles Where the Head Should Be, which won the 2010 Vassar Miller Prize. She was the recipient of a 2008 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Southwest Review, 32 Poems, Yale Review and other journals.

Nox by Anne Carson—an exquisite art-book-in-a-box elegy for her brother, a collection that’s so beautifully constructed of fragments of letters and poems and textual objects that when you open it you’ll feel like you’re unfolding a one-of-a-kind sculptural experience that will make even the most diehard kindle fan believe again in the tactile power of the book.

String Light by C.D. Wright—this book is out of print, but all of the poems from the original book other than two of them are in Steal Away: Selected and New Poems. From String Light, I’ve learned about the sheer range of poetic forms and styles one book can hold. Plus it’s really fun to read.

Two books I’m anxiously awaiting: Clean by Kate Northrop (due out any day now from Persea Books) and Quan Barry’s Water Puppets (due out from U of Pittsburgh Press). Both women are formidable poets, and I go back and read their earlier books often (Northrop’s Back Through Interruption and Things Are Disappearing Here, and Barry’s Asylum and Controvertibles).

Book that’s currently on my nightstand: Bringing the Shovel Down by Ross Gay – I can’t wait to dig into it!

BIO: Erika Meitner is the author, most recently, of Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls (Anhinga Press, 2011), and Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Her poems have appeared most recently in VQR, Tin House, Indiana Review, The New Republic, APR, and on Slate.com. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she teaches in the MFA program.

1. From Old Notebooks by Evan Lavender-Smith (BlazeVOX Books)

I kept reading FON thinking, why does this work? This shouldn’t work! Meanwhile I was laughing out loud and loving it. When I finished it I thought, well, if he can do that, I can do any damn thing I want in poetry. TREMENDOUS PERMISSION.

2. Pleasure by Brian Teare (Ahsahta Press)

I read this book in manuscript form when Brian asked me to write a blurb and I cried (not teared up, cried) when I read it. I read it again when it came out. I taught it in a graduate workshop and loved watching the students love it. When reading it again I kept seeing myself in the poems, feeling, “this is what I’m doing.” It was perplexing to me how Brian Teare, whose experience is so different from mine in many ways, felt so similar to me. Working through the question of how and why I saw myself in a gay man’s elegiac poems was very helpful.

3. Grave Of Light by Alice Notley (Wesleyan)

I’m not generally a fan of big collected editions, and I think I own every single Alice Notley single volume. So, why I am suggesting this one? Because it’s awesome. I assign it when I teach “Lines and Lineage: Contemporary American Poetry by Women” because I want my students to be brought to their KNEES by the breadth and depth and POWER of ALICE NOTLEY. And they are and every time I open the book, I am too.

4. Destroyer and Preserver by Matthew Rohrer (Wave Books)

I just posted a love-fest blog about Rohrer’s book on the poetry foundation’s blog, Harriet, but I’ll reiterate. I really enjoyed reading this book. It felt important but also easy, pleasurable, human, friendly in a way that my own work doesn’t (to me). I read it while at Virginia Colony of the Creative Arts for a glorious week and this book catapulted me into putting together a new collection. Again, permission.

5. Winter: aphorisms by Sarah Vap (not published yet)

Sorry to gloat but it is one of the great pleasures of life to see a manuscript in progress from a poet I adore. This year for National Poetry month I posed a question to poets, “Is it more important to you that your work be timely or timeless and why?” People wrote back all sorts of smart responses and Sarah, well, she sent me her new manuscript as an email attachment. It answered that question for me (you’ll have to wait and read it for yourself to know) and answered all these other questions I didn’t even know I had. I read the whole thing without moving and the poems have stayed with me for days and days. It’s amazing.

I know it’s National Poetry Month and that is the occasion for this lovely list making project, but I have to say that my poems are often equally if not more than equally in informed by (inspired, formed from) novels, non-fiction and non-literary sources. I have to include a few of these:

1. Bring Down the Little Birds by Carmen Gimenez Smith: voice, scope, pathos, language, form.
2. The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff: structure.
3. Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas: everything (this is a gem).
4. Free podcast of Dharma Talk on “The Myth of Freedom” by Pema Chodron, recommended to me by my brilliant friend, Arielle Greenberg: life changing.

BIO: Rachel Zucker is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Museum of Accidents. With Arielle Greenberg she co-wrote Home/Birth: a poemic, a hybrid genre book about birth, feminism and friendship. Zucker teaches at NYU and the 92nd Street Y. Visit her website for more information or her new blog for very little to no information.

From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger by Lorna Dee Cervantes

A friend once referred to the books she carries with her as her teddy bear books, and if any book functioned in that way for me, it’s this collection, which somehow manages to resonate whenever things gnaw at me the most.

Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts by Jorie Graham

This brilliant first collection is shockingly beautiful in its reflections on an American landscape that seems almost rife with philosophy and desire.

Donkey Gospel by Tony Hoagland

A book that is funny, heart-breaking, and ragingly honest. It’s also a “must-teach” every semester for me, in that it’s probably the most successful texts to break down young writers of their notions of what poetry is.

The Fact of a Doorframe by Adrienne Rich

I would argue Rich is one of the most talented writers not just of our generation, but of any. In her collected works, it’s easy to remember why she’s a living legend still.

I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl by Karyna McGlynn

I was left haunted by this book, a film noir in verse, for days afterward. The play with time, voice, language, and ambiance is unparalleled in any contemporary work I’ve read to date.

BIO: Erin Elizabeth Smith is the author of two poetry collections — The Naming of Strays and The Fear of Being Found. Her work has previously appeared in 32 Poems, Water~Stone, Crab Orchard, New Delta, and Yalobusha. She serves as the managing editor of Stirring and The Best of the Net Anthology and teaches in the English department at the University of Tennessee.

Shame on me. Seriously. What a wonderful little assignment from 32 Poems — list your favorite five single-author poetry books for National Poetry Month. I definitely have my five favorites, that’s not the problem. The problem is when it comes to contemporary poetry, I’m the bastard child of a lost cause. I read many more anthologies and collections than single-author full-length books, and of those I do read, for this particular assignment it helps if the poets weren’t dead. If part of the point is to list OPPs so that there is a bit of juice coming the poet’s way, I should be ashamed of myself. After scanning my bookshelf, I can only ask, do I even have five I can list as favorites?

The short answer is yes and no.

The other short answer is I have to group them first.

After grouping them into categories, I have come up with five fabulous books. Fabulous because calling them favorites implies they are better than a whole slew of others. They are better than one or two similar books, but favorite can be stretching it.

They are:

1. Ants on the Melon, Virginia Hamilton Adair. Category: poetry book I’ve re-read the most
2. Midnight Voices, Deborah Ager. Category: Favorite book by local poet
3. Niagara River, Kay Ryan. Category: book by a poet with a poet-household name.
4. After Oz, Michael J Bugeja. Category: poetry book by a teacher-poet.
5. Beowulf, by Seamus Heaney. Category: ancient text with a translation by a contemporary poet.

Adair has indeed passed away, but I had to include her, because this book really does top the list of my favorites.

Now, Steven Allen May shares his suggestions:

EECCHHOOEESS by n. h. pritchard. New York University Press, 1971.

Norman H. Pritchard is not a household name although he ought to be recognized as an early American Concrete poet. The fact that he was an Afro-American Concrete poet seems to have confused a number of people; reviewers, the buying public, etc. However it should be noted that his two full collections were published by New York University Press and Doubleday. His work was extremely ahead of his time, highly visual, and nearly impossible to read. That’s the challenge. That’s the reward.

Metropolis 1-15 by Robert Fitterman. Sun & Moon Press, 2000.
Fitterman, working in a parallel universe as Rachel Blau DuPlessis with her Drafts series, has re-imagined the long poem form. His Metropolis series aims to be as large as the city that crafted it (New York). Here each section is a different form, a different tone, a different voice. It’s an incredible beginning!

Silent Type by Barbara DeCesare. Paper Kite Press, 2007. Barbara DeCesare is a poet, any book of hers is more than worth reading but HEARING her read her work is that much better. Once you hear her, the voice snakes off the page and into your ears as though she is whispering her poems just to you. The book is an experience. Catching her live is an experience, listening to her CD is an experience. How often can that be said about a POET?

That This by Susan Howe. New Directions, 2010. The 2011 winner of Yale University’s Bollinger Prize in American Poetry. I have an appreciation of Ms. Howe’s work going back several years now and I found this book heartfelt and very moving. At the same time, I was less engaged in the middle third of the book as it seemed I have seen this act before in earlier books of hers: shredded text. The final section, the title piece, is remarkable, making the experience more than worthwhile.

jambandbootleg by Paul Siegell. A-head Publishing, 2009. Paul Siegell is a young gun poet in Philadelphia who has successfully fused his love of live music performance by, say, Phish, for example, with highly visual components. This is his initial book and it absolutely has launched him. Pay attention to this one!

BIO: stevenallenmay is a poet, publisher, and blogger living in Northern VA. He co-founded Plan B Press in 1999. Last year Plan B Press published the highly regarded Full Moon on K Street: poems about Washington D.C. edited by Kim Roberts. When not running the Press, steven chases around his two small children.