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.

1. Meadowlands, Louise Gluck. Does Louise Gluck really need more press? Does she need me to promote her? No and no. Nevertheless, I adore this book. It’s one of the most spare, most moving depictions of heartbreak that I’ve ever read.

2. Ecstatic in the Poison, Andrew Hudgins. Hudgins creates some truly scary material (Vikings, Romans, angels, demons, growing up in Alabama), and does not flinch.

3. Becoming the Villainess, Jeannine Hall Gailey. Gailey brushes the dust off the ol’ dramatic monologue and lets characters like Wonder Woman, Lara Croft, and a certain vampire slayer have at it. Pop culture meets myth, and they get along famously.

4. Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York, by Frank X Walker. I’m a sucker for personas and historical poems. These lyrics are spoken by York, the slave who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their explorations, and they’re absolutely gorgeous in their voice and spare, powerful imagery.

5. After the Revival, Carrie Jerrell. I love poems about music, perhaps because I’ve never been able to successfully write one myself, and Jerrell pulls it off masterfully. Even the poems that aren’t about music have a drawl and rhythm that should be spun on an old jukebox.

BIO: Juliana Gray is the author of Roleplay (forthcoming from Dream Horse Press) and The Man Under My Skin. She teaches at Alfred University in western New York and at the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference.

1. Evie Shockley’s a half-red sea
2. Rebecca Black’s Cottonlandia
3. David Roderick’s Blue Colonial
4. Josh Bell’s No Planets Strike
5. Kevin McFadden’s Hardscrabble

BIO: Carrie Jerrell’s collection After the Revival won the 2008 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. She is an assistant professor of English and associate director of the low-residency MFA program at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky.

Elaine Equi’s Ripple Effect (2007)

Nervy little jungle gyms of wit, these poems. You read Equi for the most serious kind of play there is.

Lisa Russ Spaar’s Satin Cash (2008)

If poems are vehicles, Spaar’s are sports cars. Everything inch of this book is bright and exotic. I admire the sheer horsepower of its language and how smooth the poems handle.

Carl Philips’ Speak Low (2009)

I can think of no other poet since Elizabeth Bishop so adept at dramatizing the shape a rigorous thought makes. His hesitations, his oscillations, the contortions of his syntax, are themselves romantic.

Bobby Rogers’ Paper Anniversary (2010)

They certainly don’t read like poems in a first book, these strange combinations of generosity and precision. Rogers can be candid on the subject of artifice, pithy in long lines, eloquently plain-spoken. There’s actual wisdom in this book. Where else do you find that?

Christian Wiman’s Every Riven Thing (2010)

These poems are challenging on a dozen levels, not the least of which is the poet’s complicated relationship with God. Wiman’s psalms, like David’s, can be angry, demanding, humble, and intimate by turns. The loving care in their accoustics can make curses sound like worship.

BIO: George David Clark’s poems have appeared most recently in Shenandoah, Smartish Pace, and Willow Springs as well as online at Verse Daily and Poetry Daily.

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Well, I have so many more than five poetry books that I love, really love, so I had to narrow it down by some self-imposed parameters, so I decided to focus on books by women that used humor in a surprising way.

Dana Levin’s Wedding Day. Butterflies in the throat, words as play thing; the poem “Quelque Chose,” is worth the entire cost of the book all by itself, a hilarious ode to the (faux?) divisions of the poetry world.

Letters From the Emily Dickinson Room from Kelli Russell Agodon. A book that combines darkness and light, tabloids and saints, best when it explores the humorous side of death and anxiety.

Dorianne Laux’s Book of Men. Her best book yet, especially poems like “Superman” and “Cher” that combine the love of these pop culture icons and sharp insights into the nature of the vulnerabilities of our heroes.

Louise Gluck’s Meadowlands. Acid-tongued, icy dialogues between mythological figures and a modern-day couple of the brink of divorce.

Denise Duhamel’s Kinky. A book of poems in the voices of various Barbie dolls. Need I say more?

(Books I want to cheat and sneak onto this list too: Lana Ayers’ A New Red, with a novel take on the old story of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Lucky Fish, full of warmth, humor, and the love of cupcakes. Okay, that’s it. Matthea Harvey’s apocalypse and wordplay spectacular, Modern Life. Seriously, that’s the last one.)

BIO: Jeannine Hall Gailey is the author of Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books, 2006) and She Returns to the Floating World (Kitsune Books, 2011.) Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in journals like The Iowa Review, The Seattle Review, and Prairie Schooner. She volunteers as an editorial consultant for Crab Creek Review and currently teaches at the MFA program at National University. Her web site is www.webbish6.com.

1) The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception by Martha Silano: A musical and vibrant collection that moves from aliens to Zinfandel, Aunt Suzie can really pole dance! to a kazoo. A light stick, the kind kids love. This is what I love about Silano’s work, you never know what each poem will hold and how she will surprise you. She has been a favorite poet of mine since I first read her book, What the Truth Tastes Like. I am always amazed with what she does with language.

2) Every Dress, A Decision by Elizabeth Austen: This collection has just come out this month, but I’m lucky & thankful to have had the opportunity to read it before it was published. The poems in this book are rich with story and music. And as poems go, Austen doesn’t just skim the surface, her poems will take you deep; she in an incredible poet who I know from the Northwest stage and so I’m happy to see her work reaching a national level.

3) Becoming the Villianness by Jeannine Hall Gailey: This has been a favorite book of mine for a long time. Poet Jeannine Hall Gailey is a feminist superhero in a pair of kickass pink boots. This collection is both fun and lively, but also poignant. From Wonder Woman to Spy Girls to the Snow Queen, you never know who you will run into in this book, but I tell you, you will always be interested and incredibly entertained. (By the way, Jeannine’s second collection She Returns to the Floating World will be published by Kitsune Books in July 2011, and as a first reader to that collection, I highly recommend it as well.)

4) The Alchemist’s Kitchen by Susan Rich: Susan Rich’s book has just been named a finalist for the Foreword Book of the Year Award in Poetry for 2010, so I feel confident recommending this book even though Susan has been a good friend of mine for the last ten years. To me, The Alchemist’s Kitchen is delectable reading, not only do we explore relationships, food, love, and life, but also art—the middle section of this collection pays tribute to photographer Myra Albert Wiggins. Rich’s poems calm me, help me to slow down and appreciate the details to life and her work make me pay attention to the music in our words.

5) A New Red by Lana Hechtman Ayers: A beautiful book of poems where a more modern Red Riding Hood gets to tell her story, along with the hunter and the wolf. Even Gretel wanders in for a poem. This is a tightly woven collection where the poetry reader can lose herself into the story of fairytales and at 129 pages, it’s a good size book so you’ll have excellent reading if you get lost on the way to grandmother’s house.

BIO: Kelli Russell Agodon is the author Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize, which is currently a finalist for the Foreword Book of the Year Award in Poetry. She is also the author of Small Knots (2004) and the chapbook, Geography.

Kelli lives in Washington State with her family where she is an avid mountain biker as well as the co-editor of Seattle’s 28-year-old print literary journal, Crab Creek Review, and the co-founder of Two Sylvias Press.

You can find her blogging at Book of Kells, where she writes about living and writing creatively or visit her website at: http://www.agodon.com or on Facebook at: www.facebook.com/agodon

God Particles
Thomas Lux
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2008

Long ago, for better or worse, the double-edged sword of human potential took over management of the world. Given the fact that the same homo sapien mind which conceives of transcendence, kindness, healing and selfless heroism, is the same mind that seems hopelessly addicted to war, hate, greed and cruelty, how are we doing? Not so good, according to the often scathing, always perceptive poems in this collection. The language is deft and direct, the imagery down-to-earth, and every topic has a take-no-prisoners relevancy.

Tourist in Hell
Eleanor Wilner
The University of Chicago Press
2010

Devastating, empathetic, complex, apocalyptic, enlightening, frightening, wonderful! No kidding, these poems give me the chills.

Upgraded to Serious
Heather McHugh
Copper Canyon Press
2009

Playful language and witty, fast-paced satirical hits on unexpectedly salient subjects, including phrenologists, the dodo’s caca, and webcamming the world. A reader’s delight.

The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Oxford University Press
USA 4th Ed. 1976

Hopkins’ work, through striking word choice and rhythms, offers the reader a poetic thrill ride, especially when his poems are memorized. Memorization brings a closer intimacy and thus a deeper revelation of this poet’s lush sprung patterns and intense sensibility that, among other sensations, rinse and wring the ear.

John Keats Complete Poems
Jack Stillinger, Editor
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
1991

Might be a cliché to say it but that doesn’t make it any less true: the intellectual sweetness, tangible soulfulness and enduring sincerity of Keats never fail to nourish the heart and head. Tender is the night indeed.

BIO: Sally Molini co-edits Cerise Press, an international online journal based in the US and France (www.cerisepress.com). Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Barrow Street, Beloit Poetry Journal, American Letters & Commentary, Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, and other journals. She lives in Nebraska.

Thanks to Reb Livingston for the inspiration behind this idea. Each year, she invites poets to share their favorite books in December.

Through this celebration, we hope to:

1. Promote the work of writers who may be new to you. Someone already wrote me to say they bought a few of the books recommended by John Poch on Day One.

2. Promote the work of the writers who volunteer to share their recommendations. At the end of each post, you’ll notice a juicy bio—often with links to the writer’s projects. I hope you take a moment to find out what they are working on these days.

The schedule of writers follows. Please feel welcome to share it on your blog. We’re creeping into the month of May, which shows poetry can’t be contained to just one month.

April 1: John Poch
April 2: Jonterri Gadson
April 3: Eric Weinstein
April 4: M.E. Silverman
April 5: Arielle Greenberg
April 6: Lucy Biederman
April 7: Eric Pankey
April 8: David Lehman
April 9 AM: Collin Kelley
April 9 PM: J.J. Penna
April 10: Jennifer Atkinson
April 11: Luke Johnson
April 11: Interview with Terri Witek
April 12: Holly Karapetkova
April 13: Daniel Nester
April 14 AM: Donald Illich
April 14 PM: Ravi Shankar
April 15: Carolina Ebeid
April 16: M. Scott Douglass
April 17 AM: Adam Vines
April 17 PM: Erica Dawson
April 18: Elizabeth J. Coleman
April 19: Bernadette Geyer
April 20 AM: Sally Molini
April 20 PM: Amit Majmudar
April 21: Kelli Russell Agodon
April 22: Jeannine Hall Gailey
April 23: George David Clark
April 24 AM: Ren Powell
April 24 PM: Dan O’Brien
April 25: Randall Mann
April 25: Andrew Kozma
April 26 AM: Mary Biddinger
April 27 AM: Juliana Gray
April 27 PM: Carrie Jerrell
April 28: Steven Allen May
April 29: Erin Elizabeth Smith
April 29: Joshua Gray
April 30: Rachel Zucker
May 1: Erika Meitner
May 2: Caki Wilkinson
May 5: Andrea Hollander Budy
May 6: Lisa Russ Spaar
May 7: January Gill O’Neil
May 10: Brian K. Spears

Today Bernadette Geyer brings her suggestions to the 32 Poems blog.

Burning the Empty Nests, by Gregory Orr – Orr’s poems are linguistically playful and emotionally razor-shap. I find myself returning frequently to the final section, “The Adventures of the Stone.”

What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire, by Charles Bukowski – Shows that Bukowski is not just a poet of whiskey and expletives. His emotional range is phenomenal.

Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems, by Wislawa Szymborska – I will always return to this collection for Szymborska’s poetic gaze, and for the brutally frightening power of the poem “Discovery.”

Selected Poems, by Mark Strand – Strand exhibits a wonderful depth of emotion without losing his inherent sense of the wry and surreal.

True Stories: Poems, by Margaret Atwood – Atwood’s voice is intimate and compelling in these poems which read sometimes as confessions, sometimes as myth.

BIO: Bernadette Geyer is the author of the chapbook What Remains and recipient of a Strauss Fellowship from the Arts Council of Fairfax County. Her poems have appeared in Oxford American, 32 Poems, The Los Angeles Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. Read her poetry book reviews.

Erika Meitner’s book Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010) meant a lot to me, not only because of her craft and intelligence but because of the heritage we share, which surfaces in such poems as “Elegy with Construction Sounds, Water, Fish” (“There is clover in the yard, but Yiddish / has almost no flowers”), “1944″ and “The Chimneys in New Jersey,” haunted as they are by Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz.

Todd Swift, a Canadian poet currently residing in London, recently published Seaway, a volume of New and Selected Poems (Salmonpoetry, 2008) that reveals the cosmopolitan range of his interests and the geographical breadth of his imagination. There are poems set in Budapest, London, Paris, Montreal, Cannes, New York, and Austerlitz. He writes most movingly about his father and mother.

Jennifer L. Knox tells the truth between laughs in poems that begin “On their fifth date, Mike and Lou attended / a Grow Your Own Cocaine class at the Y.” Her latest gathering is The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway (Bloof Books, 2010). Sample titles: “The Earth is Flat and So’s My Ass”: “Anomalies of the Female Reproductive System,” “Don Ho’s Funeral.”

The late Gerrit Henry (1950-2003) wrote with singular tenderness and charm in a timbre unmistakably his own and recognizably tinged with a New York School sensibility. In rhymes as clever as the song lyrics he admired, he captures the bliss and heartbreak of a lifelong lover’s quarrel with the gods and goddesses of romance. “I take a mid-sized yellow tab, and soon / I’;m on a cruiser heading toward the moon. / I take the pill because I am in pain, / And always was, and will be soon, again.” The Time of the Night, edited by Marc Cohen with an introduction by John Ashbery (Groundwater Press, 2011), should win Henry new fans.

In his second collection, The Dance of No Hard Feelings (Copper Canyon, 2009), Mark Bibbins solidifies his reputation as a poet of rare wit and brilliant invention, as in his irresistible poem “Concerning the Land to the South of our Neighbors to Our North.”

– David Lehman

BIO: David Lehman’s books of poems include Yeshiva Boys and When a Woman Loves a Man. His book A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award in 2010. He has created a traveling library exhibition based on “A Fine Romance”; it will travel to fifty-five libraries between May 2011 and April 2012. New poems and essays by David Lehman have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Green Mountains Review, 32 Poems, Maggy, American Poetry Review, Boulevard and The American Scholar. Lehman blogs for the Best American Poetry.