The Personal Is Always Political: A 2018 Poetry Preview
Many of this year's books are sad. It's hard not to read the current political turmoil, the icy sense of dividedness, into these poems, though many of them deal as much with private as with public pain. Needless to say, this year's poetry books are powerful.
This is the seventh time I've had the privilege to write for NPR about my most anticipated books of the coming year, and this time I've made a few new rules for myself (no debut collections, no poets who've appeared in a previous edition of this preview, and no poets who've published a retrospective of "selected" or "collected" poems) in the hope that I can offer a view of poets in medias res, in the midst — of their careers, their adult lives and responsibilities, of their engagement with where their public and private lives meet during this trouble and troubling moment.
These rules also mean I've had to omit exciting collections by poets I love, including Terrance Hayes, Kevin Young, and C.D. Wright. But the poets below aren't trying to prove their potential or cement their legacy; they're processing their lives through poetry, looking, I like to
