Must-Read Poetry: Winter 2023
In this quarterly column for The Millions, I’ll feature the best new books of poetry. I’ve been writing for the site since 2012—interviews, essays, lists—but poetry is my true literary love. Specifically, recommending poetry. I’ve found that people who don’t love poetry haven’t yet found the right poem: that perfect mix of recognition and revelation. I’m drawn to poetry because it is mysterious, wild, prayerful, and surprising; truly, as Coleridge wrote, “the best words in the best order.”
For years, I’ve been writing poems—and writing about poetry. My next book, The Habit of Poetry, is a study of a minor midcentury literary renaissance: a group of nuns who wrote beautiful, challenging poems. Their work was prolific, moving, and yet largely forgotten: sadly, a useful analogy for the plight of poetry. I want to do a small part to change that. I hope that this column will reveal that poetry is very much alive—and flourishing.
Quiet by Victoria Adukwei Bulley
A Ghanaian poet interested in formal and syntacticis united by an examination of identity and colonization. Her poems are to be .
