April is National Poetry Month, a marvelous opportunity to celebrate the expressiveness, delight, and pure charm of poetry.

Wade in the Water by Tracy K Smith

A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, using her signature voice–inquisitive, lyrical and wry–mulls over what it means to be a citizen, a mother and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men and violence.

Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman

Including The Hill We Climb, the poem she read at Biden’s inauguration, this book explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage.

Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

In his impressive debut collection, Vuong writes beauty into–and culls from–individual, familial, and historical traumas derived from the war in Vietnam.

Living Nations, Living Words edited by Joy Harjo

A powerful, moving anthology that celebrates the breadth of Native poets writing today, with poems chosen by the first Native American U.S. Poet Laureate.

Kent State by Deborah Wiles

Told from different points of view-protesters, students, National Guardsmen, and “townies”-recount the story of what happened at Kent State in May 1970, when four college students were killed by National Guardsmen, and a student protest turned into a battlefield.

The Shape of the Journey by Jim Harrison

The definitive collection of poetry from one of America’s best-loved writers.

Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry edited by Camille Dungy

The first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets.

A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

In the eighteenth century, on discovering her husband has been murdered, an Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament that reaches across centuries to the young Doireann Ní Ghríofa, whose fascination with it is later rekindled when she narrowly avoids fatal tragedy in her own life and becomes obsessed with learning everything she can about the poem.