Every year since 2014, I’ve set aside a couple of months to sit down with what amounts to a long shelf of poetry published in the past 12 months. My goal is to review 31 single-author volumes, one for each day in December. It’s exhausting, certainly, but also a lot of fun, and it’s a great way to see how well-aligned my personal aesthetics and preponderances are with the poetry world in general.
This year, I felt pretty much in tune with what was being published. Obviously, there are hundreds of quality books published each year that I will never have the chance to read, but in 2024, I sensed a movement away from the book-length poem of sententious seriousness toward volumes privileging the lyric. Granted, a number of the books I reviewed are new and selected volumes covering the careers of well-established writers. However, even younger poets seemed to be thinking in terms of brevity and density, trying to compress experience and music and ideas into as few lines as possible rather than allowing language to drift like smoke in great clouds of wavering meaning.
As always, my reviews are intentionally very short. Ideally, each one contains just enough information — an appreciative observation, say, or a striking quotation — to kickstart readers into searching out the book under discussion. Happy holidays, and happy reading!