Best Books for Writers

In this collection of essays, the former director of the Bennington Writing Seminars and the coeditor of the journal Agni reflects on “the old questions, the good questions, the old Heideggerian questions that seem so very basic on the surface, but then you get caught in the implications and realize that they go on and on and that you’ll only go crazy trying to answer them.” Chief among Birkerts’s interrogations is what it means to be a writer today, when so many other mediums compete for an audience. Meditating on smartphones, photography, Jorge Luis Borges, Bob Dylan, and more, Birkerts offers writing— “the right words in the right order”—as a pathway through an increasingly complex labyrinth.  

In this book of craft essays and exercises, coauthor of The Poet’s Companion and renowned poet Dorianne Laux offers an invitation to poets to practice and engage with the art of poetry. Laux begins by exploring the reasons she writes poetry, and each section after tackles a variety of subjects, including the syllable and the line, form, imagination, and voice. With examples from classic and contemporary poets, as well as approachable prompts and exercises throughout the book, Laux guides poets through the ways in which she practices poetry. “I like moving, word by word, toward a sense of discovery, toward an awareness of self, a curious, energetic, intelligent, humorous, sacred, baffling, heartful self,” writes Laux. “I live for that flaring up of language, when the words actually carry me, envelop me, grip me.” 

In this installment of the Why I Write series, based on Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Lectures, Greil Marcus explores the power and mystery of art and writing. The music journalist, cultural critic, and coeditor of the anthology A New Literary History of America (Belknap Press, 2009), examines his love of writing through three significant influences—his childhood haunted by the silence around his father’s death, his discovery of the film critic Pauline Kael, and an encounter with a sixteenth-century painting by Italian painter Titian. Through each section of the book, Marcus reflects on what makes writing so captivating, distinctive, and necessary. “Writing is rooted in memory: in some alchemy of responses, particular to everyone, with no one’s translation of life the same,” writes Marcus. “I write to discover what I want to say and how to say it—and the nerve to say it.” 

In this edition of The Best American Poetry, which has been published annually since 1988, guest editor Mary Jo Salter selects poems from seventy-five poets published in literary journals and poetry collections in 2023. The anthology celebrates a wide range of established poets as well as newcomers to the series, including Kim Addonizio, Ama Codjoe, Armen Davoudian, Rita Dove, Marie Howe, Omotara James, Maya C. Popa, Arthur Sze, Claire Wahmanholm, and Kevin Young. In her introduction to the volume, the former poetry editor of the New Republic and coeditor of three editions of The Norton Anthology of Poetry notes her inclination in choosing longer poems with exception for the late Louise Glück’s three-line poem “Passion and Form.” Salter writes: “The business of poets, I would argue, includes at least some of these aspirations: to witness the world, including the layered, shifting moods of their own minds’ interiors; to feel deeply and also to think through their feelings; to experience life with all of the senses…to dare to remain uncertain and paradoxical and inconclusive as life itself, while also making a finished ‘thing,’ a poem, of beauty.”

Drawn from twenty years of her career, Like Love is a collection of essays and conversations by Maggie Nelson, the author of iconic books, including Bluets (Wave Books, 2009) and The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015). The profiles, reviews, tributes, critical essays, and conversations with artists are arranged chronologically and range from subjects, such as Björk, Lhasa de Sela, Fred Moten, Alice Notley, Prince, and Kara Walker. Nelson’s insights and development as a writer shine through as she tackles themes of intergenerational exchange, love and friendship, feminist and queer issues, the roles of the critic and of language, and the rewards and trials of creating art. “Language doesn’t always make me happy. But sometimes, you must explain,” writes Nelson in the preface. “And not just because someone asked, or because we live in a culture of explanation, but because one wants to. Needs to. The language rises up, an upchuck. Words aren’t just what’s left; they’re what we have to offer.”  

In this book blending memoir, criticism, and biography, author and editor Joanna Biggs examines the unconventional paths of women writers across the centuries—their pursuits and achievements as well as their disappointments and hardships. Each chapter is dedicated to one writer and offers a glimpse into the writing lives of Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante. Biggs celebrates the ways in which these writers put their own lives into their writing, and how the choices they made enabled them to write, and keep going. “This book bears the traces of their struggles as well as my own—and some of the things we all found that help. Not all of the solutions they (and I) found worked, and even when they did, they didn’t work all of the time,” she writes. “But the answers might come in time if I could stay with the questions.”

In this anthology, a collection of poems on the theme of celebrating moments of wonder and peace in everyday life offer a guide to reflective writing. Edited by James Crews, a wide selection of poems are included by established and emerging writers, such as Kai Coggin, Toi Derricotte, Rudy Francisco, Ross Gay, Natalie Goldberg, Joy Harjo, Jane Hirshfield, Jennifer G. Lai, Alberto Ríos, and Maggie Smith. Divided into sections of “Reflective Pause,” including “Choosing Peace,” “A Time for Everything,” and “Winks of Calm,” each has a short essay focused on one poem and prompts to invite and guide the reader into writing and reflection. “Wonder calls us back to the curiosity we are each born with, and it makes us want to move closer to what sparks our attention,” writes Crews in the introduction. “These poems call us back to our original creative selves, who were never ashamed to give time and attention to something as simple as moss clinging to a fallen log, or a perfect carrot grown in the garden.” 

Artistic community is at the core of this new craft book about the artist’s life and work over time by author and critic Stacey D’Erasmo, whose novels include the Lambda Literary Award–winning A Seahorse Year (Harcourt, 2004) and Wonderland (Harcourt, 2014). Shaping her immersive, lyrical essays around conversations with older artists across mediums, including composer Tania Léon, poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña, and landscape architect Darrel Morrison, D’Erasmo produces an insightful tapestry of sustainable artistic practice. Alongside deeply personal observations of cities, lineage, queerness, and life itself, a self-portrait emerges. “Maybe the rectilinear plane on which you have staked your life,” she writes, “is always filled with unnameable stuff that you nevertheless keep beginning with ‘dear friend’ and ending with ‘love.’” The Long Run is at once a record of long, fulfilling careers in the arts and a study of how they can come to be.  

In this collection of essays, author and translator Eric Sellin provides a guide to the art and science of translation, including the nuances in translating formal poetry. These personal and insightful essays cover structural challenges as well as linguistic and aesthetic issues while offering practical and theoretical advice from his extensive career as a professor, poet, editor, and translator. “In these essays, my solution to the dilemma of dealing with the many uncertainties involved in literary translation,” writes Sellin, “has been simply to ignore those uncertainties and to concentrate on snagging the brass ring while enjoying the merry-go-round ride of the translation process; and then to focus my attention on the actual translation process…treacherous though it might be.”  

In this practical guidebook, Philip Gerard, author and founder of the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s MFA program in creative writing, walks through the genre of creative nonfiction—how it came to be defined and what it takes to craft a compelling, true story. Gerard combines journalistic skills with the art of storytelling in the eleven chapters covering subjects such as research, interviewing, mystery and structure, law and ethics, and revision. Writers will learn the challenges and steps to mastering the craft of creative nonfiction with Gerard’s generous instruction and advice. “The hardest part of writing creative nonfiction is that you’re stuck with what really happened—you can’t make it up,” writes Gerard. “You can be as artful as you want in the presentation, draw profound meanings out of your subject matter, but you are stuck with real people and real events. You’re stuck with stories that don’t always turn out the way you wish they had turned out.”