Best Books for Writers

“As we have been coediting The Ecopoetry Anthology, we’ve become ever more convinced that the environmental crisis is made possible by a profound failure of the imagination,” write editors Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street in the preface to this anthology compiling the works of writers—including Walt Whitman, H.D., Robert Hayden, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams—responding to the “burgeoning environmental crisis.” The book begins with a history of poetry about nature, creating a lineage between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry and the ecopoetics movement of the 1960s, the era in which contemporary ecopoetry bloomed. With an introduction by former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass, this collection achieves a generous and capacious archive of living in the Anthropocene, offering a road towards hope through profound intelligence and emotional poetry. 

In twenty essays, this anthology edited by author and book critic Meredith Maran gleans the expertise of major memoirists—including Sue Monk Kidd, Cheryl Strayed, Jesmyn Ward, and Edmund White—who are dedicated to the craft of creative nonfiction. Topics range from turning oneself into an authentic character to the art behind exposing difficult personal details, and the practical obstacles that come in the way of writing. Why We Write About Ourselves is an authentic and inspiring read for anybody seeking to tell their truth. 

In this second volume of original essays from the popular New York Times column, Writers on Writing compiles advice from revered authors such as Diane Ackerman, Margaret Atwood, Frank Conroy, Mary Karr, and Amy Tan. With an introduction by Jane Smiley, this collection includes essays that range from thoughtful and serious reflections, to wry and hilarious advice, offering a glimpse into the challenges and rewards of the creative process. “How to read this book?” asks Smiley. “Read it like eavesdropping or like twisting the knob on an old radio and tuning in stations from far and wide. Read it like an explorer, then wander among the authors’ other works.” 

“This anthology intends to trace a movement from conventional form to exploratory field, and to do so, not by presenting the work of literary historians but by collecting some of the important prose works of poets themselves,” writes Michelle Kwasny in the introduction to this 2004 anthology of manifestos, prefaces, craft essays, and letters from poets writing between 1802 and 1950. Organized into three sections—“Form as Proceeding,” “Crise de Vers,” and “The Poem as a Field of Action”—with introductions to each prose work by Kwasny, readers can track the development of literary styles and thought across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the most influential European and American poets, such as Aimé Césaire, Mina Loy, Charles Olson, and William Wordsworth. Expertly arranged and researched, this seminal anthology is one worth keeping on the shelf for any writer looking to expand their understanding of what literary writing has done across time and can still do. 

“Beauty, at least when it is referred to by that name—suffers the same treatment by too many contemporary poets (and students of poetry) as does authority in poetry,” writes Carl Phillips, recipient of the 2021 Jackson Poetry Prize, in “The Case for Beauty,” an essay included in Coin of the Realm. “It gets dismissed as naïve, or irrelevant, or somehow on the wrong side of the field on whose other side we are all assumed to have happily set up camp together.” In these incisive and imaginative essays, Phillips wrestles with topics such as authority, identity, consciousness, and beauty, and how these subjects relate to writing poetry. With examples ranging from ancient Greek to contemporary poetry, Phillips shows writers what it is to be a rigorous thinker in and outside the work one writes. 

“Modern Arab poetry has evolved against the background of the turmoil of the Arab world,” writes translator Abdullah al-Udhari in the introduction to this bilingual anthology of Arabic poetry featuring Adonis, Mahmud Darwish, and Samih al-Qasim, first published in 1984 by Saqi Books. “This collection is meant to provide English-speaking readers with a sense of the frontiers of Arab poetry today.” With the original Arabic and the English translations side-by-side, this anthology renders in song the intimate experiences of poets who have used their work to resist victimization and express their aspirations as contemporary writers. The work of these three poets, as al-Udhari writes, “led to the breakdown of classical Arab poetic conventions and redrew the map of Arab poetry.” Featuring detailed biographical notes and historical context to the works, this collection will help broaden the language of any writer seeking to express the urgent and ineffable. 

“These collected writings, passed down to each of us, hold the power of information. Each of us holds to our chest what solidifies our understanding of our place in this world. What can a body do with such an understanding?” writes Mahogany Browne in the foreword to this collection of writings by Audre Lorde, reissued for Penguin Classics as a part of the Penguin Vitae series. Known for her groundbreaking writings on race, gender, and sexuality, the fifteen essays and speeches in this book, including “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” and “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” do the difficult work of connecting one’s written work to the intersections of identity and social change. This influential text is not only a must-have for any writer for its incisive and lyrical prose but an essential text for anyone seeking to connect with another. 

“This structure—this architecture—is the essential drama of the poem’s composition,” argues Ellen Bryant Voigt about syntax in this timeless installment from The Art Of series published by Graywolf Press and edited by Charles Baxter. “With poetry as with music, the first step toward mastery is recognition.” With thorough discussions of prosody and syntax, Voigt parses out line by line the music of poetic language in works by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Stanley Kunitz, and others, examining what it is they deploy technically that allows meaning to come together. At times overwhelming with detail, this influential craft book carries a glossary in the back with key prosody terms, making it an indispensable book for all writers to return to, again and again, as they hone the music of their language. 

“I sometimes think I was born reading,” writes Vivian Gornick in Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader, a collection of essays that tracks the books the critic and memoirist has read over and over again, helping to shape her storied life and prolific writing career. Through incisive and intimate writing, Gornick finds herself identifying with opposing characters in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, and considering the veracity of memory through Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, as well as discussing the prose of writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Natalia Ginzburg, and Doris Lessing. Part memoir and literary criticism, Gornick’s book is a reminder of the importance of reading for a writer’s life and how it helps one “feel the power of Life with a capital L.” 

Composed of short form pieces from the sixteenth century to the present, this anthology edited by Alan Ziegler gives readers a sense of the long tradition of the form and how authors across generations continue to influence one another. Arranged chronologically by the year of each author’s birth, there are prose poems, short-short stories, brief essays, fragments, and more from writers such as Louise-Sébastien Mercier, William Blake, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Octavio Paz, Lydia Davis, Kimiko Hahn, and Claudia Rankine. Ziegler, who instituted a Short Prose Forms class at Columbia University in 1989, encourages writers to think past genre: “Perhaps space constriction lends itself to work that subverts expectations, or maybe when writers work in a renegade form they feel free to throw caution to the winds of imagination.” 

“It should go without saying that the more one knows how to do, the more one can do,” writes Lewis Turco in this fifth edition of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. This go-to reference guide has been revised to aid the contemporary reader and writer, and includes classic rules of scansion, a Form-Finder index, and new examples and terms for all forms of poetry and verse. Heralded for Turco’s engaging style, this companion, sometimes referred to as “the poet’s bible,” defines, explains, and contextualizes basic concepts so any writer looking to challenge their writing can step up to the task. 

“Read these poems to yourself in the middle of the night,” advises Edward Hirsch in How to Read a Poem. “These poems have come from a great distance to find you.” With accessible language and encyclopedic knowledge, Hirsch offers a guide on how to enjoy reading poetry, proposing the possibility of forming an intimate relationship with the genre through moving commentary on works by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Celan, Osip Mandelstam, and Walt Whitman, among others. Throughout these essays, Hirsch places the reader in the shoes of a great adventurer set to embark on a new journey, reminding them of the reason one becomes a reader of literature in the first place: “Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.”