Best Books for Writers

“This is a personal book about American poetry, but I hope it is more than a personal selection,” writes critic and poet Edward Hirsch in the introduction to this Library of America anthology with essays reflecting on forty poems that have made an impact on his life and how they might help guide and connect readers through difficult times. Featuring the work of poets such as Anne Bradstreet, Julia de Burgos, Lucille Clifton, Joy Harjo, Langston Hughes, and Phillis Wheatley, each essay both carefully contextualizes the biography of the poet with the chosen piece and analyzes in detail the language and mechanics driving the emotion behind each poem. Hirsch’s expertise and adoring relationship with verse shines through in every essay, as he makes clear why poetry matters. “There is a conversation in American poetry that is also a colloquial about American life,” writes Hirsch. “Each individual poet, wittingly or unwittingly, consciously or unconsciously, contributes to this exchange and discussion.”  

“I have always contended that the most important work being done today is in the field of ethnic letters. I’d like to add that within that field, the most critical pressure point pulses from the queer body of color—its representation and its cultural production,” writes Rigoberto González in the introduction to this collection of essays focused exclusively on writers of color, and particularly on Latino poetry. Divided into three sections—Critical Essays, Critical Reviews, and Critical Grace Notes—the collection discusses the works of contemporary writers such as Eduardo C. Corral, Natalie Diaz, Aracelis Girmay, and J. Michael Martinez along with venerable writers including Francisco X. Alarcón, Robert Hayden, and Juan Felipe Herrera. This installment of the Poets on Poetry series published by the University of Michigan Press demonstrates how writers who represent marginalized communities continue to reorient the direction of American poetry, and delivers rigorous, critical writing that will inspire generations of writers to come.  

“Like Orpheus and his songs, lyric essays try something daring. They rely more on intuition than exposition. They often use image more than narration. They question more than answer,” writes editor Randon Billings Noble in the introduction to this anthology of lyric essays. Featuring the work of writers such as Casandra López, Dinty W. Moore, Diane Seuss, Elissa Washuta, and Lidia Yuknavitch, this collection includes examples of four forms—flash essays, segmented essays, braided essays, and hermit crab essays—and concludes with a section of craft essays from six different authors offering their take on the art of writing lyric essays. Given the slippery nature of defining the form, each contributor supplements their work with a short meditation on the genre-bending form, making this book as much of a reference book as a thrilling read. “Lyric essays require a kind of passion, a commitment to weirdness in the face of convention, a willingness to risk confusion, a comfort with outsider status,” writes Noble.  

“The hearing-knowledge we bring to a line of poetry is a knowledge of patterns in speech we have known to hear since we were infants,” writes Robert Pinsky in the introduction to this poetry handbook with the intention to “enhance the reader’s pleasure in poetry through knowledge of a few basic principles and their tremendous effects.” Organized into five sections—“Accent and Duration,” “Syntax and Line,” “Technical Terms and Vocal Realities,” “Like and Unlike Sounds,” and “Blank Verse and Free Verse”—the former U.S. poet laureate guides the reader through the natural inflections of the English language, breaking down the effects these distinct sounds have on the experience of reading poetry. Meant for readers and poets of all levels, this guidebook of poetry not only takes on the task of explaining, in an accessible way, the music in poetry, but also includes a handy glossary of terms with accompanying examples that begs revisiting. 

“Is the poem a body? Underscore an honorable yes, and the poem keeps living. I swear it does, even after years on the page, sitting steely, all knowing enough,” writes Marianne Boruch in “The End Inside It,” the first of nine essays exploring the mysteries behind crafting poems in this Poets on Poetry series volume published by University of Michigan Press. The award-winning poet and professor applies the associative, playful quality of her poems into clear-eyed, daring essays, citing not only examples from iconic poets such as W. S. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, and Marianne Moore, but from various fields of expertise such as anatomy, history, medicine, photography, anthropology, and painting. The result is a poetic meditation on the nature of making art, leading readers and writers further into the dynamics of her probing mind. “I mainly wanted to return seriously to poets whose work I love, mull over the fact that writing and reading poetry alters us, that there is no us really, just the I/thou and stopped time when we pay close attention,” writes Boruch in the introduction. “And then we look back to a changed world.” 

In this rare compilation edited and translated by Clare Cavanagh, Nobel Prize–winning poet Wisława Szymborska offers insightful advice, originally written anonymously for a column in the Polish journal Literary Life. Characterized by her biting sense of humor and wisdom, Szymborska’s advice is often unforgiving and matter-of-fact, providing criticisms as well as confessions that humble the most accomplished of writers: “I myself started out with rotten poetry and stories.” Illustrated with the poet’s own collages, this guide to the writing of poetry invites the reader into the mind and revelations of a beloved poet. “The strategic ‘we’ she employs in How to Start Writing (and When to Stop) does more than guide its readers through the joys—and miseries—of writing (and not writing) well,” writes Cavanagh in the introduction. “Her seriously lighthearted alter ego provides the closest look we’re likely to get at the marvelous workshop in which she drafted, revised, discarded, and sometimes, mercifully, even preserved the poems that make up her small, but weight oeuvre.” 

“To fashion a persona out of one’s own undisguised self is no easy thing,” writes Vivian Gornick in The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. “A novel or a poem provides invented characters or speaking voices that act as surrogates for the writer. The persona in a nonfiction narrative is an unsurrogated one.” In this seminal craft book on the art of writing nonfiction, Gornick makes visible and practical the task of casting one’s self into a personal narrative. Using experience from decades of teaching in MFA programs, the renowned critic and memoirist offers examples from the works of luminaries such as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, and Marguerite Duras. Through intimate and lucid prose, this book provides guidance on how to identify truth in the words one reads and writes. 

In The Art of Description: World Into Word, a volume in Graywolf’s renowned Art of series edited by Charles Baxter, award-winning poet Mark Doty takes on the task of revealing the complexities of rendering the sensations of an experience. “It sounds like a simple thing, to say what you see,” writes Doty. “But try to find words for the shades of a mottled sassafras leaf, or the reflectivity of a bay on an August morning, or the very beginnings of desire stirring in the gaze of someone looking right into your eyes, and it immediately becomes clear that all we see is slippery, nuanced, elusive.” Through passionate, clear, and incisive meditations on the works of poets such as William Blake, Walt Whitman, and Elizabeth Bishop, Doty articulates what it is that makes the language of these masterful writers so precise and moving. Within this compact volume, readers and writers will enjoy and appreciate the deep consideration of the way words are used, both in poetry and in life. 

Edited by Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry includes three hundred poems written by poets from around the world and across the ages. Featuring the work of Judah Al-Harizi, Li-Young Lee, Anna Kamieńska, Antonio Machado, and Tu Fu, among others, the anthology is divided into evocatively titled sections such as “The Secret of a Thing,” “The Moment,” “People Among People,” and “Nonattachment.” Milosz provides a preface to each poem, making the book more than just an assemblage of writers from around the world, but an instructional and inspirational reminder of the power that poetry has to touch the soul. 

In her 2019 book, Essays One, Lydia Davis offers her insights on craft and the writing life, while this follow-up volume concentrates on her expertise as a translator. Essays include observations on learning foreign languages, translating Proust from the French, and how her travels across the city of Arles in France influenced her writing. “The translation problems that you have struggled with the hardest, perhaps never satisfied with your solutions, will stay with you for a long time—you can count on it,” Davis writes. In eleven unique sections, including “Learning a Foreign Language: Dutch,” “Translating from English into English,” “Translating Michel Leiris,” and “On Translation and Madame Bovary,” Davis lets the reader in on her idiosyncratic way of approaching translation. Her clear and incisive prose carries all those invested in the mysteries and relationships between languages. 

“I grew up seeing very few images that looked like me in books, film, or television. In that absence, how does one realize that something is even missing?” writes Alice Wong, founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project, in the introduction to this powerful collection of essays by disabled people. Writers such as Jen Deerinwater, Ariel Henley, Jamison Hill, and Jillian Weise cover a broad range of topics in this anthology that invites readers to question their own understanding of an ableist society and gives voice to a generation of writers who are often underrepresented in the media and publishing industry. “These stories do not seek to explain the meaning of disability or to inspire or elicit empathy. Rather, they show disabled people simply being in our own words, by our own accounts.”