An acclaimed poet and critic who regularly writes reviews for the Los Angeles Times, NPR, and the New York Times Book Review, Craig Morgan Teicher assembles here a fascinating collection of essays that trace the poetic development of luminaries such as Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, Louise Glück, W. S. Merwin, and francine j. harris, exploring how poets start out, how they learn to hear themselves, and how some of them are able to create works that stand the test of time. “I do hope,” Teicher writes, “that these investigations of various poets’ development offer other writers ways of thinking about how life and art—and how art and artists—affect one another.”