In anticipation of our "Summer Reading Issue," we asked which books you, as writers who read deeply year-round, turn to in the warm months ahead. Culled from readers' responses on pw.org and our Facebook page, here are the results.
POETRY
The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You (Lost Roads, 1977) by Frank Stanford
Black Woman and Other Poems/Mujer negra y otros poemas (Mango Publishing, 2004) by Nancy Morejon
Blue on Blue Ground (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005) by Aaron Smith
A Book of Luminous Things: An
International Anthology of Poetry
(Harcourt Brace, 1996) edited by Czeslaw Milosz
Collected Poems, 1947–1980 (Harper & Row, 1984) by Allen Ginsberg
The Country Without a Post
Office (Norton, 1997) by Agha Shahid Ali
C. P. Cavafy: The Collected
Poems (Random House, 2009) edited by
Daniel Mendelsohn
C. P. Cavafy: The Unfinished
Poems (Random House, 2009) edited by
Daniel Mendelsohn
The Dance Most of All (Knopf, 2009) by Jack Gilbert
Dear Darkness (Knopf, 2008) by Kevin Young
Dismantling the Hills (University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2008) by Michael McGriff
Endpoint and Other Poems (Knopf, 2009) by John Updike
Femme du Monde (Tia Chucha, 2006) by Patricia Spears Jones
Four Good Things (Houghton Mifflin,
1980) by James McMichael
Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (University of Arizona Press, 2008) by Juan Felipe Herrera
Half Wild (Louisiana State University Press, 2006)
by Mary Rose O'Reilly
How God Ends Us (University of South Carolina Press, 2009) by DéLana R. A.
Dameron
If Birds
Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009) by Anna Journey
In Search of
Duende (New Directions,
1955) by Federico García Lorca
In the American Tree (National Poetry Foundation, 1986) edited by Ron Silliman
In the Surgical Theater (American Poetry Review, 1999) by Dana Levin
Love Is a Dog From Hell: Poems
1974-1977 (Black Sparrow Press, 1977) by
Charles Bukowski
Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) by Natasha
Trethewey
Next Life (Wesleyan University Press,
2007) by Rae Armantrout
One Hundred
Poems From the Chinese (New
Directions, 1971) by Kenneth Rexroth
The Owning Stone (Red Hen Press, 2000)
by Jim Peterson
The Plague of Doves (HarperCollins, 2008) by Louise Erdrich
Poems From the Women's Movement (Library of America, 2009) edited by Honor Moore
The School
Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 (Norton, 2004) by Adrienne Rich
Selected Poems (Pantheon Books, 1993) by Rita Dove
Sonata Mulattica (Norton, 2009) by Rita Dove
Sonnets (Grove Press, 1967) by Ted
Berrigan
Sun Under Wood (Ecco, 1996) by Robert Hass
Take It (Wave Books, 2009) by Joshua Beckman
Tell Me (BOA Editions, 2000) by Kim Addonizio
Then, Suddenly (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999) by Lynn Emanuel
Warhorses (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) by Yusef Komunyakaa