0 degrees, 0 degrees by Amit Majmudar
Majmudar is a master at craft, but even better: he has a prolific and generous imagination. His poems, then–and his novels, too–incarnate stories and gods that are not his, and to read him is to learn a wider compassion.
View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems of Wislawa Szymborska
Szymborska made me realize that a poem, like a camera–but more than a camera because a poem is equipped with a telescope and a microscope and a time machine–can pan, defying the limits of our ordinary vision.
Every Riven Thing by Christian Wiman
Wiman is the best poet of almost-ness–almost-love, almost-faith, almost-reunciation–I have comes across. His poems are the ones I come back to most often; I test myself against their truths again and again.
A Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay
Some poets demand that we love life despite everything, and some demand that we love life because of everything, and Ross Gay demands that we do both at once–and he does so in words whose hold I cannot weasel out of. Nor would I want to.
Keeper by Kasey Jueds
Reading Jueds’s poems, I find myself less lonely. Her words shoulder such heavy things, crabbed love and mortal losses, and they do so with such tenderness and such grace, that when I read them, they prop me up, too.
Jane Zwart teaches English at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Rattle, Threepenny Review, and TriQuarterly, as well as other journals and magazines.