Ten Contemporary Poets to Start With

If you are new to poetry and do not know where to start, begin with the poets writing now. Living poets are winning Pulitzers and MacArthur grants, and one of them wrote for Beyoncé. This guide covers ten whose work new readers tend to fall for, with the one book to pick up first for each.

• You do not need a degree. Every poet here writes in plain or near-plain language.
• The work is recognised. Between them they hold Pulitzers, National Book Critics Circle Awards, MacArthur Fellowships, and Poet Laureate titles.
• The range is wide: grief, migration, addiction, Blackness, nature, war, and wonder, so most readers find a door in somewhere.
• Nine of the ten are alive and publishing. The tenth, Mary Oliver, died in 2019 and is read more now than she was then.
• Each entry names one book to start with, so you are never staring at a bibliography.

Ada Limón, Ocean Vuong, Warsan Shire, Hanif Abdurraqib, Tracy K. Smith, Morgan Parker, Kaveh Akbar, Claudia Rankine, Mary Oliver, and Billy Collins are the easiest way into contemporary poetry. Pick one and you will probably read the whole shelf.

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The Headliners

Ada Limón

Ada Limón became the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States in July 2022, and the appointment read less like a coronation than a homecoming for a generation of readers who had never trusted poetry before. ^[1] The Carrying (2018, Milkweed Editions) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and her earlier Bright Dead Things (2015) was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. ^[1]

Limón is a good entry point because she writes in her body: poems about miscarriage, horses, illness, and the particular longing of loving a place you cannot quite call home. Her lines are long and conversational, her images rooted in the physical world. NASA commissioned a poem from her and inscribed it on the Europa Clipper spacecraft, bound for one of Jupiter's moons. ^[2]

Start with The Carrying. The title poem on its own is enough to send most readers to the rest of her work.

Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong wrote the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds and the bestselling novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. ^[3] He took the 2019 MacArthur Fellowship, the Whiting Award, and the T. S. Eliot Prize. ^[3]

Born in Ho Chi Minh City and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, Vuong writes where the Vietnam War, immigrant family memory, and queer identity meet, with a precision that makes each line feel settled and surprising at once. Night Sky with Exit Wounds arrived as a finished voice. He began learning English at five, which is hard to credit when you hear what he does with its music. ^[4]

Start with Night Sky with Exit Wounds. The opening poem, "Threshold", sets the book's temperature in twelve lines.

Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith won the Pulitzer and served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. ^[5] Life on Mars (2011) took the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, a book that opens in the cosmos with David Bowie and closes in grief for her father. ^[6] Wade in the Water (2018) brought documentary poetry to readers who had never met the form, weaving Civil War letters and slave auction notices into verse.

"Poetry is a way of coming into contact with the world, not escaping it." — Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate, Library of Congress ^[7]

Smith gives a new reader range. She moves from interplanetary wonder to domestic elegy to historical witness without dropping the thread. Her Library of Congress work took poetry into rural communities across America. ^[5]

Start with Life on Mars, and read it as a love letter to curiosity.

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Voices That Hit Differently

Warsan Shire

If you watched Beyoncé's Lemonade or Black Is King, you have already met Warsan Shire's words, even if you did not catch her name. The Somali-British poet, born in Kenya in 1988, was the poetry collaborator on both, which put her language of displacement and survival in front of a global audience. ^[8]

Her debut full-length collection Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head (2022) was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, which confirmed what her online readership had known for a decade. ^[8] She was also Young Poet Laureate for London. Her poems move through migration and diaspora with an intimacy that never reads like reportage. It reads like a whisper.

Start with Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head, then go back for the earlier pamphlet Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth.

Hanif Abdurraqib

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio, working where Black American life, grief, pop music, and basketball meet. He is a MacArthur Fellow and the author of A Fortune for Your Disaster and the essay collection They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us.

His poetry is dense with reference. Fall Out Boy lyrics sit next to meditations on mortality, NBA statistics next to elegies for friends, and the emotional centre stays clear throughout. He writes about grief the way most people actually feel it, sideways, through something else.

Start with A Fortune for Your Disaster.

Kaveh Akbar

Kaveh Akbar was born in Tehran and holds an MFA from Butler University and a PhD in creative writing from Florida State. He wrote Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf, 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, 2017), plus the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). He also edited The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse, which tells you where his attention goes: the ways people reach for something larger than themselves.

Calling a Wolf a Wolf traces addiction and recovery with a tenderness that never tips into self-pity. Akbar is a poet of hunger, for sobriety, for God, for beauty, for language, and readers who find him often describe it as the first poetry they could not put down. He also holds the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.

"I'm interested in all the ways that language fails to be enough, and keeps trying anyway." — Kaveh Akbar, The Poetry Foundation

Start with Calling a Wolf a Wolf, especially if you have ever wanted something badly enough to be damaged by it.

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The Boundary Breakers

Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and studied at Williams College and Columbia. Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) is one of the most discussed poetry books of the century, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the PEN Center USA Poetry Award.

Citizen blurs the line between poem and essay, pulling in photographs, sports history, and the microaggressions of ordinary American life. Readers often start it sceptical, this is poetry?, and finish it changed. Rankine works in the lyric essay tradition, so if you have ever found poetry too small to hold what you needed to say, she has an answer.

Start with Citizen: An American Lyric, and plan to read it twice. The second pass catches what the first moved too fast to hold.

Morgan Parker

Morgan Parker wrote There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (Tin House, 2017), a book as funny, heartbroken, and politically sharp as its title suggests. She has won the National Poetry Series and a Pushcart Prize, and she is one of the clearest voices in the current conversation about Black womanhood, depression, and desire.

Parker names her pop culture references without apology, Lil' Kim, The Real Housewives, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and uses that familiarity to lower your guard before the poem lands. She writes in the tradition of Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton at a volume new readers find immediately contemporary.

Start with There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé. It is the kind of book you text to a friend after the first poem.

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The Classics of Our Time

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) is the one poet here who has died, and her readership is larger now than in her lifetime. She won the Pulitzer for American Primitive (1984) and the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems (1992), and "Wild Geese", with its line that "you do not have to be good", is among the most shared poems on the internet.

Oliver spent her life walking the woods and marshes of Provincetown, Massachusetts, and her poetry is the record of that attention. She is the way in for a great many readers who thought they hated poetry: accessible, observant, and quietly radical about the natural world. If you want to build a daily reading practice around her, reading one poem a day is a natural companion.

Start with Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, which covers fifty years.

Billy Collins

Billy Collins was United States Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003, and during his tenure he launched Poetry 180, which put a poem a day into American high schools. Sailing Alone Around the Room gathers work that runs from deadpan to devastating, sometimes inside one poem.

Collins is often the first contemporary poet a new reader meets, because his poems start with something recognisable, a dog, a morning, a Tuesday, before going somewhere you did not expect. He is not a difficult poet and has never pretended otherwise. If you want to understand the forms he works in and subverts, seven common poetry forms is a good companion.

Start with Sailing Alone Around the Room. "Introduction to Poetry", in which he asks students to "water-ski / across the surface of a poem", is worth the book on its own.

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Where to Go Next

These ten come from one of the richest stretches in English-language verse, a generation from every background who made the poem feel urgent again. Start with one, read a whole book, and let that book recommend the next. Warsan Shire will send you to Safia Elhillo, Ocean Vuong to Richard Siken, Tracy K. Smith to Terrance Hayes.

If reading them makes you want to write, which is the usual response, how to start writing poetry when you have no idea where to begin is the place to go. And when you want somewhere to put your own poems, Poema is built for it: a quiet, book-like place where a poem is not buried in a feed or set against vacation photos. Just the poem, the page, and the reader.