In the Bennington Review, Girmay creates a dark world of uncertain feelings and gnashing teeth, whose narrators declare, “Though it is forbidden,/we test god by asking for proof & miracles.”

The New York Times explores the quiet cafes where Wallace was a regular and the writer’s favorite local bookstore. 

Long Soldier shares her thoughts on the Dakota Access Pipeline project, and why she doesn’t define herself as a political poet. “I want us, our people, to be seen,” Long Solider says. “I want to be heard.” 

The House of Lords and Commons by Ishion Hutchinson, Olio by Tyehimba Jess, Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong, and ShallCross by C.D. Wright are all listed as picks for top 2016 poetry. 

Levin discusses the link between poetry and environmentalism, and declares of artists: “We’re expressers! We are speakers into ears! We want ears!”

The Washington Post says Whitehead’s “thrilling” novel “disrupts our settled sense of the past and stretches the ligaments of history right into our own era.”

The New York Times features an excerpt from Long Soldier’s poem in response to President Obama’s congressional resolution of apology to Native Americans. Here, she reminders her daughter, “In our home in our family we are ourselves, real feelings. Be true.”

TIME chose Colson Whitehead’s novel, about a runaway slave on a literal Underground Railroad, as one of their best books of 2016.

Jess explains why the act of writing a poem “calls upon the writer to listen intimately" and how art can be used to create shared understanding. 

Jess’s poem, from his collection Olio, is written in the voice of conjoined twins the McKoy Sisters (1851-1912), who explain of traveling circus life, “our bodies betrayals have made us a way.”