Lists of this kind are always arguments disguised as recommendations. So let me be direct about the argument: the eight poets below are not here because they are the most celebrated or the most awarded — though several are — but because their work is doing something formally or emotionally that the rest of contemporary poetry is not, and because reading them will change how you read everything else, including your own work. The list is deliberately wide: different cultural positions, different formal choices, different relationships to the lyric tradition. The one thing they share is that you will not mistake any of them for anyone else.
For the broader case for reading your contemporaries at all, see our piece on why poets should read the living.
Abdurraqib works at the intersection of music, cultural memory, and lyric poetry in a way that makes both the music criticism and the poetry better. His poems are full of proper nouns — band names, song titles, athletes, television shows — and they use that cultural specificity to do what the lyric has always done: make the particular speak for something larger than itself. He writes about grief and Blackness and American culture with a wit that never undercuts the seriousness, and a seriousness that never collapses into solemnity. He is also, usefully, a model for how to write about popular culture without being condescending toward it or toward your reader. His essays are as important as his poems; read both.
Diaz writes from and about the Mojave Desert and the Mojave language — a language she has worked to revitalise — with a formal precision and emotional amplitude that have no real equivalent in contemporary American poetry. Postcolonial Love Poem won the Pulitzer Prize in 2021 and deserved to. The poems are about the body, desire, water, land, and what happens when the language you think in is also a language under threat of extinction. They are also among the most formally inventive poems of the decade — the page used architecturally, white space deployed as meaning, syntax bent until it holds shapes ordinary English grammar cannot. What Diaz does with the long line alone is worth a semester of study.
Ross Gay is the poet of delight, and delight in his hands is not a soft or easy thing. His long, sprawling, generously punctuated lines — the comma as a breathing space, the em dash as a pivot — enact a kind of thinking-aloud that manages to be intellectually serious and emotionally open at the same time. His subject is joy, but joy as a philosophical position: what it means to insist on gratitude in a world that gives you plenty of reasons not to. Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is the best argument in contemporary poetry for the long poem as a form of sustained attention. His prose book The Book of Delights is equally essential and covers similar territory. The combination of the two gives you Gay's full argument about what it means to pay attention well.
Pico writes long poems that are essentially novellas in verse — digressive, funny, formally unstable, and deeply serious about things that look like they might not be serious, like Twitter and dating apps and the pressure on Indigenous writers to write about nature. Nature Poem is the place to start: it is a poem about not wanting to write a nature poem, which becomes, over its length, one of the best nature poems of the decade. Pico's voice is unlike anything else in contemporary poetry — intimate, self-interrupting, capable of breaking from a lyric passage into something that reads like a text message and back again without losing its thread. He is also, quietly, one of the most formally rigorous poets working in this apparent informality: the poems are much more carefully constructed than they look.
Sinclair writes out of Jamaican and Caribbean traditions with a Shakespearean amplitude — long lines, rich diction, a willingness to use the full register of English — and a very contemporary urgency. Cannibal is a book about the body, colonialism, and what it means to be seen as monstrous, and it is one of the most rhetorically powerful debut collections of the last decade. Her memoir How to Say Babylon (2023) is also extraordinary, but the poems are where the formal ambition lives. What distinguishes Sinclair from poets who use similarly rich language is that the language is always in service of the argument: she is not ornamental, she is overwhelming you on purpose, as the subject demands.
WHEREAS is one of the formally significant books of the past decade — it made our list of collections that changed how we read for good reason. Long Soldier responds to the United States government's 2009 apology to Native peoples — an apology issued quietly, without ceremony, without the presence of the people it addressed — by interrogating the language of official apology and making from it a lyric form. The legal document, the government statement, the formal resolution: these become the material out of which genuinely devastating poetry is made. The poems use the page architecturally, white space as silence and erasure, and the result is a book that is simultaneously a formal experiment and an act of witness that cannot be separated from its politics. Read it slowly.
Smith's Don't Call Us Dead reinvented what elegy is allowed to do. The collection mourns Black men killed by police and by AIDS with a velocity and formal range that has no precedent — moving between lyric and list, between the intimate and the incantatory, between grief and fury without ever letting one overwhelm the other. Smith is one of the finest elegists working in English, which is a strange thing to say about a poet still in their early career. They are also — and this matters — one of the best performers of their own work; hearing the poems read aloud is a different experience from reading them on the page, and both are worth having. Homie (2020) is more playful and equally essential.
Olio is formally the most adventurous collection of the past twenty years and it is not close. Jess writes about the ragtime and early jazz musicians of the early twentieth century in a sequence of sonnets that can be read individually, sequentially, or in multiple directions simultaneously — across the page, in combination with other poems, according to a diagram Jess provides. The book is about polyphony — about multiple voices sounding at once — and its form enacts that polyphony structurally. It also won the Pulitzer Prize, which is worth mentioning because it demonstrates that formal radicalism and popular recognition are not mutually exclusive. Olio is a book that changed what we thought the sonnet, the page, and the poetry collection could do. It belongs on every serious reader's shelf.
