15 Great Poetry Books to Read in 2025, Recommended by Poets

VIA MERCHANT

Recommended by: Grace Schulman

Rosanna Warren’s training as a painter shines through in her 2020 collection So Forth, which subtly weaves social injustices and philosophy with deeply personal thoughts and memories. Each word is an ingenious brushstroke layered to create a vivid portrait of the physical world around us, which those who are new to poetry will appreciate. However, like all great poetry books, seasoned readers will also love Warren’s invitation to ponder the deeper meaning of it all.

Why she loves it: “This is new. The language is new, a bold merging of elegance with this-minute speech. Warren has a way of seeing the world in its present moment infused by the past, her passions controlled by a luminous intelligence.”

Get Reader’s Digest’s Read Up newsletter for more books, humor, travel, tech and fun facts all week long.

About the experts Grace Schulman is an award-winning poet and editor who has written several poetry collections, including Without a Claim, The Broken String, Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems, Burn Down the Icons and Again, the Dawn. From 1973 to 1985, she directed the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, and from 1972 to 2006, she served as the poetry editor of The Nation. In 2016, Schulman was awarded the Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry from the Poetry Society of America, and in 2019, she was elected to the Academy of Arts and Letters. Chandanie Somwaru is an Indo-Caribbean poet. She is the author of Urgent \\ Where the Mind Goes \\ Scattered, and her writing has been published in Poem-a-Day, Honey Literary, Solstice, SWWIM, The Margins and other outlets. She was the first runner-up for the 2023 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award. In 2024, she won a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.

Why trust us

At Reader’s Digest, we’ve been sharing our favorite books for over 100 years. We’ve worked with bestselling authors including Susan Orlean, Janet Evanovich and Alex Haley, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning Roots grew out of a project funded by and originally published in the magazine. Through Fiction Favorites (formerly Select Editions and Condensed Books), Reader’s Digest has been publishing anthologies of abridged novels for decades. We’ve worked with some of the biggest names in fiction, including James Patterson, Ruth Ware, Kristin Hannah and more. The Reader’s Digest Book Club, helmed by Books Editor Tracey Neithercott, introduces readers to even more of today’s best fiction by upcoming, bestselling and award-winning authors. For this piece on great poetry books, Sarah Jinee Park tapped her experience as a poet and journalist who writes about poetry and books for Reader’s Digest to ensure that all information is accurate and offers the best possible advice to readers. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.

Sources: