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49 Contemporary Poets on the Best Poems They Read in 2024

All Available to Read for Free Online

In the sea of endless year-end lists, poetry often seems to get sidelined, or forgotten—or maybe the critics and listmakers just aren’t reading enough poetry in the first place. Which made me wonder—what were the poets themselves reading this year? So I asked some of my favorite contemporary poets about the poems that left the biggest impression on them in 2024—and it turned out that they were reading quite a lot.

–Brittany Cavallaro

“I Went Out to See All the Downed Trees” by Sasha Debevec-McKenney

originally published in The Poetry Review UK

Sasha Debevec–McKenney’s “I Went Out to See the Downed Trees” deftly captures the complicated sociopolitical tensions of our moment. What begins as neighbors surveying storm damage seamlessly transforms into an exploration of class, the social contract, and the political climate. It’s casually devastating.

–Karyna McGlynn, author of

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I love the veneer of simplicity in this narrative poem, and the ways in which each detail starts to add up to a slow implication of the speaker’s neighbors and their particular brand of white liberalism, leading to that gut–punch of an ending: “but these were my neighbors, and we / had to clean this up together.”

–Erika Meitner, author of Useful Junk

“Black Forest” by Laura Newbern

from A Night in the Country (Changes, 2024)

From one of the most haunting collections I have encountered in some time, “Black Forest” embodies Laura Newbern’s ability to swerve, in the space of a single line sometimes, from social mannerism to autochthonous terror. Here, she transports the primordial power of the forest to the visiting-artist dinner table, with an ending somehow as astonishing as it is understated.

–Christopher Kempf, author of What Though the Field Be Lost

Laura Newbern’s A Night in the Country (Changes, 2024) is one of the most thrilling books I’ve read in a long time. This poem feels representative of the collision on mystery and control that courses throughout Newbern’s work. And her end-stops, they devastate with such quiet intensity!

–Corey Van Landingham, author of Reader, I

“A Sunset” by Robert Hass

originally published in The New Yorker

I love this poem for the way it wends and winds so that the reader is gifted with the traveling along the ridges of Robert Hass’s extraordinary mind.

–Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World

Robert Hass is in his eighties, but unlike most of the older luminaries of American poetry, he is still trying to find new ways for the lyric poem to contain and interpret reality. In this poem, gun violence in America and a sunset, but not only that. I can’t say, in the end, that I think this poem absolutely works, but I have thought about it often since first reading it and I am inspired by its ambition.

–Elisa Gonzalez, author of Grand Tour

“The Poets Awoke” by m. nourbeSe philip

originally published in Yale Review

It’s editorial malpractice to designate a poem you personally published as your favorite of the year, I think. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention this absolutely coruscating meditation on the limits of language in moments of crisis by one of the great poetic minds of our time. Here, philip takes up the perennial question of how art can bear witness to atrocity in a poem wrought less from words than from the condition of speechlessness.

–Maggie Millner, author of Couplets

I loved this poem for so many reasons, particularly in the way the poem explores the boundaries of language through language.

–Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World