Poetry Month Staff Picks
April is National Poetry Month, 30 days of celebrating the joy, expressiveness, and pure delight of poetry.
National Poetry Month is a month-long, national celebration of poetry established by the Academy of American Poets in April 1996. The core mission is simple: to celebrate poetry in all its forms and to bring more public visibility to the art of poetry, to living poets, to our complex poetic heritage, and to the literature of poetry.
"Poetry is the one thing you own; it is the bird in your hand"
—Alison Pelegrin, Poet Laureate of Louisiana
Enjoy a few recommendations from MFL staff for some of their favorite poems/ poets.
Evidence by Mary Oliver
Recommended by Sarah
Inspired by William Wordsworth, Evidence is a collection of poems on Mary Oliver’s classic themes. She writes perceptively about grief and mortality, love and nature, and the spiritual sustenance drawn from their gifts. Never afraid to she the pretense of academic poetry, never shy of letting the power of an image lie in unadorned language, Oliver is a skilled guide to the rarest and most exquisite insights of the natural world.
Available as a book.
Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver was born and raised in Maple Hills Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. She would retreat from a difficult home to the nearby woods, where she would build huts of sticks and grass and write poems. She attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College, but did not receive a degree from either institution. As a young poet, Oliver was deeply influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay and briefly lived in Millay’s home, helping Norma Millay organize her sister’s papers. Oliver is notoriously reticent about her private life, but it was during this period that she met her long-time partner, Molly Malone Cook. The couple moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the surrounding Cape Cod landscape has had a marked influence on Oliver’s work.
Known for its clear and poignant observations and evocative use of the natural world, Oliver’s poetry is firmly rooted in place and the Romantic nature tradition. Her work received early critical attention; American Primitive (1983), her fifth book, won the Pulitzer Prize. According to Bruce Bennetin the New York Times Book Review, American Primitive, “insists on the primacy of the physical.” Bennet commended Oliver’s “distinctive voice and vision” and asserted that the “collection contains a number of powerful, substantial works.” Holly Prado of the Los Angeles Times Book Review also applauded Oliver’s original voice, writing that American Primitive “touches a vitality in the familiar that invests it with a fresh intensity.”
Learn more about Mary Oliver here.
Life On Mars by Tracy K. Smith
Recommended by Rebecca
With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like “love” and “illness” now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.
Available as a book, audio book, e-book, and e-audio.
Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. From 1997 to 1999 she held a Stegner fellowship at Stanford University. Smith is the author of four books of poetry: The Body’s Question (2003), which won the Cave Canem prize for the best first book by an African-American poet; Duende (2007), winner of the James Laughlin Award and the Essense Literary Award; Life on Mars (2011), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and Wade in the Water (2018). In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. She has also written a memoir, Ordinary Light (2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction.
In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. She teaches at Harvard University, where she is a professor of English and of African and African American Studies and the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She also hosted American Public Media’s daily radio program and podcast The Slowdown, which is sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.
Learn more about Tracy K. Smith here.
Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light by Joy Harjo
Recommended by Hope
In this gemlike volume, Harjo selects her best poems from across fifty years, beginning with her early discoveries of her own voice and ending with moving reflections on our contemporary moment. Generous notes on each poem offer insight into Harjo’s inimitable poetics as she takes inspiration from Navajo horse songs and jazz, reckons with home and loss, and listens to the natural messengers of the earth.
Available as a book.
Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019-2022 and is winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2024 Frost Medal, Yale’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and was recently honored with a National Humanities Medal.
The author of eleven books of poetry, including the highly acclaimed, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years, several plays, children’s books, and non-fiction works, and two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, her many honors include the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Cloud Runner, Harjo’s twelfth book of poetry, will be published by W.W. Norton in Fall of 2026.
As a musician and performer, Harjo has produced eight award-winning music albums. Her latest, Insomnia and Seven Steps to Grace, co-produced with esperanza spaulding, is forthcoming on Smithsonian Folkways in April 2026.
Harjo holds the Ruth Yellowhawk Fellowship from the Kettering Foundation, and is the inaugural Artist-in-Residence for the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She lives on the Muscogee Nation Reservation in Oklahoma.
Learn more about Joy Harjo here.
Land of the Cranes by Aida Salazar
Recommended by Denise
A heart-wrenchingly beautiful story in verse about a young Latinx girl who learns to hold on to hope and love even in the darkest of places: a family detention center for migrants and refugees.
Nine-year-old Betita knows she is a crane. Papi has told her the story, even before her family fled to Los Angeles to seek refuge from cartel wars in Mexico. The Aztecs came from a place called Aztlan, what is now the Southwest US, called the land of the cranes. They left Aztlan to establish their great city in the center of the universe-Tenochtitlan, modern-day Mexico City. It was prophesized that their people would one day return to live among the cranes in their promised land. Papi tells Betita that they are cranes that have come home.
Then one day, Betita’s beloved father is arrested by Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) and deported to Mexico. Betita and her pregnant mother are left behind on their own, but soon they too are detained and must learn to survive in a family detention camp outside of Los Angeles. Even in cruel and inhumane conditions, Betita finds heart in her own poetry and in the community she and her mother find in the camp. The voices of her fellow asylum seekers fly above the hatred keeping them caged, but each day threatens to tear them down lower than they ever thought they could be. Will Betita and her family ever be whole again?
Available as a book.
Also on Hoopla as an e-book, and e-audio.
Aida Salazar
Aida Salazar is an award-winning author, translator, and arts activist whose writings explore issues of identity and social justice. Her critically acclaimed verse novels and picture books have received over twenty five awards including an ALA Caldecott Honor, ALA Pura Belpre Honor, Malka Penn Human Rights in Children’s Literature Award, The Américas Award, The Tomás Rivera Book Award, NSK Nuesdtat Finalist, International Latino Book Awards among other distinctions. She lives with her family of artists in Oakland, CA.
Learn more about Aida Salazar here.
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Recommended by Sam
Paradise Lost is an epic poem that was first published in 1667. The poem explores the biblical story of the fall of man, focusing primarily on the rebellion of Satan and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Amidst the cosmic struggle between God and Satan, the poem delves into themes of free will, disobedience, and the consequences of sin. Milton’s work is richly layered with classical allusions and theological reflections, showcasing his profound knowledge of literature and theology. The intricate narrative unfolds in twelve books, and Milton employs blank verse, a non-rhyming iambic pentameter, to give the poem a majestic and elevated tone.
Available as a book, audio book, and ebook.
Also available on Hoopla as an ebook, and e-audio.
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet and intellectual, who was employed as a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under its Council of State, and later under Oliver Cromwell. Milton wrote at a time of religious flux and political upheaval, and is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost, written In blank verse.
Learn more about John Milton here.
Also recommended by Sam – If by Rudyard Kipling