“What are the best Poetry Books of 2016?” We aggregated 28 year-end lists and ranked the 273 unique titles by how many times they appeared in an attempt to answer that very question!

There are thousands of year-end lists released every year and, like we do in our weekly Best Book articles, we wanted to see which books appear on them the most. We used 28 lists and found 273 unique titles. The top 16 books, all appearing on 3 or more lists, are below with images, summaries, and links for learning more or purchasing. The remaining books, along with the articles we used, can be found at the bottom of the page.

Be sure to check out our other Best Book of the year lists:

• The Best Fiction Books of 2016
• The Best Nonfiction Books of 2016
• The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of 2016
• The Best Cookbooks of 2016
• The Best Art & Photography Books of 2016
• The Best Graphic Novels & Comics of 2016
• The Best Science & Nature Books of 2016
• The Best Biography & Memoire Books of 2016
• The Best History Books of 2016

And if you want to see how they compare to last year, take a look at the 2015 lists as well!

Happy Scrolling!

The Top Poetry Books of 2016

16 .) Blackacre by Monica Youn

Lists It Appears On:

• Entropy
• MPR News
• Buzzfeed Books

“Blackacre” is a centuries-old legal fiction―a placeholder name for a hypothetical estate. Treacherously lush or alluringly bleak, these poems reframe their subjects as landscape, as legacy―a bereavement, an intimacy, a racial identity, a pubescence, a culpability, a diagnosis. With a surveyor’s keenest tools, Youn marks the boundaries of the given, what we have been allotted: acreage that has been ruthlessly fenced, previously tenanted, ploughed and harvested, enriched and depleted. In the title sequence, the poet gleans a second crop from the field of Milton’s great sonnet on his blindness: a lyric meditation on her barrenness, on her own desire―her own struggle―to conceive a child. What happens when the transformative imagination comes up against the limits of unalterable fact?

Learn More / Purchase Book

15 .) Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems, 1995-2015 by Kevin Young

Lists It Appears On:

• Entropy
• Washington Post
• Boston Globe

Blue Laws gathers poems written over the past two decades, drawing from all nine of Kevin Young’s previously published books of poetry and including a number of uncollected, often unpublished, poems. From his stunning lyric debut (Most Way Home, 1995) and the amazing “double album” life of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2001, “remixed” for Knopf in 2005), through his brokenhearted Jelly Roll: A Blues (2003) and his recent forays into adult grief and the joys of birth in Dear Darkness (2008) and Book of Hours (2014), this collection provides a grand tour of a poet whose personal poems and political poems are equally riveting.

Learn More / Purchase Book

14 .) House of Lords and Commons by Ishion Hutchinson

Lists It Appears On:

• NY Times
• Library Journal
• The New Yorker

“In House of Lords and Commons, the revelatory and vital new collection of poems from the winner of the 2013 Whiting Writers’ Award in poetry, Ishion Hutchinson returns to the difficult beauty of the Jamaican landscape with remarkable lyric precision. Here, the poet holds his world in full focus but at an astonishing angle: from the violence of the seventeenth-century English Civil War as refracted through a mythic sea wanderer, right down to the dark interior of love.

These poems arrange the contemporary continuum of home and abroad into a wonderment of cracked narrative sequences and tumultuous personae. With ears tuned to the vernacular, the collection vividly binds us to what is terrifying about happiness, loss, and the lure of the sea. House of Lords and Commons testifies to the particular courage it takes to wade unsettled, uncertain, and unfettered in the wake of our shared human experience.”

Learn More / Purchase Book

13 .) Sunshine by Melissa Lee-Houghton

Lists It Appears On:

• The Guardian
• Five Books
• Bustle

Sunshine is the new collection from Next Generation Poet Melissa Lee-Houghton. A writer of startling confession, her poems inhabit the lonely hotel rooms, psych wards and deserted lanes of austerity Britain.Sunshine combines acute social observation with a dark, surreal humour born of first-hand experience. Abuse, addiction and mental health are all subject to Lee-Houghton’s poetic eye. But these are also poems of extravagance, hope and desire, that stake new ground for the Romantic lyric in an age of social media and internet porn. In this new book of poems, Melissa Lee-Houghton shines a light on human ecstasy and sadness with blinding precision.

Learn More / Purchase Book

12 .) The Black Maria by Aracelis Girmay

Lists It Appears On:

• Publishers Weekly
• Boston Globe
• Chicago Review of Books

Taking its name from the moon’s dark plains, misidentified as seas by early astronomers, the black maria investigates African diasporic histories, the consequences of racism within American culture, and the question of human identity. Central to this project is a desire to recognize the lives of Eritrean refugees who have been made invisible by years of immigration crisis, refugee status, exile, and resulting statelessness. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry, Girmay’s newest collection elegizes and celebrates life, while wrestling with the humanistic notion of seeing beyond: seeing violence, seeing grace, and seeing each other better.

Learn More / Purchase Book

11 .) Bestiary by Donika Kelly

Lists It Appears On:

• MPR News
• Buzzfeed Books
• The Undefeated
• Bustle

Across this remarkable first book are encounters with animals, legendary beasts, and mythological monsters–half human and half something else. Donika Kelly’s Bestiary is a catalogue of creatures–from the whale and ostrich to the pegasus and chimera to the centaur and griffin. Among them too are poems of love, self-discovery, and travel, from “Out West” to “Back East.” Lurking in the middle of this powerful and multifaceted collection is a wrenching sequence that wonders just who or what is the real monster inside this life of survival and reflection. Selected and with an introduction by the National Book Award winner Nikky Finney, Bestiary questions what makes us human, what makes us whole.

Learn More / Purchase Book

10 .) Float by Anne Carson

Lists It Appears On:

• Entropy
• NPR
• CBA
• Financial Times

Anne Carson consistently dazzles with her inventive, shape-shifting work and the vividness of her imagination. Float reaches an even greater level of brilliance and surprise. Presented in an arrestingly original format–individual chapbooks that can be read in any order, and that float inside a transparent case–this collection conjures a mix of voices, time periods, and structures to explore what makes people, memories, and stories “maddeningly attractive” when observed in spaces that are suggestively in-between.

Learn More / Purchase Book

9 .) Odes by Sharon Olds

Lists It Appears On:

• The Guardian
• Good Books Guide
• Boston Globe
• Buzzfeed Books

Following the Pulitzer prize-winning collection Stag’s Leap, Sharon Olds gives us a stunning book of odes. Opening with the powerful and tender “Ode to the Hymen,” Olds addresses and embodies, in this age-old poetic form, many aspects of love and gender and sexual politics in a collection that is centered on the body and its structures and pleasures. The poems extend parts of her narrative as a daughter, mother, wife, lover, friend, and poet of conscience that will be familiar from earlier collections, each episode and memory burnished by the wisdom and grace and humor of looking back. In such poems as “Ode to My Sister,” “Ode of Broken Loyalty,” “Ode to My Whiteness,” “Blow Job Ode,” and “Ode to the Last Thirty-Eight Trees in New York City Visible from This Window,” Olds treats us to an intimate examination that, like all her work, is universal, by turns searing and charming in its honesty. From the bodily joys and sorrows of childhood to the deaths of those dearest to us, Olds shapes the world in language that is startlingly fresh, profound in its conclusions, and life-giving for the reader.

Learn More / Purchase Book

8 .) ShallCross by C.D. Wright

Lists It Appears On:

• Publishers Weekly
• Washington Post
• Entropy
• Library Journal

In a turbulent world, C.D. Wright evokes a rebellious and dissonant ethos with characteristic genre-bending and expanding long-form poems. Accessing journalistic writing alongside filmic narratives, Wright ranges across seven poetic sequences, including a collaborative suite responding to photographic documentation of murder sites in New Orleans. ShallCross shows plain as day that C.D. Wright is our most thrilling and innovative poet.

Learn More / Purchase Book

7 .) The Performance of Becoming Human by Daniel Borzutzky

Lists It Appears On:

• Entropy
• Buzzfeed Books
• Brian Fanelli
• Bustle

Daniel Borzutzky returns to confront the various ways nation-states and their bureaucracies absorb and destroy communities and economies. In THE PERFORMANCE OF BECOMING HUMAN, the bay of Valparaiso merges into the western shore of Lake Michigan, where Borzutzky continues his poetic investigation into the political and economic violence shared by Chicago and Chile, two places integral to his personal formation. To become human is to navigate borders, including the fuzzy borders of institutions, the economies of privatization, overdevelopment, and underdevelopment, under which humans endure state-sanctioned and systemic abuses in cities, villages, deserts.

Learn More / Purchase Book

6 .) The Remedies by Katharine Towers

Lists It Appears On:

• The Guardian
• Good Books Guide
• Five Books
• Bustle

Katharine Towers’ second collection is a book of small wonders. From a house drowning in roses to crickets on an August day, from Nerval’s lobster to the surrealism of flower remedies, these poems explore the fragility of our relationship with the natural world. Towers also shows us what that relationship can aspire to be: each poem attunes us to another aspect of that world, and shows what strange connections might be revealed when we properly attend to it. The Remedies is a lyric, unforgettable collection which offers just the spiritual assuagement its title promises, and shows Towers emerging as a major poetic talent.

Learn More / Purchase Book

5 .) Collected Poems: 1950-2012 by Adrienne Rich

Lists It Appears On:

• MPR News
• The New Yorker
• NY Times
• Good Books Guide
• Buzzfeed Books

Adrienne Rich was the singular voice of her generation and one of our most important American poets. She brought discussions of gender, race, and class to the forefront of poetical discourse, pushing formal boundaries and consistently examining both self and society.

Learn More / Purchase Book

4 .) Falling Awake by Alice Oswald

Lists It Appears On:

• Bustle
• Five Books
• Good Books Guide
• The Guardian
• The New Yorker

Alice Oswald’s award-winning and highly acclaimed volume Memorial portrays fallen soldiers from Homer’s Iliad. Falling Awake expands on that imagery―defining life as a slowly falling weight, where beings fight against their inevitable end. Oswald reimagines classical figures such as Orpheus and Tithonus alive in an English landscape together with shadows, flies, villagers, dew, crickets―all characterized in tension between the weight of death and their own willpower.

Learn More / Purchase Book

3 .) Olio by Tyehimba Jess

Lists It Appears On:

• Entropy
• Library Journal
• NPR
• Publishers Weekly
• The Undefeated

Part fact, part fiction, Tyehimba Jess’s much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.

Learn More / Purchase Book

2 .) Look by Solmaz Sharif

Lists It Appears On:

• Bustle
• Buzzfeed Books
• Entropy
• Goodreads
• NPR
• NY Times
• Publishers Weekly
• San Francisco Chronicle 2
• Washington Post

“Solmaz Sharif’s astonishing first book, Look, asks us to see the ongoing costs of war as the unbearable loss of human lives and also the insidious abuses against our everyday speech. In this virtuosic array of poems, lists, shards, and sequences, Sharif assembles her family’s and her own fragmented narratives in the aftermath of warfare. Those repercussions echo into the present day, in the grief for those killed in America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the discrimination endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter.

At the same time, these poems point to the ways violence is conducted against our language. Throughout this collection are words and phrases lifted from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms; in their seamless inclusion, Sharif exposes the devastating euphemisms deployed to sterilize the language, control its effects, and sway our collective resolve. But Sharif refuses to accept this terminology as given, and instead turns it back on its perpetrators. “”Let it matter what we call a thing,”” she writes. “”Let me look at you.”””

Learn More / Purchase Book

1 .) Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

Lists It Appears On:

• Brian Fanelli
• Bustle
• Buzzfeed Books
• Entropy
• Five Books
• Good Books Guide
• Goodreads
• Library Journal
• NPR
• San Francisco Chronicle 2
• The New Yorker
• The Undefeated
• Via Negativa

Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times writes: “The poems in Mr. Vuong’s new collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds…possess a tensile precision reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s work, combined with a Gerard Manley Hopkins-like appreciation for the sound and rhythms of words. Mr. Vuong can create startling images (a black piano in a field, a wedding-cake couple preserved under glass, a shepherd stepping out of a Caravaggio painting) and make the silences and elisions in his verse speak as potently as his words…There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong’s sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things.”

Learn More / Purchase Book

#17-273 Best Poetry Books of 2016

The 28 Best Poetry Book Lists Used