The Open Door, edited by Don Share and Christian Wiman

Christian Wiman and Don Share have put together a memorable collection of poetry drawn from Poetry magazine’s venerable history. This wide-ranging, eclectic anthology puts its finger on the pulse of 20th-century American poetry. It includes famous poems like T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) and Wallace Stevens’s “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” (1912) but also less well-known gems like Muriel Rukeyser’s “Song” (1941) and Eleanor Wilner’s “Magnificat” (2008). The collection is not organized chronologically. Instead, the editors organized the collection poetically, with an ear for beauty and resonance. It is a testimony to the complexity of our own poetic moment and worth reading cover to cover.