Inspired partly by Jan Simpson’s cool Christmas-for-Theatregoers list and by new Christmas poetry lists from The Independent UK and the Daily Mail, the latter a listing of new love poetry, we at WVFC feel obligated to offer our First Annual Poetry Friday Christmas shopping list. Below, your quick-links to the most recent work by poets who’ve adorned our Poetry Fridays this year.

Click on the highlighted names to see video, commentary and sample poems of each (we promise you’ll have fun); then come back and click on each book’s title to fill your Christmas list.

Feel free to play in our Poetry category to find more gift ideas: Space and time prevented us from including all of the many Voices in Verse we’ve included since we started in 2005, and we also left out Poetry Friday participants who we found but who didn’t submit poems to us — such as Forugh Farrokhzad, Maxine Hong Kingston, David Tucker, Lisa Russ Spaar and John Keats. Happy holidays, and please enjoy…

Our very first Voices in Verse, Elizabeth Alexander,  rang in President Obama’s first inaugural this year; a fuller scope of her work can be seen in her newest book American Sublime;

Poet Laureate Louise Gluck and her latest collection, A Village Life:


Our own Susan Kinsolving and her recent The White Eyelash;

As Alice Pettway begins her adventure teaching English in Mozambique with the Peace Corps, you might consider buying her just-published Barbed Wire and Bedclothes;

Carol Muske-Dukes‘ many good works, including her lyrical Channeling Mark Twain, a Novel;

Mary Jo Bang and her  abecedarius (one for each letter), The Bride of E;

Karen Alkalay-Gut and her collection So Far, So Good;

Maria Luisa Arroyo‘s 2008 collection Gathering Words;

Christine Gelineau and her compilation of Franco-Canadian poems, French Connections;

Ginger Andrews and her An Honest Answer, which won the Nicholas Roerich Prize;

Sophie Cabot Black and her most recent published work, The Descent.

Stay tuned for more Poetry Friday recommendations from WVFC’s poets and readers! And please feel free to tell us, in comments below, who we’re missing in this year’s poetry releases.