“Practicing social distancing and limiting excursions like grocery shopping means stocking up so you don’t run out of essentials like toilet paper and coffee, but for any culture fiend, the real travesty would be running out of books. While many bookstores have temporarily closed, there are still options for having new books delivered to your door (or e-reader). Now, just in time for World Book Day, hotels around the globe have opened up their private collections to transport you to faraway locales with destination-inspired stories.” The books each hotel recommends are towards the end of each paragraph; now go, travel in your mind! So where should you start? This list will help you wade through modern poetry by pairing new poems to discover with your last poetry touchtone — you know, that poem you were kind of into in high school. Use these recommendations to discover even more poems so your poetry path spills over into May. After all, poetry might be the perfect art form to think through things that seem so hard to put into words. There’s a poem for everyone. “I’ve written here before about the quality of “I-want-to-read-it-osity” that some books have, a hard to define but easy to see quality which I am going to refer to as “grabbyness.” There are books you can pick up and put down and happily pick up again, and then there are books that seem to glue themselves to your brain, that utterly absorb you. There are books that are great when you’re halfway through them but that take work to get into. Right now, the kind you can put down and the kind that are hard to get into don’t cut it, because they’re hard to focus on while fretting. For me, grabbyness is a quality entirely orthogonal to actual quality. There are grabby books that are only OK and great books that are not grabby. It also has nothing to do with how ostensibly exciting they are, nor how comforting they are. There are just books that are grabby and books that are not. What I’m talking about is the power to bring you right into the story so that all you want to do is read more, and you forget entirely about the real world around you.” Gimme the grabbies!
