Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems

An award-winning poet offers a brilliant introduction to the joys--and challenges--of the genre
In Don't Read Poetry, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another--and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about "poetry," whether we think we like it or think we don't, in order to help us cherish--and distinguish among--individual poems.
A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingénues and cognoscenti alike.

• How a Poem Moves: A Field Guide for Readers of Poetry
• The Eloquent Poem: 128 Contemporary Poems and Their Making
• The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice
• The Government Lake: Last Poems
• Deaf Republic
• A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past
• The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them
• An American Sunrise: Poems
• Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative
• How to Read Poetry Like a Professor: A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse