My Year of Reading: Best Poetry of 2016

In his Afterword to the late Larry Levis’ posthumous collection The Darkening Trapeze, David St. John writes: “I continue to believe that poetry remains one of our most vital reservoirs of reflection, solace and outrage within a world replete with horrors.” He wrote those words long before November 8, or the atrocities on the streets of Aleppo, or the year’s final, hard cluster of celebrity deaths, but I believe St. John is right. In a world often draped in the black shroud of greed, bigotry,...