Craig Morgan Teicher

A new collection of Dickinson's poems — written on envelopes and found after her death — opens a rare porthole into the enigmatic writer's life and art. Literally and figuratively shaped by their unusual medium, the poems in The Gorgeous Nothings invite endless interpretations.

Stanley Crouch, one of the nation's most prominent jazz critics, is the author of the just-released Kansas City Lightning -- part one of a biography of Charlie "Bird" Parker. Reviewer Craig Morgan Teicher says the story starts a little slowly, but when Parker picks up the saxophone, Crouch's writing cooks.

The Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney died this morning in Dublin at the age of 74. In a remembrance, poet and critic Craig Morgan Teicher writes that Heaney had mastered sound and nuance, crafting poems you can taste and feel, alive and powerful, as you speak them aloud.

Poet and critic Craig Morgan Teicher says The Colossus, Plath's first book of poetry (and the only one published in her lifetime), shows us glimpses of the poet she would later become. Do you have a favorite Plath poem? Tell us in the comments.

2012 was the year of the big collected volume when it came to poetry. It was intimidating, even for the most hardened poetry fans. But critic Craig Morgan Teicher says 2013 will be full of slim collections that are still smart, important and powerful.

D.A. Powell's poems in Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys subvert Boy Scout imagery with cheekiness, and take on desire, salvation and HIV with courage. This is a book that looks death in the eye — and winks.

The most anticipated collections of the year revisit the past and take us to the frontiers of language, borrowing from Twitter memes and overheard conversation, from the classics and bad movies.