“What are the best Poetry Books of 2016?” We aggregated 28 year-end lists and ranked the 273 unique titles by how many times they appeared in an attempt to answer that very question!
There are thousands of year-end lists released every year and, like we do in our weekly Best Book articles, we wanted to see which books appear on them the most. We used 28 lists and found 273 unique titles. The top 16 books, all appearing on 3 or more lists, are below with images, summaries, and links for learning more or purchasing. The remaining books, along with the articles we used, can be found at the bottom of the page.
Be sure to check out our other Best Book of the year lists:
And if you want to see how they compare to last year, take a look at the 2015 lists as well!
Happy Scrolling!
“Blackacre” is a centuries-old legal fiction―a placeholder name for a hypothetical estate. Treacherously lush or alluringly bleak, these poems reframe their subjects as landscape, as legacy―a bereavement, an intimacy, a racial identity, a pubescence, a culpability, a diagnosis. With a surveyor’s keenest tools, Youn marks the boundaries of the given, what we have been allotted: acreage that has been ruthlessly fenced, previously tenanted, ploughed and harvested, enriched and depleted. In the title sequence, the poet gleans a second crop from the field of Milton’s great sonnet on his blindness: a lyric meditation on her barrenness, on her own desire―her own struggle―to conceive a child. What happens when the transformative imagination comes up against the limits of unalterable fact?
Blue Laws gathers poems written over the past two decades, drawing from all nine of Kevin Young’s previously published books of poetry and including a number of uncollected, often unpublished, poems. From his stunning lyric debut (Most Way Home, 1995) and the amazing “double album” life of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2001, “remixed” for Knopf in 2005), through his brokenhearted Jelly Roll: A Blues (2003) and his recent forays into adult grief and the joys of birth in Dear Darkness (2008) and Book of Hours (2014), this collection provides a grand tour of a poet whose personal poems and political poems are equally riveting.
“In House of Lords and Commons, the revelatory and vital new collection of poems from the winner of the 2013 Whiting Writers’ Award in poetry, Ishion Hutchinson returns to the difficult beauty of the Jamaican landscape with remarkable lyric precision. Here, the poet holds his world in full focus but at an astonishing angle: from the violence of the seventeenth-century English Civil War as refracted through a mythic sea wanderer, right down to the dark interior of love.
These poems arrange the contemporary continuum of home and abroad into a wonderment of cracked narrative sequences and tumultuous personae. With ears tuned to the vernacular, the collection vividly binds us to what is terrifying about happiness, loss, and the lure of the sea. House of Lords and Commons testifies to the particular courage it takes to wade unsettled, uncertain, and unfettered in the wake of our shared human experience.”
Sunshine is the new collection from Next Generation Poet Melissa Lee-Houghton. A writer of startling confession, her poems inhabit the lonely hotel rooms, psych wards and deserted lanes of austerity Britain.Sunshine combines acute social observation with a dark, surreal humour born of first-hand experience. Abuse, addiction and mental health are all subject to Lee-Houghton’s poetic eye. But these are also poems of extravagance, hope and desire, that stake new ground for the Romantic lyric in an age of social media and internet porn. In this new book of poems, Melissa Lee-Houghton shines a light on human ecstasy and sadness with blinding precision.
Taking its name from the moon’s dark plains, misidentified as seas by early astronomers, the black maria investigates African diasporic histories, the consequences of racism within American culture, and the question of human identity. Central to this project is a desire to recognize the lives of Eritrean refugees who have been made invisible by years of immigration crisis, refugee status, exile, and resulting statelessness. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry, Girmay’s newest collection elegizes and celebrates life, while wrestling with the humanistic notion of seeing beyond: seeing violence, seeing grace, and seeing each other better.
Across this remarkable first book are encounters with animals, legendary beasts, and mythological monsters–half human and half something else. Donika Kelly’s Bestiary is a catalogue of creatures–from the whale and ostrich to the pegasus and chimera to the centaur and griffin. Among them too are poems of love, self-discovery, and travel, from “Out West” to “Back East.” Lurking in the middle of this powerful and multifaceted collection is a wrenching sequence that wonders just who or what is the real monster inside this life of survival and reflection. Selected and with an introduction by the National Book Award winner Nikky Finney, Bestiary questions what makes us human, what makes us whole.
Anne Carson consistently dazzles with her inventive, shape-shifting work and the vividness of her imagination. Float reaches an even greater level of brilliance and surprise. Presented in an arrestingly original format–individual chapbooks that can be read in any order, and that float inside a transparent case–this collection conjures a mix of voices, time periods, and structures to explore what makes people, memories, and stories “maddeningly attractive” when observed in spaces that are suggestively in-between.
Following the Pulitzer prize-winning collection Stag’s Leap, Sharon Olds gives us a stunning book of odes. Opening with the powerful and tender “Ode to the Hymen,” Olds addresses and embodies, in this age-old poetic form, many aspects of love and gender and sexual politics in a collection that is centered on the body and its structures and pleasures. The poems extend parts of her narrative as a daughter, mother, wife, lover, friend, and poet of conscience that will be familiar from earlier collections, each episode and memory burnished by the wisdom and grace and humor of looking back. In such poems as “Ode to My Sister,” “Ode of Broken Loyalty,” “Ode to My Whiteness,” “Blow Job Ode,” and “Ode to the Last Thirty-Eight Trees in New York City Visible from This Window,” Olds treats us to an intimate examination that, like all her work, is universal, by turns searing and charming in its honesty. From the bodily joys and sorrows of childhood to the deaths of those dearest to us, Olds shapes the world in language that is startlingly fresh, profound in its conclusions, and life-giving for the reader.
In a turbulent world, C.D. Wright evokes a rebellious and dissonant ethos with characteristic genre-bending and expanding long-form poems. Accessing journalistic writing alongside filmic narratives, Wright ranges across seven poetic sequences, including a collaborative suite responding to photographic documentation of murder sites in New Orleans. ShallCross shows plain as day that C.D. Wright is our most thrilling and innovative poet.
Daniel Borzutzky returns to confront the various ways nation-states and their bureaucracies absorb and destroy communities and economies. In THE PERFORMANCE OF BECOMING HUMAN, the bay of Valparaiso merges into the western shore of Lake Michigan, where Borzutzky continues his poetic investigation into the political and economic violence shared by Chicago and Chile, two places integral to his personal formation. To become human is to navigate borders, including the fuzzy borders of institutions, the economies of privatization, overdevelopment, and underdevelopment, under which humans endure state-sanctioned and systemic abuses in cities, villages, deserts.
Katharine Towers’ second collection is a book of small wonders. From a house drowning in roses to crickets on an August day, from Nerval’s lobster to the surrealism of flower remedies, these poems explore the fragility of our relationship with the natural world. Towers also shows us what that relationship can aspire to be: each poem attunes us to another aspect of that world, and shows what strange connections might be revealed when we properly attend to it. The Remedies is a lyric, unforgettable collection which offers just the spiritual assuagement its title promises, and shows Towers emerging as a major poetic talent.
Adrienne Rich was the singular voice of her generation and one of our most important American poets. She brought discussions of gender, race, and class to the forefront of poetical discourse, pushing formal boundaries and consistently examining both self and society.
Alice Oswald’s award-winning and highly acclaimed volume Memorial portrays fallen soldiers from Homer’s Iliad. Falling Awake expands on that imagery―defining life as a slowly falling weight, where beings fight against their inevitable end. Oswald reimagines classical figures such as Orpheus and Tithonus alive in an English landscape together with shadows, flies, villagers, dew, crickets―all characterized in tension between the weight of death and their own willpower.
Part fact, part fiction, Tyehimba Jess’s much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.
“Solmaz Sharif’s astonishing first book, Look, asks us to see the ongoing costs of war as the unbearable loss of human lives and also the insidious abuses against our everyday speech. In this virtuosic array of poems, lists, shards, and sequences, Sharif assembles her family’s and her own fragmented narratives in the aftermath of warfare. Those repercussions echo into the present day, in the grief for those killed in America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the discrimination endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter.
At the same time, these poems point to the ways violence is conducted against our language. Throughout this collection are words and phrases lifted from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms; in their seamless inclusion, Sharif exposes the devastating euphemisms deployed to sterilize the language, control its effects, and sway our collective resolve. But Sharif refuses to accept this terminology as given, and instead turns it back on its perpetrators. “”Let it matter what we call a thing,”” she writes. “”Let me look at you.”””
Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times writes: “The poems in Mr. Vuong’s new collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds…possess a tensile precision reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s work, combined with a Gerard Manley Hopkins-like appreciation for the sound and rhythms of words. Mr. Vuong can create startling images (a black piano in a field, a wedding-cake couple preserved under glass, a shepherd stepping out of a Caravaggio painting) and make the silences and elisions in his verse speak as potently as his words…There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong’s sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things.”
| # | Book | Author | Lists |
| (Books Appear On 2 Lists Each) | |||
| 17 | A Gambler’s Anatomy | Jonathan Lethem | NY Times |
| San Francisco Chronicle 2 | |||
| 18 | A Woman of Property | Robyn Schiff | Chicago Tribune |
| The New Yorker | |||
| 19 | All That Man Is | David Szalay | NY Times |
| San Francisco Chronicle 2 | |||
| 20 | Another Brooklyn | Jacqueline Woodson | NY Times |
| San Francisco Chronicle 2 | |||
| 21 | Behold the Dreamers | Imbolo Mbue | NY Times |
| San Francisco Chronicle 2 | |||
| 22 | Cannibal | Safiya Sinclair | Buzzfeed Books |
| The Undefeated | |||
| 23 | Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude | Ross Gay | The Undefeated |
| Via Negativa | |||
| 24 | Certain Magical Acts | Alice Notley | Entropy |
| Good Books Guide | |||
| 25 | Children Of The New World: Stories | Alexander Weinstein | NY Times |
| NPR | |||
| 26 | Commonwealth | Ann Patchett | NY Times |
| San Francisco Chronicle 2 | |||
| 27 | Even this Page is White | Vivek Shraya | Goodreads |
| CBA | |||
| 28 | Four Reincarnations | Max Ritvo | Entropy |
| Via Negativa | |||
| 29 | Freedom Over Me: Eleven Slaves, Their Lives And Dreams Brought To Life | Ashley Bryan | NPR |
| The Horn Book | |||
| 30 | Gap Gardening | Rosmarie Waldrop | Entropy |
| The New Yorker | |||
| 31 | Garden Time | W.S. Merwin | Washington Post |
| Buzzfeed Books | |||
| 32 | Here Comes the Sun | Nicole Dennis-Benn | NY Times |
| San Francisco Chronicle 2 | |||
| 33 | Here I Am | Jonathan Safran Foer | NY Times |
| San Francisco Chronicle 2 | |||
| 34 | Homegoing | Yaa Gyasi | NY Times |
| San Francisco Chronicle 2 | |||
| 35 | Jazz Day: The Making of a Famous Photograph | Roxane Orgill | NPR |
| The Horn Book | |||
| 36 | LaRose | Louise Erdrich | NY Times |
| San Francisco Chronicle 2 | |||
| 37 | Let Them Eat Chaos | Kate Tempest | The Guardian |
| Bustle | |||
| 38 | Measures of Expatriation | Vahni Capildeo | Good Books Guide |
| Bustle | |||
| 39 | Mister Monkey | Francine Prose | NY Times |
| San Francisco Chronicle 2 | |||
| 40 | Moonglow | Michael Chabon | NY Times |
| San Francisco Chronicle 2 | |||
| 41 | My Name Is Lucy Barton | Elizabeth Strout | NY Times |
| San Francisco Chronicle 2 | |||
| 42 | Night | Etel Adnan | Entropy |
| Boston Globe | |||
| 43 | Ninety-Nine Stories of God | Joy Williams | NY Times |
| San Francisco Chronicle 2 | |||
| 44 | Nutshell | Ian McEwan | NY Times |
| San Francisco Chronicle 2 | |||
| 45 | Popular Music | Kelly Schirmann | Entropy |
| Chicago Review of Books | |||
| 46 | Reputations | Juan Gabriel Vásquez; translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean. | NY Times |
| San Francisco Chronicle 2 | |||
| 47 | Say Something Back | Denise Riley | The Guardian |
| Good Books Guide | |||
| 48 | So Much Synth | Brenda Shaughnessy | Publishers Weekly |
| Buzzfeed Books | |||
| 49 | Still Dirty | David Lau | Chicago Tribune |
| Entropy | |||
| 50 | Swing Time | Zadie Smith | NY Times |
| San Francisco Chronicle 2 | |||
| 51 | Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth | Warsan Shire | Verso |
| Via Negativa | |||
| 52 | The After Party | Jana Prikryl | Good Books Guide |
| The New Yorker | |||
| 53 | The Fortunes | Peter Ho Davies | NY Times |
| San Francisco Chronicle 2 | |||
| 54 | The Little Red Chairs | Edna O’Brien | NY Times |
| San Francisco Chronicle 2 | |||
| 55 | The Vegetarian | Han Kang | NY Times |
| San Francisco Chronicle 2 | |||
| 56 | Unbearable Splendor | Sun Yung Shin | Entropy |
| Chicago Review of Books | |||
| 57 | Violet Energy Ingots | Hoa Nguyen | Entropy |
| Bustle | |||
| 58 | Zero K | Don DeLillo | NY Times |
| San Francisco Chronicle 2 | |||
| (Books Appear On 1 List Each) | |||
| 59 | 1989: The Number | Kevin Coval and Nate Marshall | Chicago Review of Books |
| 60 | A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics | CA Conrad | Via Negativa |
| 61 | A Collapse Of Horses: A Collection Of Stories | Brian Evenson | NPR |
| 62 | A Gentleman in Moscow | Amor Towles | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 63 | A Slice from the Cake Made of Air | Lillian-Yvonne Bertram | Entropy |
| 64 | Alice & Oliver | Charles Bock | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 65 | Alien Weaving | Will Alexander | Entropy |
| 66 | American Anger: An Evidentiary | H.L. Hix | Bustle |
| 67 | American Flowers | Tyler Flynn Dorholt | Entropy |
| 68 | American Housewife | Helen Ellis | NPR |
| 69 | Antígona González | Sara Uribe | Entropy |
| 70 | Archeophonics | The Rumpus | |
| 71 | Banana Palace | Dana Levin | MPR News |
| 72 | BARKSKINS | Annie Proulx | NY Times |
| 73 | Beautiful and Damned | Robert M. Drake | Goodreads |
| 74 | BEFORE THE FALL | Noah Hawley | NY Times |
| 75 | bindweed & crow poison: small poems of stray girls, fierce womenby Robin Turner | Via Negativa | |
| 76 | Bitter Sweet Love | Michael Faudet | Goodreads |
| 77 | Black Lavender Milk | Angel Dominguez | Entropy |
| 78 | BLACK WATER | Louise Doughty | NY Times |
| 79 | Blue Hallelujahs | Cynthia Manick | The Undefeated |
| 80 | Bodymap | Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha | Via Negativa |
| 81 | Book of Interludes | Grace Shuyi Liew | Entropy |
| 82 | Booked | Kwame Alexander | Goodreads |
| 83 | Box Kite | Baziju (Roo Borson and Kim Maltman) | CBA |
| 84 | Bright Dead Things | Ada Limón | Via Negativa |
| 85 | Brother | Matthew Dickman and Michael Dickman | Financial Times |
| 86 | Buck Studies | Douglas Kearney | Entropy |
| 87 | Burning in this Midnight Dream | Louise Bernice Halfe | CBA |
| 88 | Careful Mountain | Sara June Woods | Entropy |
| 89 | Carousel Court | Joe McGinniss Jr. | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 90 | Cattle of the Lord | Rosa Alice Branco | Chicago Review of Books |
| 91 | Cheer Up Femme Fatale | Kim Yideum | Entropy |
| 92 | Chelate | Jay Besemer | Entropy |
| 93 | child in a winter house brightening | Abigail Zimmer | Chicago Review of Books |
| 94 | Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word | The Rumpus | |
| 95 | Collected Poems of Alistair Te Ariki Campbell | Alistair Te Ariki Campbell | The Spinoff |
| 96 | Collected Poems: 1974–2004 | Rita Dove | Buzzfeed Books |
| 97 | Conjugation | Phil Hall | CBA |
| 98 | Counting Descent | Clint Smith | The Undefeated |
| 99 | Daredevils | Shawn Vestal | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 100 | De Willekeur | Jan Lauwereyns | Via Negativa |
| 101 | Death Tractates | Via Negativa | |
| 102 | DO NOT SAY WE HAVE NOTHING | Madeleine Thien | NY Times |
| 103 | DON’T LET MY BABY DO RODEO | Boris Fishman | NY Times |
| 104 | Double Zero | Chris Hosea | Entropy |
| 105 | END OF WATCH | Stephen King | NY Times |
| 106 | ENDINGS: Poetry and Prose | Huffington Post | |
| 107 | Envelope Poems | Emily Dickinson | The New Yorker |
| 108 | Every Love Story Is an Apocalypse Story | Donna Vorreyer | Via Negativa |
| 109 | EVERYBODY’S FOOL | Richard Russo | NY Times |
| 110 | Exit Theater | Mike Lala | Entropy |
| 111 | Extracting The Stones Of Madness: Poems 1962-1972 | Alejandra Pizarnik | Entropy |
| 112 | Fale Aitu Spirit House | Tusiata Avia | The Spinoff |
| 113 | Fearful Beloved | Khadijah Queen | Entropy |
| 114 | Field Guide to the End of the World | Jeannine Hall Gailey | Goodreads |
| 115 | Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine | Diane Williams | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 116 | For a Little While: New and Selected Stories | Rick Bass | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 117 | Fuchsia | Mahtem Shiferraw | The Undefeated |
| 118 | Gesell Dome | Guillermo Saccomanno; translated from the Spanish by Andrea G. Labinger. | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 119 | Getting it Right: Poems 1968-2015 | Alan Roddick | The Spinoff |
| 120 | Ghost County | John McCarthy | Chicago Review of Books |
| 121 | Gold From the Stone | Lemn Sissay | Financial Times |
| 122 | Graffiti | Savannah Brown | Goodreads |
| 123 | GRIEF IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS | Max Porter | NY Times |
| 124 | Hardly War | Don Mee Choi | Entropy |
| 125 | Hera Lindsay Bird | Hera Lindsay Bird | The Spinoff |
| 126 | High Dive | Jonathan Lee | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 127 | Highway Sky | James Brush | Via Negativa |
| 128 | HOT MILK | Deborah Levy | NY Times |
| 129 | How Festive the Ambulance | Kim Fu | CBA |
| 130 | Hystopia | David Means | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 131 | I Am A Season That Does Not Exist In The World | Kyung Ju Kim | Entropy |
| 132 | i be, but i ain’t | Aziza Barnes | MPR News |
| 133 | I MUST BE LIVING TWICE: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2014 | Eileen Myles | NY Times |
| 134 | If I Go Missing | Via Negativa | |
| 135 | Illocality | Joseph Massey | Entropy |
| 136 | In The Not Quite Dark: Stories | Dana Johnson | NPR |
| 137 | Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems | Frank Lima | Library Journal |
| 138 | Innocents and Others | Dana Spiotta | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 139 | IRL | Tommy Pico | Entropy |
| 140 | IZA’S BALLAD | Magda Szabo | NY Times |
| 141 | Knockout: Stories | John Jodzio | NPR |
| 142 | La Douleur Exquise | J.R. Rogue | Goodreads |
| 143 | Lacunae: 100 Imagined Ancient Love Poems | Daniel Nadler | NPR |
| 144 | Last Sext | Melissa Broder | Entropy |
| 145 | Local Extinctions | Mary Quade | MPR News |
| 146 | Losing It | Emma Rathbone | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 147 | Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals | Via Negativa | |
| 148 | Marys of the Sea | Joanna C Valente | Entropy |
| 149 | Meditations of a Beast | Kristine Ong Muslim | Chicago Review of Books |
| 150 | MISCHLING | Affinity Konar | NY Times |
| 151 | Model Disciple | Michael Prior | CBA |
| 152 | Monterey Bay | Lindsay Hatton | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 153 | Mortal Trash | Kim Addonizio | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 154 | My Struggle: Book Five | Karl Ove Knausgaard | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 155 | Night-Sky Checkerboard | Oh Sae-young | Chicago Review of Books |
| 156 | Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840 edited | Timothy Whelan and Julia Griffin | Verso |
| 157 | Nothing to Declare | Henri Cole | Good Books Guide |
| 158 | Of This World: New and Selected Poems | Via Negativa | |
| 159 | Overpour | Jane Wong | Entropy |
| 160 | Paradise Lost | John Milton | Via Negativa |
| 161 | Pitch of Poetry | The Rumpus | |
| 162 | Poems: New and Selected | Ron Rash | Chicago Review of Books |
| 163 | Pond | Claire-Louise Bennett | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 164 | Quarter Life Poetry: Poems for the Young, Broke and Hangry | Samantha Jayne | Goodreads |
| 165 | Rabbit Rabbit | Kerrin P. Sharpe | Via Negativa |
| 166 | Rapture | Sjohnna McCray | Bustle |
| 167 | Reasons (not) to Dance | José Angel Araguz | Via Negativa |
| 168 | Registration Caspar | J. Gordon Faylor | Entropy |
| 169 | Remembering Animals | Brenda Iijima | Entropy |
| 170 | Restless Continent | Aja Couchois Duncan | Entropy |
| 171 | Safe Space | Jos Charles | Entropy |
| 172 | Saint Aldhelm’s Riddles | Via Negativa | |
| 173 | Salt River Songs | Sam Hunt | The Spinoff |
| 174 | Save Twilight: Selected Poems | Julio Cortázar | The Rumpus |
| 175 | Seam | Tarfia Faizullah | Via Negativa |
| 176 | Selected Poems, 1968-2014 | Paul Muldoon | NPR |
| 177 | Serious Sweet | A.L. Kennedy | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 178 | Shelter in Place | Alexander Maksik | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 179 | Skies | The Guardian | |
| 180 | Songs from a Mountain | Amanda Nadelberg | Entropy |
| 181 | Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty | Ramona Ausubel | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 182 | Standing Water: Poems | Eleanor Chai | NPR |
| 183 | STILL HERE | Lara Vapnyar | NY Times |
| 184 | Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately | Alicia Cook | Goodreads |
| 185 | Style | Dolores Dorantes | Entropy |
| 186 | Sudden Death | Álvaro Enrigue; translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 187 | Sweet Lamb of Heaven | Lydia Millet | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 188 | Sweetbitter | Stephanie Danler | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 189 | Sympathetic Little Monster | Cameron Awkward-Rich | Entropy |
| 190 | Take This Stallion | Anaïs Duplan | Entropy |
| 191 | Tales of a Receding Hairline | K.W. Peery | Goodreads |
| 192 | THE ASSOCIATION OF SMALL BOMBS | Karan Mahajan | NY Times |
| 193 | The Bees Make Money in the Lion | Lo Kwa Mei-in | The Undefeated |
| 194 | The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems | Natalia Toledo | Via Negativa |
| 195 | The Book of Questions, Volume I, | Edmond Jabès | Via Negativa |
| 196 | The Collected Poems of Jane Kenyon | Via Negativa | |
| 197 | The Consequences of My Body | Maged Zaher | Entropy |
| 198 | The Corpse Pose | Erik Campbell | Entropy |
| 199 | The Country Gambler | Erica McAlpine | Via Negativa |
| 200 | The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems | Larry Levis | Goodreads |
| 201 | The Girls | Emma Cline | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 202 | THE GLOAMING | Melanie Finn | NY Times |
| 203 | The Halo | Via Negativa | |
| 204 | The Hermit | Lucy Ives | Entropy |
| 205 | The Jungle Around Us | Anne Raeff | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 206 | The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theatre | The Rumpus | |
| 207 | The Kindness of Enemies | Leila Aboulela | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 208 | The Last Painting of Sara de Vos | Dominic Smith | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 209 | The Last Shift: Poems | Philip Levine | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 210 | THE LIFE-WRITER | David Constantine | NY Times |
| 211 | The Met Office Advises Caution | Rebecca Watts | Financial Times |
| 212 | THE MIRROR THIEF | Martin Seay | NY Times |
| 213 | The Missing Museum | Amy King | Entropy |
| 214 | THE MORTIFICATIONS | Derek Palacio | NY Times |
| 215 | The Names | Tim Lilburn | CBA |
| 216 | The Nerve of It | Lynn Emanuel | MPR News |
| 217 | The Nest | Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 218 | THE NIX | Nathan Hill | NY Times |
| 219 | The Noise of Time | Julian Barnes | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 220 | THE NORTH WATER | Ian McGuire | NY Times |
| 221 | The Old Philosopher | Vi Khi Nao | Entropy |
| 222 | The Paper Menagerie | Ken Liu | NPR |
| 223 | The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St | C.D. Wright | Entropy |
| 224 | The Portable Veblen | Elizabeth McKenzie | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 225 | The Princess Saves Herself in this One | Amanda Lovelace | Goodreads |
| 226 | The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms | The Rumpus | |
| 227 | The Queen of the Night | Alexander Chee | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 228 | The Rain in Portugal: New Poems | Billy Collins | Goodreads |
| 229 | The Red Car | Marcy Dermansky | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 230 | The Revolutionaries Try Again | Mauro Javier Cardenas | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 231 | The River | Jane Clarke | Via Negativa |
| 232 | The Romance of Siam | Jai Arun Ravine | Entropy |
| 233 | The Secret Birds | Tony Fitzpatrick | Chicago Review of Books |
| 234 | THE SPORT OF KINGS | C | NY Times |
| 235 | The Terranauts | T.C. Boyle | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 236 | The Type | Sarah Kay | Goodreads |
| 237 | THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD | Colson Whitehead | NY Times |
| 238 | The Universe of Us | Lang Leav | Goodreads |
| 239 | The Veins of the Ocean | Patricia Engel | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 240 | The Voyager Record | Anthony Michael Morena | Entropy |
| 241 | The Waking Comes Late | Steven Heighton | CBA |
| 242 | The Watermark | Alice Anderson | Entropy |
| 243 | The White Stones | J.H. Prynne | Chicago Tribune |
| 244 | The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It | Via Negativa | |
| 245 | The Wine-Dark Sea | Mathias Svalina | Entropy |
| 246 | Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems | Pablo Neruda | Goodreads |
| 247 | There Should Be Flowers Paperback | Joshua Jennifer Espinoza | Entropy |
| 248 | They and We Will Get Into Trouble For This | Anna Moschovakis | Entropy |
| 249 | Thief in the Interior | Phillip B. Williams | Chicago Review of Books |
| 250 | Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones | Lucia Perillo | MPR News |
| 251 | To Fold the Evening Star | Five Books | |
| 252 | To the House of the Sun | Via Negativa | |
| 253 | Today Means Amen | Sierra DeMulder | Goodreads |
| 254 | TODAY WILL BE DIFFERENT | Maria Semple | NY Times |
| 255 | Tree Talks: Southern Arizona | Wendy Burk | Entropy |
| 256 | VALIANT GENTLEMEN | Sabina Murray | NY Times |
| 257 | Version Control | Dexter Palmer | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 258 | Void Studies | Rachael Boast | Financial Times |
| 259 | Wannabe HoochieMama Gallery of Realities’ Red Dress Code: New and Selected Poems | Thylias Moss | The Undefeated |
| 260 | WAR AND TURPENTINE | Stefan Hertmans | NY Times |
| 261 | Warp | The Rumpus | |
| 262 | WEATHERING | Lucy Wood | NY Times |
| 263 | What Belongs to You | Garth Greenwell | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 264 | What Blooms in Winter | Maria Mazziotti Gillan | Brian Fanelli |
| 265 | What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours | Helen Oyeyemi | NPR |
| 266 | What Lies Between Us | Nayomi Munaweera | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| 267 | What Weaponry | Elizabeth J. Colen | Entropy |
| 268 | Whiskey Words & a Shovel II | R.H. Sin | Goodreads |
| 269 | White Blight | Athena Farrokhzad. Translated from the Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida | Boston Globe |
| 270 | Witness, I Am | Gregory Scofield | CBA |
| 271 | Works & Days | Bernadette Mayer | Chicago Tribune |
| 272 | You Ask Me To Talk About the Interior | Carolina Ebeid | Entropy |
| 273 | You Should Pity Us Instead | Amy Gustine | San Francisco Chronicle 2 |
| Source | Article |
| Boston Globe | Best books of 2016 |
| Brian Fanelli | 2016 Recap/Best Of |
| Bustle | The 12 Best Poetry Collections Of 2016 |
| Buzzfeed Books | The 11 Best Poetry Books Of 2016 |
| CBA | Best Books of 2016 |
| Chicago Review of Books | The Best Poetry Books of 2016 |
| Chicago Tribune | Best poetry books of 2016 |
| Entropy | BEST OF 2016: BEST POETRY BOOKS & COLLECTIONS |
| Financial Times | Best books of 2016: Poetry |
| Five Books | Helen Mort recommends the Best Poetry of 2016 |
| Good Books Guide | 100+ Literary Favourites of 2016 |
| Goodreads | BEST POETRY |
| Huffington Post | The Best Self-Published Books of 2016 |
| Library Journal | BEST POETRY |
| MPR News | Best poetry collections of 2016: Poets’ picks |
| NPR | NPR’s Book Concierge Our Guide To 2016’s Great Reads |
| NY Times | Fiction & Poetry |
| Publishers Weekly | Best Poetry |
| San Francisco Chronicle 2 | Best of 2016: 100 recommended books |
| The Guardian | Kate Kellaway’s best poetry books of 2016 |
| The Horn Book | Horn Book Fanfare |
| The New Yorker | THE BEST BOOKS OF POETRY IN 2016 |
| The Rumpus | BARBARA BERMAN’S 2016 HOLIDAY POETRY SHOUT-OUT |
| The Spinoff | Best books of 2016: the five best books of poetry |
| The Undefeated | NEW BEGINNINGS: THE FRESHEST BOOKS OF 2016 |
| Verso | Staff Picks: Books of the Year 2016—Chosen by Verso |
| Via Negativa | Favorite poetry books of 2016: a crowd-sourced compendium |
| Washington Post | Best poetry collections of 2016 |
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