National Poetry Month! To celebrate words and the people who love them, check out these new poetry releases from Yale Press:

Why Poetry Matters by Jay Parini

Poetry doesn’t matter to most people, observes Jay Parini at the opening of this book. But, undeterred, he commences a deeply felt meditation on poetry, its language and meaning, and its power to open minds and transform lives. By the end of the book, Parini has recovered a truth often obscured by our clamorous culture: without poetry, we live only partially, not fully conscious of the possibilities that life affords. Poetry indeed matters.

The Earth in the Attic by Fady Joudah; Foreword by Louise Glück

Fady Joudah’s The Earth in the Attic is this year’s winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. In his poems Joudah explores big themes—identity, war, religion, what we hold in common—while never losing sight of the quotidian, the specific. Contest judge Louise Glück describes the poet in her Foreword as “that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession . . . have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas.” She finds in his poetry an incantatory quality and concludes, “These are small poems, many of them, but the grandeur of conception is inescapable. The Earth in the Attic is varied, coherent, fierce, tender; impossible to put down, impossible to forget.”

For more information on the Yale Series of Younger Poets, including a complete list of past winners, click here. Or click here for a list of all poetry books released by Yale Press. For more information about National Poetry Month, visit the Academy of American Poets’ website here.