Michael Schmidt is one of the most respected poetry editors working in English, founder of Carcanet Press and a longtime champion of serious contemporary poetry, and his anthologies carry a curatorial authority that most collections can’t match. The Great Modern Poets gathers work from across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries into a volume designed to give readers a genuine sense of where the art form has been and what it has become. 📖

Schmidt selects with both breadth and conviction, representing the major movements and voices of modern poetry without flattening everything into a greatest-hits survey, letting individual poems speak with their full weight rather than reducing them to representative specimens. His editorial instincts lean toward poetry with real staying power rather than fashionable contemporaneity. ✒️

Readers new to modern poetry who want a serious, well-chosen introduction, or experienced readers looking for a single volume that covers the terrain with genuine editorial intelligence, will find Schmidt’s selection an excellent guide.

Why this endures: it brings a serious poetry editor’s lifelong curatorial intelligence to bear on modern verse, producing an anthology that reads as a coherent argument about what the last century of poetry has actually achieved.

Someone has a plan, and it involves making a particular person pay for something they did, or something they’re believed to have done. Jackie Kabler builds her psychological thriller around the deliberate architecture of revenge, exploring what happens when a carefully constructed plot starts encountering the unpredictability of actual human beings who don’t behave the way they’re supposed to. 🔪

Kabler writes tightly plotted domestic suspense with a strong sense of the psychological mechanics underlying her characters’ motivations, giving the revenge premise real interior complexity rather than treating it as a simple matter of cause and effect. The question of whether the target actually deserves what’s coming adds a layer of moral ambiguity that keeps readers from settling too comfortably into one perspective. 🌑

Readers who enjoy psychological thrillers built around deliberately planned harm and the complications that arise when plans meet reality will find Kabler a reliable, twisty read.

Why this grips: it builds its tension around the gap between a perfectly constructed revenge plan and the messy human reality that keeps refusing to cooperate with it.

Johnny Walker is the pseudonym of an Iraqi interpreter who worked alongside U.S. Navy SEALs through some of the most dangerous operations of the Iraq War, doing work that required extraordinary courage while knowing that discovery would mean death not just for himself but for his entire family. Jim DeFelice, who co-wrote American Sniper, helps Walker tell a story that offers a genuinely rare vantage point on the war. 🎖️

What makes this memoir distinctive within a crowded genre is its perspective, an Iraqi’s view of the conflict, his reasons for fighting alongside American forces, the impossible position that put him in with his own community, and his eventual immigration to the United States. Walker’s account complicates the war’s narrative in ways that purely American-perspective memoirs simply can’t, without diminishing the valor or sacrifice on either side. 🌍

Readers who enjoy military memoir and want a perspective on the Iraq War they haven’t encountered before will find Walker’s account both gripping and genuinely illuminating.

Why this matters: it tells the Iraq War from a vantage point almost no other memoir has access to, through the eyes of an Iraqi who risked everything to fight alongside the Americans and paid an enormous personal price for it.