The Best of Poets Respond

2014–2024

In June of 2014, Rattle launched the Poets Respond series, putting poetry “back in the news” by regularly publishing poems immediately responding to current events. In the years since, we’ve published over 800 poems, creating what amounts to a powerful almanac in verse. To open our new Best of Rattle Awards, we’ve collected the most unforgettable of those poems into a single volume, in print for the first time. This chronicle of our collective history covers most of the big news—the mass shootings, the Trump elections, Black Lives Matter, and the coronavirus epidemic—but some of the smaller stories, too, that make the series as a whole as surprising and lively as living through these years has been.

Featuring: José A. Alcántara • Jamaica Baldwin • Katie Bickham • Bayleigh Cardinal • Rachel Custer • Tishani Doshi • Alejandro Escudé • Rhina P. Espaillat • Sonia Greenfield • Bob Hicok • Lynne Knight • Julia Kolchinsky • Dorianne Laux • Alison Luterman • Michael Mark • Abby E. Murray • Rolli • Amy Woschek Schmidt • Rebecca Starks • Anthony Tao • Joshua Eric Williams