Today’s poetry book recommendations—the seventh set of suggestions during National Poetry Months—come to us from the poet Eric Pankey.

I recommend the following the following five first books that I have been reading this spring with great pleasure and admiration:

• LOVELY ASUNDER by Danielle Deulen
• UNBEKNOWNST by Julie Hanson
• NOTHING FATAL by Sarah Perrier
• SIGHTSEER by Cynthia Marie Hoffman
• GLEAN by Joshua Kryah

Each of these first books seems to me more like a poet’s third or fourth book— wholly individual voices grappling with the medium and its potential and its limitations.

BIO: Eric Pankey is the author of eight collections of poems, most recently THE PEAR AS ONE EXAMPLE: NEW AND SELECTED POEM 1984-2008. A new collection, DISSOLVE, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions.