Poetry: Not Dead Yet, Thank You

Apparently, Publishers Weekly brass decided a while back that even one batch of poetry reviews a month was too much space for too little return, so they decided to put the recurring feature on a new, irregular schedule with fewer titles. (Full disclosure: I review other types of books for them regularly.) This didn't sit well with various poetry publishers, who agitated for restoration--and won, reports Poets & Writers.

"You spoke. And we listened," [Jeff] Zaleski wrote in an e-mail to those who had contacted him. "In response to the passionate inpouring of e-mails and telephone calls from the many who love and rely upon our poetry reviews, we at Publishers Weekly are extremely happy to report that we are resuming our dedicated monthly Poetry Forecasts section." Zaleski wrote that the initial decision to reduce the number of poetry reviews arose from the belief that they "were not of prime utility to our readers." That belief, Publishers Weekly realized, was wrong. "It has been humbling and edifying to see how Publishers Weekly's reach extends not only to our subscribers, and beyond them to our readers who don’t subscribe, but also to everyone who cares about books," Zaleski wrote.

I'd point out that as Amazon has slashed its own coverage of books to the bone--and not that it ever paid a lot of attention to poetry in the first place--PW has become by default one of the most important sources of information about new poetry releases for online book shoppers.