Most readers, writers, and library workers have a lot of unread books in their homes. Despite being a triple threat, I’m not sure I have more unread books than average—but I have more than I’d like, and one of my few concrete goals for 2026 is to read something new-to-me from every shelf in the house. My friend, poet, publisher, and game designer Kay Marlow Allen, said in a recent newsletter:

In previous years, I've made resolutions, chosen guiding words, and made bingo boards, but this year, I'm going in with a simple intention: use what I have.

What I have, personally, is media wealth. Vinyls, CDs, and tapes, plus everything needed to play them; DVDs and a film projector; drawers of embroidery, watercolor, and printmaking supplies; and books, books stacked in front of books on my shelves, books lined up beneath my bedside table waiting to be read… or re-homed. My neighborhood is wealthy too—in terms of historicity, but also in free bookshelves. I don’t have to travel far to find an outlet for the overflow. When I weed the apartment holdings, I like to imagine a book that wasn’t for us finding its perfect reader, someone who will grab it out of the shelf with a gasp, clutch it as though they’ll have to fight someone else for it, take it home and read it immediately. I did all those things when a copy of The Dangerous Husband by Jane Shapiro appeared in one of the local shelves. It wasn’t a book I’d been looking for, as I am always looking for a copy of Lolly Willowes. It was a book I’d heard of and forgotten and knew, or remembered, upon seeing it that it would be For Me. After all, that’s one of the Five Laws of Library Science.

In their speculative, collective inquiry into atmosphere Tone, Kate Zambreno and Sofia Samatar speak on the hoard, delineating between hoard and collection. This is something that all media enthusiasts must reckon with eventually: are my holdings truly a collection, or have they become a hoard? Public and academic libraries maintain collections, develop them, and of course we weed them. The people likeliest to have few rosy, borderline-religious beliefs about books are people who work with them.

Over a languid, elliptical coffee recently, a friend referenced Coleridge’s famous adage of prose and poetry. A collection in its truest sense—library as organism, Constitution as living document, a body that sheds and grows, a fearlessly and honestly-tended garden—is the best books for the owner, in the order best suited to them. My household organizes some books by genre and others by publication date. We have a reference collection with no dictionaries, one that refers only to topics subjectively important: constellations, Florida, geology, rock music. There are maybe five books in the place about writing, and one of them I’ve had since ninth grade. For arcane reasons, we keep three copies of The Awakening.

No one could call this collection well-rounded, but it doesn’t have to be. It only has to be vital.

This January, I started with the poetry shelf. When I go into a bookstore, too, I make for the poetry first. My ongoing, probably-lifelong goal is to buy more poetry, read more poetry, make more room for poetry in my life. As a result, my poetry shelf is fairly eclectic. I don’t have a lot of Important poetry (some Rich, some Carson, some Oliver, some Hayes, some Rilke; Shakespeare’s sonnets in a big compendium of his plays). I read volumes of poetry between fiction and nonfiction, at about a one-to-five rate. If I buy a collection in a stack of other kinds of books, the poetry is what I read first upon getting home.

From the unread poetry options, I picked Mother Octopus by Sarah Giragosian, which had been waiting on my shelf since last year. I found it didn’t work quite as well for me as Giragosian’s previous collection The Death Spiral. Part of the unread book’s appeal, of course, is in its possibility. It can never disappoint you, but then, it can also never astound you. Giragosian’s nature poetry is where her strengths lie, in my non-academic opinion; her responses to other poets, including Jericho Brown and Jennie Xie, are somehow more immediate and evocative than contemporary poems of pandemic and authoritarianism (the collection having been published in 2024). A queer author, her work seems queerest when situated in what Zambreno and Samatar, after Haraway, call the humanimal: relations between humans and the natural world, words used for describing animal realities that illuminate queer humanity:: ammonite, defleshed, sidewind, amber-slur, spiral.

Giragosian is local to me, and her collections are studded with insider knowledge, as in “Taughannock Falls Haibun.” Locale is a weighty factor in my collecting, but not enough to tip the scales in favor of Mother Octopus. I offered the book to one of my neighborhood shelves after work last week, accepting a paperback copy of Poe’s tales in return.

I don’t call myself a poet, but I’ve written a fair amount of poetry and some of it has even been published by other people. I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect a lot of young writers write poetry first, having absorbed the notion of Poet As Writer, or Writer Equals Poet. Some eventually learn how to write poetry, and some go on to fiction or essays (or plays, in the case of my high school literary journal’s greatest success story). I facilitate my library’s writing club for teenagers, and I often ask the poets and fiction writers to parse why they gravitate toward their chosen forms. Some are very specific about it, and others have no idea. I was a kid who had no idea. You don’t have to have any idea: if the words want out, they’ll get out.

My other ongoing, probably-lifelong goal is to try writing a new-to-me poetic form every year. There are a lot of them. I haven’t decided what this year’s will be, although I’ve written four poems since January began. Maybe you have a favorite form to suggest? Let me know!