Senior editor Ron Charles says that David Mason's "Ludlow" blends fact and fiction to recreate one of the most tragic events in American labor history.

It's easy to fall for the bravado of rakish John Donne of the late 16th and early 17th century London.

Robert Pinsky, left, writes that sometimes poetry makes things happen. In a large, resonant example, a poem by Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) about Stalin caused the poet's imprisonment in 1934.

After years of copyright quarrels and delays, the new, gorgeously bound Collected Poems, 1956-1998 promises to prove Zbigniew Herbert one of the most impressive poets of the later 20th century.

Three new paperbacks -- written by poets, naturally -- make the case that poetry really is for the people.

Sample poems from recently published collections.

Three compilations speak to different emotions and spirits.