Contemporary best-sellers this week

What does it take to unseat Natasha Trethewey from the top position on the contemporary best-seller list? Answer: A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver’s latest, which has skyrocketed to #1 this week. Receiving collateral advantage from A Thousand Mornings, Oliver’s Swan jumps from #19 to #3. Rounding out the top five is Sharon Olds’s Stag’s Leap at #4 and News of the World, by Philip Levine at #5. New to the list this week is Heid E. Erdrich’s Cell Traffic: New and Selected Poems debuting at #21. About this new collection her publisher writes: “Erdrich's new work reflects her continuing concerns with the tensions between science and tradition, between spirit and body. She finds surprising common ground while exploring indigenous experience in multifaceted ways: personal, familial, biological, and cultural.” Entering the list tied at #29 are Jay Baron Nicorvo’s debut collection Deadbeat and Rose McAleese’s Strong. Female. Character. Finally, Linda Gregerson’s The Selvage enters the list at #30. “In eloquent poems about Ariadne, Theseus, and Dido, the death of a father, a bombing raid in Lebanon, and in a magnificent series detailing Masaccio's Brancacci frescoes, The Selvage deftly traces the ‘line between’ the ‘wonder and woe’ of human experience.”