Contemporary best-sellers this week

For the forth week in a row, Mary Oliver’s A Thousand Mornings claims the top spot on this week’s contemporary best sellers list. Following Oliver is Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s latest collection Time of Useful Consciousness, leaping from #20 to #2. Billy Collins’s Horoscopes for the Dead is still showing life at #3, while Linda Gregerson’s The Selvage and C.K. Williams’s Writers Writing Dying come in at #4 and #5, respectively. Entering the list at #6 is Adrienne Rich’s Later Poems Selected and New: 1971-2012. Of this collection Publishers Weekly writes: “This big and important selection begins at the point where Rich (who died in March 2012) became a national political figure: Diving into the Wreck (1973), with its often-quoted title poem, became a must-read for 1970s feminists, while The Dream of a Common Language (1977), with its central sequence ‘Twenty-One Love Poems,’ set a new standard for writing on love between women.” Also new to the list is Robert Bly’s latest ‪Talking Into the Ear of a Donkey. Taylor Hagood writing for The Rumpus says Bly’s book “makes for a mellow read, full of a kind of warm remembrance and musing to be found only in the ponderings of a poet of great experience. The sharp insights into socio-political life that have characterized Bly’s writing throughout his career are there, but they are couched in an aesthetic as pleasantly aromatic as vanilla-flavored pipe tobacco.” Finally, debuting this week at #30 is Hannah Gamble’s ‪Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast. From the publisher: “Selected by Bernadette Mayer for the National Poetry Series, these poems engage the structures of family and intimacy, exposing the viscera of the everyday, all its frailties and familiarity rendered absurd and remade through language.”