How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope

Crews, a fine poet and teacher, appears to have a Midas touch when it comes to gathering wonderful poems and growing popular anthologies. Two months ago, more than 90,000 copies of How to Love the World were in print, and more than 50,000 had already sold. Heartening news for the world of poetry: people are loving and sharing this book, which hasn’t yet been out a year. And rightly so. After too many extremely strenuous seasons, many people apparently want and need more positivity. What finer way than to absorb wondrously inviting poems studded by “reflective pauses” inviting further thinking and personal writing. Poets include Tracy K. Smith, Joy Harjo, Ellen Bass, Ted Kooser, Amanda Gorman, Alberto Rios, and many more. The connections between these poems feel exquisitely right. This book is needed right now. As with Crews’s previous popular anthology, Healing the Divide, also featured as an earlier YPPL book pick, this volume has an extremely pleasing smaller-size, tuckable-flaps, velveteen physicality. In a melodious foreword, Ross Gay writes, “Witnessing how we are loved and how we love makes the world. In his superb introduction, “The Necessity of Joy,” Crews discusses “soul time” and its essential presence. How to Love the World is for everyone—adolescents, teens, adults—who welcomes greater fullness of joy and wholeness of days.