Scanning lines, short and long

H. L. Hix, author of "Chromatic"

"I just finished The Resistance to Poetry, a book of criticism by James Longenbach , the [poetry] judging chair of the National Book Award."

Ben Lerner, author of "Angle of Yaw"

"I've been reading several novels by Witold Gombrowicz . I just finished his first, Ferdydurke , and it's really pretty good."

Nathaniel Mackey, author of "Splay Anthem"

"I don't know how indicative this is, but I [chose] two books by H.D. called Trilogy and Helen in Egypt, which I have to refresh my reading of as I'll be teaching them again soon. I also [chose] a book called Incognegro, by D. S. Marriott."

Philip Levine, author of "What Work Is"

"I'm reading the diary of Isaac Babel from one year called 1920 Diary , and it's incredible. It's the basis for his great book ' Red Calvary.' It's amazing he could write of what he was seeing that year without anger, and any idea of who he would become."

Donald Hall, author of "White Apples and the Taste of Snow: Selected Poems 1946-2006"

"I've been reading, and re reading, the new book of poems by Jane Hirshfield called After . This is her sixth book , and I still think of her as a young poet. She is superb."

James Richardson, author of "Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms "

"How about Kay Ryan's The Niagara River . Others turn out self-sagas or exhibitions of advanced sensibility. Kay Ryan is the subtlest ear in American poetry, and her poems waver down the page as lightly as leaves, over almost before they've begun. But with what tremors of insight and recognition they land!"

Natasha Trethewey, author of "Native Guard"

"I've just started reading Deborah Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory . It's an important book to me because I am interested in history and documentary evidence, and the ways that truth and meaning exist in our cultural memory."

Michael Collier, author of "Dark Wild Realm"

"I'm reading David Rivard's and Daisy Fried's [most recent] collections, Sugartown and My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again, respectively . I'm also rereading Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory as well as Donald Davie's The Poet in the Imaginary Museum ."

William Logan, author of "The Whispering Gallery"

"Hubert E. Collins's Warpath and Cattle Trail , a memoir by a man who in the 1880s had grown up on a ranch on the Chisholm Trail and seen the end of the Indian way of life."

Alison McGhee, author of "Rainlight"

"I just finished Other Voices, Other Rooms, a slender novel by Truman Capote , published way back when. The language of this book is so beautiful, so elegantly composed, that it reads like an extended poem."

Blas Manuel De Luna, author of "Bent to the Earth"

"The book that I'm reading right now is Larry Levis's The Gazer Within . This book, by a fellow Fresno poet, is a collection of his insightful and sensitive and witty and self-deprecating writing about poetry and his life."

Compiled by John Freeman