Poets House | Lower Manhattan

Just two blocks northwest of Ground Zero is Battery Park City, a quiet pocket of southwest Manhattan running alongside the Hudson River. The Poets House (poetshouse.org) recently moved here from Soho, and now sits around the corner from the Battery Park City public library—the New York Public Library's first green, leed-certified branch in Manhattan—and just north of the Irish Hunger Memorial.

The Poets House has a public-access poetry collection of more than fifty thousand volumes and hosts more than two hundred events annually nationwide. Still, it feels like a peaceful site of retreat in which to read, think, and write, with desks and chairs lining a long wall of windows overlooking the Hudson and separate rooms for those desiring more solitude.

In addition to its shelves of poetry volumes, the Poets House hosts an annual showcase of all the poetry titles published in the United States each year, whether in print, on CD, or DVD. A site for the written, spoken, and recorded word, the Poets House is working "to create a future where everyone has entree into the ageless, borderless conversation that is poetry." – Michelle Johnson, Managing Editor

From World Literature Today 85, no. 5