You Should Feel Bad by Laura Creste

Selected and introduced by Stephanie Burt:

Poetry—even the plainest (and these poems aren’t plain)— isn’t about what happens next, or who does what to whom, but about how it happens, and how it feels. The best poems make you say, on first read, “What?” and then, on returning, “Oh!” or “Yes.” And they can hold wisdom, implied or explicit, reassuring or unsettling, nostalgic or forward-looking or scary or maybe—as in Laura Cresté’s poems—all three at once. “I thought I wanted to be in love but really / I wanted something to do with my hands.”