Danielle Gaither, Word Nerd

What can be improved?

Falling on my face as a poet is a good transition into some of the things that didn’t go so well for me in reading this year. An obvious one is that my Shakespeare project got derailed. I’ll say more about that in the

Why take on this challenge?

You might think I'm taking on this challenge because I'm a poetry expert or superfan, but that's not the case. I actually have kind of a contentious relationship with contemporary poetry in particular. I struggle to identify what makes some poems more than diary entries with line breaks.Yet, at its best, poetry has a certain spark that I don't feel any other form of literature has.

How will I make this challenge work?

The first thing to point out is that even regular book-length poetry collections by single authors are generally much quicker to read than a novel or short story collection with a similar page count. And if that feels like too much, many poets have published what's known as chapbooks (sometimes called pamphlets in the UK), which are even shorter. So the time commitment isn't as large as you might think.