Poetry is hard to define even for those devoted to reading, writing, and studying it. “It is difficult,” William Carlos Williams famously wrote, “to get the news from poems,” but that news can be indispensable to understanding our humanity. It is, as Ezra Pound put it, “news that stays news.” Charles Wright calls it simply language that sounds better and means more; John Ashbery considered poetry language with a “blue rinse.” Whether one is thinking about poetry on the page or the poetry of a beloved’s body or a mountaintop hike or an exceptionally ecstatic meal, one thing most agree upon is that poetry helps us experience, if not explain, the ineffable, the inexplicable, the unfathomable, the impossible. The mysterious. “Why should the truth not be impossible?” asks Anne Carson. “Why should the impossible not be true?”