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There's a lot to look forward to in the upcoming year, including collections about religious faith, books that push the boundaries of what we can call poetry and some poems that are too hot for your average English class. Critic Craig Morgan Teicher walks us through the highlights of the year ahead.

April is National Poetry Month. In step with NPR tradition, we're asking readers to help us celebrate. We supply the hashtag — you fill our feeds with your mini works of art.

The high school letter jacket is a tradition separating the jocks from the non-varsity crowd. But at the Santa Fe Desert Academy, a small private high school in New Mexico, a different kind of student qualifies for the coveted jacket -- those who make the Precision Poetry Drill Team.

The Poetry Out Loud contest is kind of like a poetry spelling bee. Kids from across the country compete at reciting their chosen poems, and the winner takes home a prize of $20,000.

Since 1986, Ted Kooser has written an annual Valentine's Day poem and sent it to an ever-growing list of women. Now, he's collected those poems in a new book, Valentines.

Poetry Speaks Who I Am is a collection of poems intended not "for parents, for children, for classroom study or for required memorization," says editor Elise Paschen. It's for tweens and young teens, and includes poems about school, cars and the horror of shopping for your first bra.

In a powerful memoir, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey surveys the storm-battered landscape of the place she once called home. Beyond Katrina is a powerful meditation on things long gone that will never come back.

Newly announced Poet Laureate Donald Hall says he will work to improve poetry's standing the United States, seeking to provide new inspiration to the medium. Hall reads from three of his poems: "Old Roses," "Man in the Dead Machine," and "Weeds and Peonies," which is about his late wife, the poet Jane Kenyon.

This weekend in Chicago, a small theater troupe with a big resume will present all of the poems in Charles Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal" — sung by more than 50 performers from around the world.

NPR's Robert Siegel reflects on a long-forgotten poem by Thomas Campbell called Gertrude of Wyoming. NPR's Daniel Schorr recently referenced the epic-length poem in one of his political commentaries.