What compels someone to write poetry in the first place—to commit to this nuanced, imaginative, and far-reaching art form? One of the ten authors in our twenty-first annual look at debut poets, John Liles, remarks, “I never understood what it is that so many others seem to know. What makes this life worth it, given everything we, a brief iterant species, have done to others, ourselves, across a planet.” In his search “to know” he found a belief in language, how it can connect us. Another poet, Bernardo Wade, writes about where it all started for him: “When I began writing poems, they were mostly nonsensical scribbles I did in the corner of the seafood joint where I waited tables.” No matter their various origins, the poets in the following pages proceeded to create debut books wherein the delicate ecosystem of the poem is carefully tended to. {read}