While A Poet of the Invisible World is not a nonfiction biography of Rumi, and anyone expecting that will be disappointed, it seems a safe bet that Michael Golding drew on the poet’s life as inspiration for this novel.

Selected Letters has assembled a finely textured account of this beloved, productive writer who stayed connected with everyone but kept his own counsel and, in the face of daunting obstacles, endured.

The North Haven Journal illuminates a more intimate story still, Bishop’s relationship with the much younger Alice Methfessel, an administrator at Harvard University, where Bishop had begun teaching in 1970.

On Elizabeth Bishop describes how Tóibín was influenced early on by Bishop, not only by her assiduous attention to detail but also by what she left unsaid, by the power of her empty spaces. Conversational in tone, this book is the fifth in Princeton University’s lively series.

DEEP LANE is Mark Doty’s eighth collection of poetry.

JOHN MARSH proposes something here that may cause many readers to shake a skeptical head, but hear him out. In Walt We Trust addresses our generally fixed beliefs about death, money, sex, and democracy, and proposes that the writings of Walt Whitman can serve as a guide on the path toward human connection and personal fulfillment.

Reviews of Space Traveler by Benjamin S. Grossberg, Unions by Alfred Corn, and Nothing to Declare by Henri Cole.

Justin Martin, the author of Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America’s First Bohemians, is clearly a man of eclectic interests, having previously written biographies of Frederick Law Olmsted, Ralph Nader, and Alan Greenspan. He has now turned his attention to the biography of an entire group.