Eternally grateful to Demystifying the Manuscript: Essays and Interviews on Creating a Book of Poems by Susan Rich & Kelli Russell Agodon. The book has been so helpful to me. It has no doubt saved me from at least a year of “figuring things out.” In the introduction, the authors say they were working to create a portable mentor, and that’s exactly what this is.

This book is less about self-publishing, although inclusive of self-publishing. It’s more about getting a handle on the trends and reader/publisher expectations in how to organize your work into a cohesive project.

Emotional arc versus narrative arc. “Is the last line of one poem talking to the first line of the next?” Historical collections; Braided collections; Collaged collections; Hybrid collections; Sections/no sections and the difference in reader experience; and so much more in terms of offering a variety of ways to think about the manuscript, cover to cover.