Eunhae Han’s Reviews > Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems > Status Update

one of many ways poems connect to human experience. A wise poem doesn’t just deliver a message; it deepens a reader’s capacity to perceive nuance, contradiction, and complexity in lived experience.

Burt reframes difficulty not as an obstacle but as a feature of many poems: a way that poems challenge readers to slow down, rethink expectations, or experience language differently.

Contemporary poems may resist traditional tools of analysis, and Burt encourages readers to adapt rather than dismiss unfamiliar styles or voices.

Poems do not exist in isolation; they come alive through individual encounters. Different readers—and the same reader at different moments—will legitimately experience the same poem in different ways.