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Poetry, not fiction, is Read With Jenna’s highest-rated pick
“Devotions” was Jenna Bush Hager’s final book club choice of 2024, presenting viewers with a tender holiday gift. The collection, curated by Mary Oliver herself shortly before her death in 2019, brings together some of her most beloved poems — each one a reminder to notice the world in its simplest, most miraculous forms.
Oliver, who won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, built her career on close observation of the natural world — of birdsong and branches, tides and seasons — but also of the inner landscape that mirrors the natural one. “Wild Geese,” one of her most popular works, has found a second life on TikTok, its iconic first line — “You do not have to be good” — passed around social media like a secular prayer.
For Hager, poetry is a balm to the chaos of life. As she told Today, “When I’m unsure of the world, there are a few things I can do: I can go outside and be in nature. I can lean into my faith. Or something else really therapeutic is reading poetry.” She often sends poems to friends and family, she said, to put into words her feelings that otherwise resist articulation. “Devotions” may not have been the splashiest release or the most talked-about debut, but it resonated, and readers responded in kind.
