This National Poetry Month, BookPage is celebrating by "highlighting some of the best new collections," including Nickole Brown's Fanny Says. Brown was asked to write a piece for the magazine about the importance of reading poetry, and her top five reasons are worth sharing far and wide. "In her second collection of poetry, Fanny Says, Nickole Brown offers a probing lyrical biography of her maternal grandmother while also considering the power of memory and Southern society. In this guest blog post, she lists the reasons you should be reading poetry—during poetry month and every other month in between." Here's a taste of why Nickole Brown says poetry should be in our lives: "To me, poetry can make even the most quotidian of things—a tomato on the counter, a housefly batting against the window, your bent reflection in a steel mixing bowl—something extraordinary. Poetry notices things. It scrubs your life free of clichés and easy answers, and the best poems make everyday life strange and new. Poetry requires you to be awake to write it, and reading effective poetry is a second kind of awakening." Nickole Brown also wrote a guest piece for literary blog Write All the Words, in which she shares a fantastic classroom writing exercise for National Poetry Month. "There’s nothing more important to me as a poet—and as a human being, really—than awareness," says Brown. "Paying attention is, I think, my primary responsibility as a writer. If I don’t notice the quiet tickings within my own self, I can’t fully appreciate the secrets and mysteries carried within my own body and memory, and perhaps more importantly, my work as a writer is work as a noticer, an observer of others and the life outside my own." Click here to read Brown's top five reasons to read poetry. Click here to read Brown's guest post for Write All the Words. Brown's new collection Fanny Says is now available at the BOA Bookstore. April is National Poetry Month! Now through April 30, get FREE SHIPPING on any BOA Bookstore order(s)!