Jorie Graham has a new collection of work out this Spring entitled From the New World: Poems 1976-2014. We asked her six questions about what she likes to read.

When and where do you like to read?

Books: when I am alone, or feel myself to be alone in a public place. I love to read myself to sleep. I also have come to almost love the way in which we now are interrupted throughout the day by essays and poems and chapters that seep in through the Internet. Though that kind of reading has nothing to do with how one uses one's inwardness in bending over to read a book.

What were your favorite books as a child?

As a child it was TinTin, Babar, Madeline , Hans Christian Anderson and Grimms. I grew up primarily French-speaking (in the Lycée system) so everything was in the French translation. As an older child, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. I loved holding the little Gallimard books. I also read a lot of poetry—as the French system requires it K-12—all the medieval poets, Rennaissance poets, symbolists, surrealists and so on. Obviously I loved Rimbaud , Apollinaire , Supervielle, Baudelaire—but I also adored Du Bellay and Ronsard. We had to recite 100 lines of verse every morning before the first class—so we committed a lot of Racine and Corneille and Moliere to memory. We also read philosophy—starting at age 10. The French system (which is mirrored in many school systems worldwide) is a bit intense about a “classical education.” In spite of how much the French feel it has deteriorated, it is still pretty much the same. You need to have three or four languages when you graduate. Or, in some of the best public schools, “four living and one dead.”

What books had the greatest impact on you?

After Shakespeare, Dante and Homer, The Brothers Karamazov . When I learned to read in English, Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse , Between the Acts,) Proust, Beckett. Then Faulkner, Melville, Hawthorne, and Henry James. Eudora Welty, and Flannery O Connor. I am not mentioning the poets—as that list is too long. Though the discovery of Yeats, Eliot and of Hopkins were life-altering.

Would you like to name a few writers out there you think deserve greater readership?

The poetry of Denis Johnson and the first book of poems by Linda Gregg—Too Bright To See. I do not understand why people find our modernists “too difficult”—let alone the ways in which someone like Dickens is no longer read by young readers. So, to people growing up in the US School system—I would have to say “literature” deserves greater readership. Whole plays. Whole novels. Collected Poems. A great poet I think everyone should read? Zbigniew Herbert (translated by the Carpenters)—such as in a short selected Report from the Besieged City. Also certain less read novels of John Coetzee’s (Age of Iron, and The Life and Times of Michael K). Graham Greene's The End of The Affair. Machado de Assis, Camilo Jose Cela (Mrs Caldwell Speaks To Her Son), Juan Rulfo (Pedro Paramo)…

What was the last book you recommended?

Ben Lerner—Angle of Yaw and 10:04 ( a novel). Keston Sutherland's The Odes to TL61P. Alice Oswald's Dart. Allen Grossman, The Ether Dome and Other Poems and How To Do Things With Tears.

The Unwinding, George Packer. Hyperobjects, Timothy Morton. Dark Ecology also by Morton. Anything by Michael Pollan, Rebecca Solnit , Jonathan Schell. This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, Storms of my Grandchildren by Jim Hansen, The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert… even if these books are already surpassed by current science, they are wake-up calls. Six Degrees by Mark Lynas is from 2008 so one needs to adjust for that, but it is simple, loud and clear.

What do you plan to read next?

William Golding's The Inheritors, Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding The End Of The World.