A Year’s Worth of Verse at Poets House

Cameron Blaylock Books on display as part of the 21st annual showcase at Poets House.

It’s something of a sport to say that poetry is dying, but nearly 3,000 books currently on display in Battery Park City offer a strong counterargument.

The 21st annual showcase at Poets House collects poetry books released in the past year by about 700 different publishers. On display through Aug. 3, the books will eventually move upstairs to be absorbed into the organization’s library of more than 50,000 titles.

The public is free to browse through the books in the showcase, including the latest collections by John Ashbery and Adrienne ich; “Troubling the Line,” an anthology of work by transgender poets; the nearly 1,000 pages of “The Collected Poems of James Dickey”; and the splendidly titled “I Am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary,” a collection of notebooks, diaries and letters by the avant-garde Russian poet Daniil Kharms, who died in 1942.

The exhibit’s unique charms are found in the handmade books peppered throughout the shelves. “Very Different Animals,” by Frank Sherlock, is a poem printed on an accordion-style foldout and tucked into the back of a small painting by the artist Nicole Donnelly. Books published by vanity presses aren’t included in the showcase, but self-published titles are fair game. Those include Don Moyer’s box set of collected work. Gina Scalise, a librarian at Poets House who organized the show, flipped through one of Mr. Moyer’s lavishly! illustrated books during my visit. “It’s a labor of love,” she said. “A lot of stuff here is.”