The Poetry Foundation, going back as far as 2006, posts week-to-week lists of best-selling contemporary, small press, anthology, and children’s poetry books. The top thirty list from the week of March 4, 2012 involves this year’s NBA and NBCC winners, our Poet Laureate is just outside of the top ten, Pulitzer prize-winners pepper the top twenty, and a Nobel Laureate rounds out the chart.  Billy Collins (3), Mary Oliver (4), and Christian Wiman (3) comprise ten of the top thirty spots. Francine J. Harris’s debut, Allegiance, surprises at number one overall, and Terry Blackhawk’s The Light Between pops into the eighth spot.

The small press best-seller lists aren’t posted weekly, but they tend to show off up-and-comers, and they provide an unembellished arrangement of what’s trending from the small press market. While nobody’s inking new deals for upcoming books of poetry based on their appearance on the Poetry Foundation’s best-sellers lists, it definitely gives an idea of what books are moving, what presses are putting those books out, and who’s writing the stuff that people are paying attention to. Just reading reviews and blogs doesn’t quite give the impression that a good old-fashioned best-seller list does, even if poets like to think nobody’s interested in how well poetry sells.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/books/contemporary