“Poems once in motion…continue to move their readers. And what an imaginative variety of poetic delights is offered here.”—Billy Collins

It would have pleased Walt Whitman, that poet of urban motion, to envision his words coursing by electrified rail through a diverse, global city of 8 million souls. Since 1992, with the presentation of an excerpt from Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” the Poetry in Motion program—co-sponsored by MTA Arts & Design and the Poetry Society of America—has brought more than 200 poems, in whole or in part, before the eyes of millions of subway and bus riders, offering a moment of timelessness in the busy day. The poems are by an eclectic mix of writers, from Sappho and Sylvia Plath to W. H. Auden, Rita Dove, Seamus Heaney, Nikki Giovanni, Patrick Phillips, and Aracelis Girmay. Each of the 20 selected poems gathered here from the book has, in sixteen lines or less, the power to enliven the quotidian, provide nourishment for the soul, and enchant even the youngest among us.

• "Please Give This Seat to an Elderly or Disabled Person" by Nina Cassian
• "El Chicle (for Marcel)" by Ana Castillo
• from "Sympathy" by Paul Laurence Dunbar
• "The Ideal" by James Fenton
• "Noche de Lluvia, San Salvador" by Aracelis Girmay
• "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden
• "Scaffolding" by Seamus Heaney
• "Luck" by Langston Hughes
• "Leave it All Up to Me" by Major Jackson
• from "To Autumn" by John Keats
• "The Suitor" by Jane Kenyon
• "An Old Cracked Tune" by Stanley Kunitz
• "I Ask My Mother to Sing" by Li-Young Lee
• "The Tropics in New York" by Claude McKay
• from "Love in the Ruins" by Jim Moore
• "If there is something to desire" by Vera Pavlova
• "Heaven" by Patrick Phillips
• "What Do You Believe A Poem Shd Do?" by Ntozake Shange
• "The Good Life" by Tracy K. Smith
• "When You are Old" by W.B.Yeats

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