Resisting the trend of divisiveness, American Journal (Graywolf, $14) looks for what unites us. This outstanding anthology of contemporary poetry, edited by Tracy K. Smith, opens with a simple request: “Please raise your hand” if you’ve ever “been a child / lost,” and with Aracelis Girmay’s disarming “Second Estrangement,” we’re reminded that at some level we’re all still vulnerable as children and live in a “world…/filled, finally with strangers.” Part of this collection’s mission is to make those strangers less strange. As Smith notes in her introduction, poetry is ideally suited for this task; reading a poem, we draw close to those we’d “never get the chance to meet” otherwise. In his beautiful “becoming a horse,” Ross Gay taps into such empathy by first “putting my heart to the horse’s” to learn what the horse feels. After that he’s ready to “drop my torches/…drop my knives.” But before we can adopt the “slow honest tongue of horses,” we have to listen carefully to the many voices and languages around us, from that of Nathalie Diaz’s brother, tormented by a “hellish vision,” to Erika L. Sánchez’s “The Poet at Fifteen,” speaking with a “hybrid mouth, a split tongue,” to the insistent “ringing hum” of a war vet’s PTSD in Brian Turner’s “Phantom Noise.”