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Now that we're done with all that fiscal cliff wrangling (sort of), it's time to move on to priority No. 2: the next year in poetry. Just kidding. But, with the whole year stretching out before us, it is a good time to get excited about what literature has in store.

2012 was the year of colossal books of collected poems (from Jack Gilbert, who passed away shortly after his book's publication; Louise Glck; Lucille Clifton and one or two others). While 2013 doesn't promise so many monumental doorstoppers, it's packed with powerful, important and comfortably slim volumes of new poems by famous poets, as well as some books poetry lovers will love from poets whose names might be new to them. Here's a look at the eight you won't want to miss.

On the power that maps hold in shaping our realities

"It's a bit like another phrase, that history is written by the winners, by the victors. And it's the same with mapmakers. If you have the power to commission a map or make your own map, you're going to make it, you know, reflect your world and reflect your views. So, that could be — if you had a strong Christian worldview, you would put Jerusalem in the middle of the map.

"In ancient Greece, you would go right back and it would be Rhodes, the island of Rhodes off Greece — which is now what you would regard mostly as a kind of holiday island; and it absolutely relies on tourism and not much else. But, you know, in ancient Greece it was the center of world maps because it was such a big economic center of trade and port. It tells you a lot about world history — how we saw ourselves. That's the wonderful thing really about old maps; well, obviously, you realize how the world has changed, but you realize how we place ourselves upon it when the map is drawn."

On the impact of the digital revolution

"Well, I fall into two camps here. I use, you know, my maps on my phone. And it's far easier to put my GPS on than to have to consult a map. But gosh, I mean, do we lose a lot. We lose the beauty of maps; we lose the romance of maps; we lose that terrible feeling that we'll never be able to fold up a map again.

"And I think the other thing, you know, we lose, is a sense of how big the world is. Because now we look at our map, there's a real sense of, 'Get me to where I want to go.' Now you get the feeling, actually, 'It's all about me' ... It's a terribly egocentric way of looking at the world. So I think the view of where we are in the world, in the history of the world, is changing. And I think in a way it's one of the biggest, if not the biggest impacts of the digital and technological revolution — is how we see ourselves in the world."

Read an excerpt of On The Map

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"You scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours," is an old and cherished maxim of our republic. In politics, that's called an earmark, aka pork. One member of Congress gets a road or a monument for his or her state in exchange for a vote on the bill in question.

Congress has lived on this since the era of stovepipe hats. The political vogue lately, however, has been to repudiate those earmarks. But with the recent gridlock in Washington, the feeling is that perhaps some of that grease might help ease things.

Long before President Clinton, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and President Obama, to name just a few, opposed earmarks, former Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., remembers hearing about them in the 1960s, when his father Milward Simpson was in the Senate.

"[Lyndon Johnson] came up to Pop one time and said, 'Milward, what can I do for you? I need your vote ... surely you must have a dam or something out there you need in Wyoming,'" Simpson tells Jacki Lyden, host of weekends on All Things Considered. "I'm not talking about purity; I'm just talking about reality."

“ We cannot handle too much more of the situation we currently face where ... legislation can only get through when it is done at the last hour.