There are a few days left to celebrate National Poetry Month (of course it’s worth celebrating verse year-round), and our recommendations this week start with books by two of America’s leading young poets: Kevin Young and Tracy K. Smith. A slightly older poet (and playwright), William Shakespeare, has his “Macbeth” updated by the Norwegian thriller writer Jo Nesbo. Also this week, Lawrence Wright takes us on a tour of his complicated home state, Texas; David Reich takes us on a tour of the even more complicated science of population genetics; Aliette de Bodard reimagines Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson in a science-fiction universe; and much more.

John Williams

Daily Books Editor and Staff Writer

BROWN: Poems, by Kevin Young. Photographs by Melanie Dunea. (Knopf, $27.) “Brown” is the latest book by the prolific Kevin Young, who in addition to his steady output as an author is the poetry editor of The New Yorker and the director of Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. “Young is a maximalist, a putter-inner, an evoker of roiling appetites,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “As a poet of music and food, his only rival is Charles Simic. His love poems are beautiful and sexy and ecstatic. He mostly wears his politics lightly but regularly sinks hooks into you that cannot easily be removed.”

WADE IN THE WATER: Poems, by Tracy K. Smith. (Graywolf, $24.) Tracy K. Smith, America’s poet laureate, returns with her first collection since “Life on Mars” won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012. The book includes a suite of found poems that employ, nearly verbatim, the letters and statements of African-American Civil War veterans and their families. Our critic Dwight Garner writes: “Smith’s new book is scorching in both its steady cognizance of America’s original racial sins — open wounds that have had insectlike eggs repeatedly laid in them — and apprehension about history’s direction.”

GOD SAVE TEXAS: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State, by Lawrence Wright. (Knopf, $27.95.) Lawrence Wright, whose books include investigations of Scientology (“Going Clear”) and Al Qaeda (the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Looming Tower”), turns his attention to the state he has long called home. “God Save Texas” “is both an apologia and an indictment: an illuminating primer for outsiders who may not live there but have a surfeit of opinions about those who do,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “The book rambles far and wide, and it’s a testament to Wright’s formidable storytelling skills that a reader will encounter plenty of information without ever feeling lost.”