Schnackenberg's first book, Portraits and Elegies (1982), marked her emergence as a poet who had mastered a wide variety of types of formal verse. Reviewers hailed this collection as evidence of an exciting new voice in American poetry. Many of the poems in this collection are more accessible for the general reader than some of Schnackenberg's complex later work.

Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism (1996), edited by Mark Jarman and David Mason, is an anthology that brings together most of the major poets of the New Formalism. Curiously, the editors omit Schnackenberg. The poets represented include Tom Disch, Timothy Steele, Mary Jo Salter, Brad Leithauser, Marilyn Hacker, Molly Peacock, Sydney Lea, Dana Gioia, and Andrew Hudgins.

In his introduction to The Direction of Poetry: An Anthology of Rhymed and Metered Verse Written in the English Language since 1975 (1988), Robert Richman describes...