The Poem Is You Sixty Contemporary American Poems And How To Read Them [Hardcover]

Contemporary American poetry has plenty to offer new readers, and plenty more for those who already follow it. Yet its difficultyand sheer varietyleaves many readers puzzled or overwhelmed. The critic, scholar, and poet Stephanie Burt sets out to help. Beginning in the early 1980s, where critical consensus ends, Burt canvasses American poetry of the past four decades, from the headline-making urgency of Claudia RankinesCitizento the stark pathos of Louise Gl?ck, the limitless energy of Juan Felipe Herrera, and the erotic provocations of D. A. Powell.

The Poem Is You: Sixty Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Themis a guide to the diverse magnificences of American poetry today. It presents a wide range of poems selected by Burt for this volume, each accompanied by an original essay explaining how a given poem works, why it matters, and how the poem speaks to other parts of art and culture. Included here are some classroom classics (by Ashbery, Komunyakaa, Hass), less famous poems by very famous poets (Gl?ck, Kay Ryan), and poems by prizewinning poets near the start of their careers (such as Brandon Som), and by others who are notor not yetwell known.

The Poem Is Youwill appeal to poets, teachers, and students, but it is intended especially for readers who want to learn more about contemporary American poetry but who have not known where or how to start. It describes what American poets have fashioned for one another, and what they can give us today.

It is refreshing to find a book that gives equal weight and relish to avant-garde minimalism, New Formalism, and so many of the stations in between&The poems Burt selects would alone comprise a valuable anthology of the American poetry of its time, and [she] is an entertaining, thought-provoking and eager guide to them, keen to ask all the questions that occur to [her] in [her] reading, and to engage with the chicanery of thought it engenders. Each essay is obviously a pld