David Wojahn examines the state of American verse as it enters the first decades of a new millennium, focusing on both the challenges and opportunities of an ancient art as it tries to adapt to the cultural, technological, and political transformations of our turbulent era. Each of these nine essays makes an impassioned and nuanced argument against the so-called marginalization of poetry in contemporary American culture. Among the work included is a penetrating essay on the role of politics in contemporary verse, a querulous examination of the rise of what Wojahn terms “the Google poem,” and a meditation on poetry and “self-doubt.” Among the figures he considers are American poets such as Hayden Carruth, John Berryman, Linda Bierds, and Tom Sleigh, as well as crucial modern international poets, among them Nazim Hikmet, Zbigniew Herbert, C.P. Cavafy, and Tomas Transtromer. These are personable, opinionated, and, above all, readable essays by a widely admired poet-critic.

Strange Good Fortune is a collection of fifteen essays on the state of American verse, written by a well-known American poet whose criticism has also attracted considerable attention. Passionate in his engagement with both the practice of poetry and in the observation of verse as it exists within an increasingly professionalized and sometimes perplexing scene, Wojahn follows in the tradition of poet-critics such as Randall Jarrell and Delmore Schwartz, offering provocative and insightful observations about such topics as the persistence of autobiographical poetry, poetry and politics, the creative writing industry, American poets and travel, recent literary hoaxes, and the poetry of depression and invective. The essays discuss not only familiar figures such as Elizabeth Bishop, James Wright, and Robert Lowell but also under-appreciated poets such as Weldon Kees, Frederick Seidel, and Armand Schwerner, as well as younger poets such as Mark Doty, Susan Mitchell, and Denis Johnson. Wojahn's is a humanistic and practical criticism, devoid of theoretical cant, and capable of both acute analysis of individual poems and larger generalizations about poetic method. Forceful, readable, and unflappable, Strange Good Fortune is the work of a poet writing about what he cares about; it is not hobbled by jargon or addled by theory.