The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry offers a historical and theoretical account of avant-garde women poets in America from the 1910s through the 1990s and asserts an alternative tradition to the predominantly male-dominated avant-garde movements. Elisabeth Frost argues that this alternative lineage distinguishes itself by its feminism and its ambivalence toward existing avant-garde projects; she also thoroughly explores feminist avant-garde poets' debts and contributions to their male counterparts.

Dream worlds, real worlds: this book ushers in an extraordinary collection of new work by nearly forty poets currently living and writing in Arizona. From campuses and coffee houses, prisons and pueblos, classrooms and kitchen tables comes the work of both well-known and emerging writers drawn to the state's blazing days and starry nights in search of place, time, idea, and self.Brief introductions for each poet reveal that socially, geographically, and emotionally, they come from anywhere and everywhere. Here and together, however, their energy and synergy are shaping a literary landscape unlike any other. They write of jazz, serotonin levels and talk shows, homelessness, convenience stores and gunplay, Tiananmen Square and Bosnia. Their poems, like these lines by Alberto Ríos, are as clear as the desert air: "The birds, they make this happen. / In the sky with nothing else to do, a Saturday, / The slow knee-bend of an afternoon, out there. / I have seen them myself / The birds caw down a rain, tease it / To a hard ground of grass and flat and edge."For the anthology, well-known contributors—Ríos, Richard Shelton, Steve Orlen, Alison Deming, and others—were asked to surprise the editors with their ideas for the best less-known artists to include in the volume. Like a kaleidoscope, then, each page brings a shift in tone and color from the one before, from mainstream, "language," and experimental poetry, to that shaped by rural or traditional cultures.In English, Spanish, and Native languages, voices here reach out to those readers whose home—or whose heart—is in Arizona, and to many others who will never travel here. "Each distinct and other," says Forché of the words in Fever Dreams, make of poetry "what it could not be without this place, translating into poetry its timelessness and awe."Contributors:
William Aberg
Ai
Jed Allen
Barbara Anderson
Jon Anderson
Michael Bowden
Becky Byrkit
Cordelia Candelaria
James Cervantes
David Chorlton
Jeanne E. Clark
Jane Candia Coleman
Michael Cuddihy
Barbara Cully
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Norman Dubie
Beckian Fritz Goldberg
Catherine Hammond
Rex Lee Jim
Ramson Lomatewama
Rita Magdaleno
Jane Miller
Paul Morris
Sheila Murphy
Rick Noguchi
Steve Orlen
Henry Quintero
Alberto R¡os
William Pitt Root
Jeannine Savard
Richard Shelton
Jim Simmerman
Virginia Chase Sutton
Laura Tohe
Tracy Trefethen
Peter Wild
Leilani Wright
Brian Young
Ofelia Zepeda

For the Scribe, the ninth collection by award-winning poet David Wojahn, continues his explorations of the interstices between the public and the private, the historical and the personal. Poems of recollection and elegy commingle and conjoin with poems which address larger matters of historical and ecological import. The subjects of extinction and apocalypse figure prominently and obsessively in these pages, both in short lyrics and in several lengthy sequences. The poems also evidence the mastery of technique for which Wojahn is renowned, whether he is writing in fixed forms or in free verse. For the Scribe is the most ambitious and searching collection thus far from a poet who has been a named finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the O. B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the William Carlos Williams Book Award.

Expanding the boundaries of both genre and gender, contemporary American women are writing long poems in a variety of styles that repossess history, reconceive female subjectivity, and revitalize poetry itself. In the first book devoted to long poems by women, Lynn Keller explores this rich and evolving body of work, offering revealing discussions of the diverse traditions and feminist concerns addressed by poets ranging from Rita Dove and Sharon Doubiago to Judy Grahn, Marilyn Hacker, and Susan Howe.

Arguing that women poets no longer feel intimidated by the traditional associations of long poems with the heroic, public realm or with great artistic ambition, Keller shows how the long poem's openness to sociological, anthropological, and historical material makes it an ideal mode for exploring women's roles in history and culture. In addition, the varied forms of long poems—from sprawling free verse epics to regular sonnet sequences to highly disjunctive experimental collages—make this hybrid genre easily adaptable to diverse visions of feminism and of contemporary poetics.

In this timely anthology, established and emerging poets bear powerful witness to the COVID-19 pandemic in writing that reels from collective grief and uncertainty. This volume consists of sixteen separate chapbooks, and a collection of pandemic-era photography, which are unified by a shared narrative: public and private experiences of quarantine, and the impulse toward creation during a time of enormous upheaval, injustice, and protest. Each voice brings with it a deeply personal account of this globally historic moment, and in doing so, conveys the urgency of introspection, of isolation, and of revolution. These pieces feature B. A. Van Sise, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Yusef Komunyakaa, Laren McClung, Stephanie Strickland, Mary Jo Bang, Shane McCrae, Ken Chen, J. Mae Barizo, Dora Malech, Jon Davis, Lee Young-Ju, Jae Kim, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, A. Van Jordan, Maggie Queeney, Traci Brimhall, Brynn Saito, Denise Duhamel, and Rick Barot. This is a transcendent and ultimately transformative book of poetry written through the COVID-19 pandemic.

The book begins with deaths: chiefly the poet’s mother’s, but also those of cherished mentors and friends. Poems explore living beyond those deaths and approaching old age, and then do some traveling. Williamson takes a pilgrimage to Japan and India, inspired by his practice of Zen meditation, and placed under the aegis of a saying from the great Rinzai Zen monastery at Daitoku-ji: “If you cannot endure this moment, what can you endure?” A theme then becomes enduring the public moment, with all its griefs and opportunities for growth. The reader is then transported with the poet to Italy. In 2000, Williamson began visiting Tuscany regularly, and eventually became a property owner there. The poems set in Italy dwell on an encounter with old culture, and its potential to encourage both resignation and mysticism, with moods that persist from the tutelary geniuses of two great Italian poets: the nihilistic Leopardi and the tentatively mystical Montale. Gathering around those experiences multiple lore from music, philosophy and science, it becomes an extended meditation on mental suffering, glimpses of the ecstatic, and the double nature of our life, “skull / and beatific face,” with “the immortal recombinants of fire and water.”

From Outlaw to Classic presents a sweeping history of the forces that have shaped, and continue to shape, the American poetry canon. Students, scholars, critics, and poets will welcome this enlightening and impressively documented book.
    Recent writings by critics and theorists on literary canons have dealt almost exclusively with prose; Alan Golding shows that, like all canons, those of American poetry are characterized by conflict. Choosing a series of varied but representative instances, he analyzes battles and contentions among poets, anthologists, poetry magazine editors, and schools of thought in university English departments.  The chapters:
• present a history of American poetry anthologies
• compare competing models of canon-formation, the aesthetic (poet-centered) and the institutional (critic-centered)
• discuss the influence of the New Critics, emphasizing their status as practicing poets, their anti-nationalist reading of American poetry, and the landmark textbook, Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren
• examine the canonizing effects of an experimental “little magazine,” Origin
• trace how the Language poets address, in both their theory and their method, the canonizing institutions and canonical assumptions of the age.