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We feel that to "better" American poetry is to jam dominant systems of taste to the best of our abilities, and to resignify the very phrase "American poetry" with the languages that it so desperately lacks. We intend to center voices of resistance, subjectivities that emerge from the radical margins, artists whose Americanness transcends nationalism and other borders, perspectives historically denied institutional backing--in short, poets and poetries that are urgent and necessary but do not get along nicely with Power. "Bettering American Poetry is a poetic battle cry for resistance. Comprised of captivating voices that transcend borders and defy the limits of our time, this anthology rattles readers awake with scintillating truth andtough love." -Jamia Wilson, Executive Director of the Feminist Press "Imagine this. A calling of our names, a murmuring of our ghosts, a shouting in our blood. Thank you, dear editors and poets, for burning through to bone, for acknowledging our cuts, for naming our skeletal struggles. Thank you for this edge of safety, for this bit of home." -Ching-In Chen, author of The Heart's Traffic and recombinant (winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Trans Poetry) "Here lives poetry that resembles a sticky dance floor. Poetry that is at once terraformed music and primal shout and wet kiss and sweaty palm. The "American" in Bettering American Poetry is a kind of ghoulish placeholder for whichever more rebellious, more enlivening world comes next. Pay close attention to the future maps and manifestos and mantras these poets have dreamed up. Join them in the club, in the brown/black/feminist/decolonial commons, in which everyone is where they are supposed to be." -Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of This Wound is a World, winner of the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize "A world in which more than one anthology annually presents the poems their editors loved best is better than a world in which readers have to wait many years for the odd tome-like anthology to appear and attempt to define contemporary poetry. These anthologies help readers to understand what's happening in poetry, and they especially help beginning poets to recognize the community they are joining. Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3 includes work by some of the most exciting poets writing today, and-and this is of the utmost importance-it makes poetry's visible community larger." -Shane McCrae, author of The Gilded Auction Block and In the Language of My Captor
We feel that to "better" American poetry is to jam dominant systems of taste to the best of our abilities, and to resignify the very phrase "American poetry" with the languages that it so desperately lacks. We intend to center voices of resistance, subjectivities that emerge from the radical margins, artists whose Americanness transcends nationalism and other borders, perspectives historically denied institutional backing--in short, poets and poetries that are urgent and necessary but do not get along nicely with Power. "Bettering American Poetry is an explosive revelation of the arriving generation of American poets-arriving from every part of the landscape, bringing energies, gifts, and ways of seeing and saying of every kind. Plunge into its pages. See/ hear the news of who we are." --Jane Hirshfield, author of The Beauty "This anthology and its squad of editors better American poetry by gathering a diverse formation of poets who inspire us to read across difference, speak against power, and breathe through struggle." --Craig Santos Perez, author of from unincorporated territory [lukao] "Thank you, editors, thank you, authors for utterly rearranging my cells. This is the only anthology with the word "American" I want to be a part of. A series I will return to, giddy. How desperately I needed to experience how big a poem can be - what a gift you've given us - I'm beaming at you, poets - brutal and honey, whiplash and cry." --TC Tolbert, author of Gephyromania and co-editor of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics "Some anthologies are important. Some are important and necessary. Resistance on every level to what is considered normal and acceptable is both important and necessary. It is the only way to breath. This gathering helps us breathe. We need all the help we can get." --John Yau, author The Wild Children of William Bake and Bijoux in the Dark.
In a landscape at once the brutal American South as it is the brutal mind, Boy with Thorn interrogates the genesis of all poetic creation—the imagination itself, questioning what role it plays in both our fascinations with and repulsion from a national history of racial and sexual violence. The personal and political crash into one language here, gothic as it is supple, meditating on visual art and myth, to desire, the practice of lynching and Hurricane Katrina. Always at its center, though, is the poet himself—confessing a double song of pleasure and inevitable pain.
We feel that to "better" American poetry is to jam dominant systems of taste to the best of our abilities, and to resignify the very phrase "American poetry" with the languages that it so desperately lacks. We intend to center voices of resistance, subjectivities that emerge from the radical margins, artists whose Americanness transcends nationalism and other borders, perspectives historically denied institutional backing--in short, poets and poetries that are urgent and necessary but do not get along nicely with Power. "Soaring and raw, these poems 'better' American Poetry by battering down racial pieties of our white neoliberal nation. This anthology is an explosive Cri de Coeur of these times." - Cathy Park Hong "Resistance and action have always been key elements of progress, and I'm so encouraged that Bettering American Poetry exists and super humbled to be a part of it. We need this poetry, these voices, this perspective--and the poems are just really freaking good!" - Tommy Pico "Bettering American Poetry is verse of the most urgent kind. In this moment of rising fear and resentment these poets write with a deep regard for all peoples. This is the kind of work that will take us through the next 4 years and the next 100." - Nate Marshall
In this his fourth collection, award-winning poet Kyle Dargan examines the mechanics of the heart and mind as they are weathered by loss. Following a spate of deaths among family and friends, Dargan chooses to present not color-negative elegies but self-portraits that capture what of these departed figures remains within him. Amid this processing of mortality, it becomes clear that he has arrived at a turning point as a writer and a man. As the title suggests, Dargan aspires toward an unflinching honesty. These poems do not purport to possess life s answers or seek to employ language to mask what they do not know. Dargan confesses as a means of reaching out to the nomadic human soul and inviting it to accompany him on a walk toward the unknown."
Poetry. Women's Studies. LGBT Studies. Nothing that is complicated may ever be simplified, but rather catalogued, cherished, exposed. THE MISSING MUSEUM spans art, physics & the spiritual, including poems that converse with the sublime and ethereal. They act through ekphrasis, apostrophe & alchemical conjuring. They amass, pile, and occasionally flatten as matter is beaten into text. Here is a kind of directory of the world as it rushes into extinction, in order to preserve and transform it at once.
In her astounding third collection, Nikki Wallschlaeger turns to water—the natural element of grief—to trace history’s interconnected movements through family, memory, and day-to-day survival. Waterbaby is a book about Blackness, language, and motherhood in America; about the ancestral joys and sharp pains that travel together through the nervous system’s crowded riverways; about the holy sanctuary of the bathtub for a spirit that’s pushed beyond exhaustion. Waterbaby sings the blues in every key, as Wallschlaeger uses her vibrant lexicon and varied rhythms to condense and expand emotion, hurry and slow meaning, communicating the profound simultaneity of righteous dissatisfaction with an unjust world, and radical love for what’s possible.
Transversal takes a disruptive approach to poetic translation, opening up alternative ways of reading as poems get translated or transcreated into entirely new pieces. In this collection, Urayoán Noel masterfully examines his native Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean as sites of transversal poetics and politics. Featuring Noel’s bilingual playfulness, intellect, and irreverent political imagination, Transversal contains personal reflections on love, desire, and loss filtered through a queer approach to form, expanding upon Noel’s experiments with self-translation in his celebrated collection Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico. This collection explores walking poems improvised on a smartphone, as well as remixed classical and experimental forms. Poems are presented in interlocking bilingual versions that complicate the relationship between translation and original, and between English and Spanish as languages of empire and popular struggle. The book creatively examines translation and its simultaneous urgency and impossibility in a time of global crisis. Transversal seeks to disrupt standard English and Spanish, and it celebrates the nonequivalence between languages. Inspired by Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, the collection celebrates Caribbean practices of creolization as maximalist, people-centered, affect-loaded responses to the top-down violence of austerity politics. This groundbreaking, modular approach to poetic translation opens up alternative ways of reading in any language.
The new edition of a prize-winning memoir-in-poems, a meditation on life as a queer Indigenous man—available for the first time in the United States “i am one of those hopeless romantics who wants every blowjob to be transformative.” Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut poetry collection, This Wound Is a World, is “a prayer against breaking,” writes trans Anishinaabe and Métis poet Gwen Benaway. “By way of an expansive poetic grace, Belcourt merges a soft beauty with the hardness of colonization to shape a love song that dances Indigenous bodies back into being. This book is what we’ve been waiting for.” Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to “cut a hole in the sky / to world inside.” Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where “everyone is at least a little gay.” Presented here with several additional poems, this prize-winning collection pursues fresh directions for queer and decolonial theory as it opens uncharted paths for Indigenous poetry in North America. It is theory that sings, poetry that marshals experience in the service of a larger critique of the coloniality of the present and the tyranny of sexual and racial norms.
Literary Nonfiction. California Interest. Contributors include: Stephen Collis, CAConrad, Matthew Cooperman & Aby Kaupang, Adam Dickinson, Suzi F. Garcia, Brenda Hillman, Brenda Iijima, Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Lucas de Lima, Eric Magrane, Joyelle McSweeney, Julie Patton, Craig Santos Perez, Evelyn Reilly, Linda Russo, Metta S�ma, Kaia Sand, Kate Schapira, Jonathan Skinner, Cecilia Vicu�a. "BIG ENERGY POETS: ECOPOETRY THINKS CLIMATE CHANGE, is more than another book on climate change, these disparate authors are collectively voices in the same struggle: How to ensure the planet's survival, where planet and body (human or otherwise) are not separate but synonymous, are inextricably tied. There is a necessary insistence in this anthology on the body politic being the earth's politic. Together, this is a creative treatise toward the integrity of continuance, and against fear of the other, the 'other' being as much 'nature' as person. The introduction asks, 'Why poetry?' to confront the urgency of climate change and all of its implications and causalities. The answer is found in the challenge taken up by these poets as they allow us access to both their poetry and their process. Here authors utilize their critical and creative practices to forward a conversation we can simply not afford to ignore. Race, gender, genocide, these poets are asking questions and further, daring to question themselves. It may surprise some how many of the poets feel the poem as inhabiting the body and it becomes easier through that understanding to see how the poet, the body of the poet, connects to the land, to the environments in which they find themselves. Indeed, several of these poets even as they put words to the page in all manner of formats and styles, literally put their bodies on the line that marks the difference between apathy and action by marching, picketing and refusing to stop creating or privileging the power of the imagination to alter our course. Read this, powerful, instructional and inspiring, it does what we want poetry to do, move us. The writing of poetry can make one adept at discerning systems, correlations, and interconnections. Ecopoetry is the nexus of science, activism and poetics. From Anna Lena Phillips Bell's intimate litanies of trees that bring to mind the names of children in a class ledger, to Lucas de Lima's take on transmogrification, to Meta Sama's evocative conflations of 'hair,' 'river' and 'sand,' here we find the polemics of universal intersectionality, a necessary embracement, where we all have something at stake and at risk. As Brenda Hillman writes in her essay, A Brutal Encounter Recollected in Tranquility, writing may be your most necessary action but you can't be the only one."--Vievee Francis