"In Best New Poets, the term 'emerging writer' is defined as someone who has yet to publish a book-length collection of poetry. The goal of Best New Poets is to provide special encouragement and recognition to new poets, the many writing programs they attend, and the magazines that publish their work"--Page ix.

It's a nervy thing for an anthology to label itself Best New Poets, but once again the collection lives up to its name. It's a rich and readable selection, reflecting no party-line aesthetic, and attesting to the formidable promise of the emerging generation. --David Wojahn.

Best New African Poets 2016 Anthology has 251 pieces from 131 poets and artists in 7 languages (English, Portuguese, French, Afrikaans, Shona, Yoruba and Kiswahili) from 24 African countries and Diasporas, with South African and Angolan poets dominating the list. We also have a healthy number of poets from Uganda, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Moçambique, Ghana, and Nigeria, as usual. The nationalist sense is the one that most predominates with its pink, blue and gray tints that are expressed in parallel with existentialist perspectives that in turn go hand in hand with love, desire, hankering, joy, sensuality that transports us to epic, lyrical, utopian contexts without being lost in fantasy, they are artistic lines sometimes with traditional and sometimes more innovative touches. However, in contrast and to a lesser extent, almost as if there were resistant and with restraint we also find desolation, pain, negation that can be so sweet or so bitter that it allows the imagination to stop in a lament or end in resignation.

Best New African Poets 2016 Anthology has 251 pieces from 131 poets and artists in 7 languages (English, Portuguese, French, Afrikaans, Shona, Yoruba and Kiswahili) from 24 African countries and Diasporas, with South African and Angolan poets dominating the list. We also have a healthy number of poets from Uganda, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Moçambique, Ghana, and Nigeria. The nationalist sense is the one that most predominates with its pink, blue and gray tints that are expressed in parallel with existentialist perspectives that in turn go hand in hand with love, desire, hankering, joy, sensuality that transports us to epic, lyrical, utopian contexts without being lost in fantasy, they are artistic lines sometimes with traditional and sometimes more innovative touches. However, in contrast and to a lesser extent, almost as if there were resistant and with restraint we also find desolation, pain, negation that can be so sweet or so bitter that it allows the imagination to stop in a lament or end in resignation.

The work of the fifty writers represented here provides the best perspective available on the continuing vitality of poetry as it is being practiced today.

Poetry. By turns mystical and realist, Mary Gilliland's intensely musical poems consider global apocalypse--'our course set for the destitute sunset'--but also celebrate the generative power of creativity. With preternatural empathy, she enters fascinating sensibilities--Virginia Woolf, Nikola Tesla--and sings 'the troubled music' of history. Gilliland's sinewy, nuanced poems understand earth--and consciousness--as gardens that no walls or enchantments can protect. Her vision is profound, enduring.--Alice Fulton Mary Gilliland's THE RUINED WALLED CASTLE GARDEN casts a sidelong glance at the human comedy in various times and places. Here a 'stubbled saint' stumbles into our contemporary world; the rush of life stops with a milennial 'where-were-you party.' Marked by compression, surprise, originality of language, a confident and eloquent voice cuts to the essential.--Mary Crow Like the apothecarist Keats, Mary Gilliland's poetry wells up from the healing force of unheard melodies. Her tensile lyric and fluent narrative grasp the sweet otherness in life, which is 'Eve's radical helplessness' to endure and bear intimate witness to both change and permanence. THE RUINED WALLED CASTLE GARDEN is a radiant testimony--and a triumph--of an unerring ear I deeply cherish.--Ishion Hutchinson

The anticipated second book by the poet Mary Szybist, author of Granted, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award The troubadours knew how to burn themselves through, how to make themselves shrines to their own longing. The spectacular was never behind them.-from "The Troubadours etc." In Incarnadine, Mary Szybist.