This anthology includes many of the major poets to have emerged and gained pre-eminence since World War II, and whose writing reflects not only the significant changes in this nation's postwar history, and the coming to grips with a nuclear age, but also an entirely new way of looking at and structuring reality. United by their "postmodernist" concerns with spontaneity, "instantism," formal and syntactic flexibility, and the revelation of both the creator and the process through the writing itself, these 38 poets represent very diverse strains of an essential American individualism. Included are many of the poets whose work first gained widespread national attention with the 1960 publication of The New American Poetry: Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Blackburn, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, and others. Among the poets included here for the first time are Anne Waldman, Diane di Prima, Ed Sanders, Jerome Rothenberg, and James Koller. In addition to a new preface by Allen and Butterick, the book provides autobiographical notes of all the poets and listings of their major works.

This anthology of poetry collects 21st century American works by both established and emerging poets that deal with the public events, government policies, ecological and political threats, economic uncertainties, and large-scale violence that have largely defined the century to date. But these 138 poems by 50 poets do not simply describe, lament, or bear witness to contemporary events; they also explore the linguistic, temporal, and imaginative problems involved in doing so. In this way, the anthology offers a comprehensive look at contemporary American poetry, demonstrating that poets are moving at once toward a new engagement with public concerns and toward a focus on the problems of representation. A detailed introduction by the editors along with poetics statements by many of the poets add depth and context to a book that will appeal to anyone interested in the state and evolution of contemporary American poetry. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Bringing together over 100 years of creative and vital American poetry in one volume, Anthology of Modern American Poetry includes over 750 poems by 161 American poets ranging from Walt Whitman to Sherman Alexie. It represents not only the traditionally familiar poetic works of the last hundred years but also includes numerous poems by women, minority, and progressive writers only rediscovered in the past two decades. It is also the first anthology to give full treatment to American long poems and poetic sequences.

"Donald Allen's prophetic anthology had an electrifying effect on two generations, at least, of American poets and readers. More than the repetition of familiar names and ideas that most anthologies seem to be about, here was the declaration of a collective, intelligent, and thoroughly visionary work-in-progress: the primary example for its time of the anthology-as-manifesto. Its republication today--complete with poems, statements on poetics, and autobiographical projections--provides us, again, with a model of how a contemporary anthology can and should be shaped. In these essentials it remains as fresh and useful a guide as it was in 1960."--Jerome Rothenberg, editor of Poems for the Millennium "The New American Poetry is a crucial cultural document, central to defining the poetics and the broader cultural dynamics of a particular historical moment."--Alan Golding, author of From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry

Poetry. Anthology. AN ANTHOLOGY OF NEW (AMERICAN) POETS features the work of thirty-five young poets who represent "a new opening of the field for American poetry [and] a turn to living figures and essential issues" --Paul Hoover. The poems are characteristically aware of the traditions they are falling out of step with, making a "'thinking' compendium of the planetary poetry scene and a boon to the ongoing struggle to keep the world safe for poetry" --Anne Waldman. The Anthology is co-edited by Lisa Jarnot, Leonard Schwartz and Chris Stroffolino, and contains work by Lee Ann Brown, Candace Kaucher, Jeffrey McDaniel, Claire Needell, Mark Nowak, Edwin Torres and many more.

Since Whitman and Dickinson, most of the major poetry in the United States has been written against the literary establishments and prevailing canons of taste, and often far from the cultural centers. This is the first anthology in many years to gather the work from this continuing tradition of innovators and outsiders, presenting poets and poems that are still excluded from the academic collections. Opening with the last poems of the Modernist masters Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and H.D., the book follows through four generations of writers who have been the primary figures of the new poetries and poetics since 1950. With a historical afterword, complete bibliographies, and generous selections from each of the thirty-five poets, this anthology is the only available introduction to the poets connected with such groups and movements as the Objectivists, the Beats, Black Mountain, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, and ethnopoetics. American Poetry Since 1950 is a new map of the territory, an array of known and unknown contemporary classics. It is full of strange texts and startling procedures, histories and natural histories, high lyricism and extended meditations - extraordinary works that challenge our notions of what a poem ought to be.

Soto writes with a pure sweetness free of sentimentality that is almost extraordinary in modern American poetry. -- Andrew Hudgins. Soto insists on the possibility of a redemptive power, and he celebrates the heroic, quixotic capacity for survival in human beings and the natural world. -- Publishers Weekly. Soto has it all -- the learned craft, the intrinsic abilities with language, a fascinating autobiography, and the storyteller's ability to manipulate memories into folklore. -- Library Journal.