The anthology Vermont Poets and Their Craft is a deep well of both information and art that offers thought-provoking essays on poetic craft and a unique selection of poetry. Compiled as a follow-up to Sundog Poetry Center's lecture series of the same name, filmed and televised by Vermont Public Television, this collection will not only be an invaluable resource for creative writing classes, but for writers at all stages of development who might enjoy literary company diving deep into various aspects of poetic craft. Included are essays from most of the poets from the original series - Major Jackson, Sydney Lea, David Budbill, Baron Wormser, Neil Shepard, Diana Whitney, David Huddle, and, Pamela Harrison, Mary Jane Dickerson, and Tamra Higgins - as well as seven additional poets vital to Vermont's lyric canon: Partridge Boswell Martha Zweig, Stephen Cramer, Greg Delanty, Chard deNiord, Didi Jackson, and Julia Shipley. These essays on poetic craft offer something for everyone, whether you are an accomplished poet, or a student seeking deeper understanding of poetic craft, or are simply curious about poetry's allure. Topics include poetic plain-style; the interweaving of lyric and narrative elements in a poem; the formal elements of both metered and free verse; the art of concealing and revealing in a poem; the deployment of dramatic and thematic cues through poetic structure; the natural-world representations of desire in poetry; the grounding of a poem through imagery; the convergence of history and poetry; the complexity of poetry residing in its combination of irony and ecstasy; the music inside lyric poetry and the poetry inside music lyrics; the linguistic play, serendipity, and subversion of experimental poetry; and - what else? - the mystery and terror at the heart of Robert Frost's nature poetry. This 250-page anthology by Vermont poets on poetic craft is full of the best writing and best advice on writing you're likely to find anywhere in the English-speaking world (and certainly within Vermont). If there's a particular angle that Vermont poets take when writing about poetic craft, it's probably rooted in their selection of poems by contemporary Vermont poets to illustrate their ideas about craft. So yes, this anthology is partly a local affair, discussing Vermont poems and poetic concepts that resonate for writers here in the Green Mountains, even as it reflects ideas about poetic craft that come down to us from several thousand years ago and several thousand miles away.

With its mystical landscape and fiercely self-reliant citizenry, Vermont has inspired poets from its earliest days. This anthology of contemporary Vermont poets represents a wide range of voices. The poems in this volume claim Vermont as their place of origin, bearing witness to the remarkably rich and ongoing legacy of the state's poetic traditio

Explains the basic elements of poetry and groups poems to encourage an analysis of similarities and differences.

Finalist for the New England Book Award in Poetry and the Vermont Book Award As heard on NPR Morning Edition A New York Public Library Best Book of 2022 A searching, startling new collection of poems from the author of The Möbius Strip Club of Grief and Someone Else’s Wedding Vows Written in four sections with incisive and vivid lyrical language, Bianca Stone’s What Is Otherwise Infinite considers how we find our place in the world through themes of philosophy, religion, environment, myth, and psychology. “I deal only in the hardest pain-revivers, symbols and tongues,” writes Stone. “I want to tell you only / in the intimacy of our discomfort.” Populated by Archangels, limping in paradise; by allergies of the soul; the intimacy and danger of motherhood; psychic wounds; and dirty, dirty chocolate layer cake, What Is Otherwise Infinite deftly examines our inherent and inherited ideas of how to live, and the experience of the Self—which on one hand is so intensely personal, and on the other, universal.

What does it mean to move away from the shadow of one’s mother, parents, or family in order to come into being within this world? As collective memory within the Black diaspora has been ruptured, GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA time travels by creating and recapturing memory from a fractured past to survive in the present and envision a future. In her first full-length collection GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues, Shanta Lee Gander navigates between formal and vernacular styles to introduce the reader to a myriad of subjects such as scientific facts that link butterflies to female sexuality and vulnerability; whispers of classical Greek myth; H.P. Lovecraft’s fantastical creature, Cthulhu; and the traces of African mythmaking and telling. Beneath the intensity, longing, seeking, wondering, and the ‘tell-it-like-it-is’ voice that sometimes tussles with sadness, there is a movement of sass and a will that refuses to say that it has been broken. Gander leaves a door ajar in this ongoing conversation of the Black female body that walks the spaces of the individual within a collective; the tensions between inherited and hidden narratives; and the present within a history and future that is still being imagined.