New Poets of the American West is a panoramic (and revealing) view of the West through the eyes of more than 250 poets and 450 poems, including poems in English, Spanish, Navajo, Salish, Assiniboine, and Dakota languages. In these pages you will visit flea markets, military bases, internment camps, reservations, funerals, weddings, rodeos, nursing homes, national parks, backyard barbecues, prisons, forests, meadows, rivers, and mountain tops. In your ¿mind¿s eye,¿ you will meet a simple-minded girl who gets run over by a bull, two mothers watching a bear menacingly nosing toward unsuspecting children, and children who ¿have yet to be toilet trained out of their souls.¿ You will learn to ¿reach into the sacred womb, / grasp a placid hoof / and coax life toward this certain moment.¿ You¿ll teach poetry to third graders, converse with hitchhikers, lament for an incarcerated brother ¿trying to fill the holes in his soul / with Camel cigarettes / and crude tattoos.¿ You will sit at the kitchen table where perhaps the world will end ¿while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.¿ In the short time each of us has in this world, here¿s your chance to experience life widely and to reflect on your experiences deeply.

One hundred fifty poems by seventy-five poets offer an inclusive collage of voices--protest poems of the Chicano farmworkers' movement, campfire cowboy songs, sacred Native American songs, and works by Willa Cather, Langston Hughes, Adrienne Rich, and other canonical figures--from a land where cultural collision is part of the rugged landscape.

In this provocative and thoughtful anthology, many voices join in illuminating the remarkably vast and varied American West. The verse collected here ranges from American Indian tribal poems to old folk songs like “The Streets of Laredo,” from country-western lyrics to the work of such foreign poets as Bertolt Brecht and Zbigniew Herbert. Here is the West in all its rich variety–the harsh life of farms and ranches; man’s destructive invasion into forest and desert solitudes; the bars and bistros of San Francisco and Hollywood; Pacific surf and endless highways; the ghost towns, the poverty, and the legendary world of cowpunchers and gunslingers. From Robert Frost’s “Once by the Pacific” to Charles Bukowski’s “Vegas,” from Fred Koller’s “Lone Star State of Mind” to Thom Gunn’s “San Francisco Streets”–the West is evoked in all its incarnations, both actual and mythic.

Women Writers of the American West, 1833–1927 recovers the names and works of hundreds of women who wrote about the American West during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of them long forgotten and others better known novelists, poets, memoirists, and historians such as Willa Cather and Mary Austin Holley. Nina Baym mined literary and cultural histories, anthologies, scholarly essays, catalogs, advertisements, and online resources to debunk critical assumptions that women did not publish about the West as much as they did about other regions. Elucidating a substantial body of nearly 650 books of all kinds by more than 300 writers, Baym reveals how the authors showed women making lives for themselves in the West, how they represented the diverse region, and how they represented themselves. Baym accounts for a wide range of genres and geographies, affirming that the literature of the West was always more than cowboy tales and dime novels. Nor did the West consist of a single landscape, as women living in the expanses of Texas saw a different world from that seen by women in gold rush California. Although many women writers of the American West accepted domestic agendas crucial to the development of families, farms, and businesses, they also found ways to be forceful agents of change, whether by taking on political positions, deriding male arrogance, or, as their voluminous published works show, speaking out when they were expected to be silent.

A collection of poetry, profiles, and photographs celebrates the lives and work of twelve cowboy poets of the West

An essential anthology of an innovative American poet Edward Dorn was not only one of America’s finest poets but a rare critical intelligence and commentator. He was a student of Charles Olson, who helped him to see the American West as a site for his quest for self-knowledge; at the core of his work is a deep sense of place and the people who occupy it, underpinned by a wry ironic dissent. It was Dorn’s comic-epic masterpiece, Gunslinger, which began appearing in 1968 and had already become an underground classic by the time it was published in its entirety in 1974, that established his reputation in the wider world. This new volume brings together poems from Dorn’s entire career, including previously uncollected work.

Contributors include: Peter Wild, Frank Graziano, John Haines, Richard Shelton, Richard Hugo, Gary Soto, William Matthews, William Stafford, Reg Saner, David Wagoner, and Steven Meyers.