Poetry in America is flourishing in this new millennium and asking serious questions of itself: Is writing marked by gender and if so, how? What does it mean to be experimental? How can lyric forms be authentic? This volume builds on the energetic tensions inherent in these questions, focusing on ten major American women poets whose collective work shows an incredible range of poetic practice. Each section of the book is devoted to a single poet and contains new poems; a brief "statement of poetics" by the poet herself in which she explores the forces — personal, aesthetic, political — informing her creative work; a critical essay on the poet's work; a biographical statement; and a bibliography listing works by and about the poet. Underscoring the dynamic give and take between poets and the culture at large, this anthology is indispensable for anyone interested in poetry, gender and the creative process. CONTRIBUTORS: Rae Armantrout, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lucie Brock Broido, Jorie Graham, Barbara Guest, Lyn Hejinian, Brenda Hillman, Susan Howe, Ann Lauterbach, Harryette Mullen.

North American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language is an important new addition to the American Poets in the 21st Century series. Like the earlier anthologies, this volume includes generous selections of poetry by some of the best poets of our time as well as illuminating poetics statements and incisive essays on their work. Among the insightful pieces included in this volume are essays by Catherine Cucinella on Marilyn Chin, Meg Tyler on Fanny Howe, Elline Lipkin on Alice Notley, Kamran Javadizadeh on Claudia Rankine, and many more. A companion web site will present audio of each poet's work. Calling, Natasha Trethewey Mexico 1969 Why not make a fiction of the mind's fictions? I want to say it begins like this: the trip a pilgrimage, my mother kneeling at the altar of the Black Virgin, enthralled—light streaming in a window, the sun at her back, holy water in a bowl she must have touched. What's left is palimpsest—one memory bleeding into another, overwriting it. How else to explain what remains? The sound of water in a basin I know is white, the sun behind her, light streaming in, her face— as if she were already dead—blurred as it will become. I want to imagine her beforethe altar, rising to meet us, my father lifting me toward her outstretched arms. What else to make of the mind's slick confabulations? What comes back is the sun's dazzle on a pool's surface, light filtered through water closing over my head, my mother—her body between me and the high sun, a corona of light around her face. Why not call it a vision? What I know is this: I was drowning and saw a dark Madonna; someone pulled me through the water's bright ceiling and I rose, initiate, from one life into another.

This publication marks the first time in a hundred years that a wide range of nineteenth-century American women's poetry has been accessible to the general public in a single volume. Included are the humorous parodies of Phoebe Cary and Mary Weston Fordham and the stirring abolitionist poems of Lydia Sigourney, Frances Harper, Maria Lowell, and Rose Terry Cooke. Included, too, are haunting reflections on madness, drug use, and suicide of women whose lives, as Cheryl Walker explains, were often as melodramatic as the poems they composed and published. In addition to works by more than two dozen poets, the anthology includes ample headnotes about each author's life and a brief critical evaluation of her work. Walker's introduction to the volume provides valuable contextual material to help readers understand the cultural background, economic necessities, literary conventions, and personal dynamics that governed women's poetic production in the nineteenth century.

“A fine and selective anthology that’s also a critical introduction to some of the most provocative, and some of the most original, poetry out there.” —Stephanie Burt, author of Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems The American Poets in the 21st Century series continues with another anthology focused on female poets. Like the earlier books, this volume includes generous selections of poetry by some of the best poets of our time as well as illuminating poetics statements and incisive essays on their work. This unique organization makes these books invaluable teaching tools. Broadening the lens through which we look at contemporary poetry, this new volume extends its geographical net by including Caribbean and Canadian poets. Representing three generations of women writers, among the insightful pieces included in this volume are essays by Karla Kelsey on Mary Jo Bang’s modes of artifice, Christine Hume on Carla Harryman’s kinds of listening, Dawn Lundy Martin on M. NourbeSe Phillip (for whom “english / is a foreign anguish”), and Sina Queyras on Lisa Robertson’s confoundingly beautiful surfaces. In addition, a companion website presents audio of each poet’s work.

A monument to the literary genius of women throughout the ages, A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now is an invaluable collection. Here in one volume are the works of three hundred poets from six different continents and four millennia. This revised edition includes a newly expanded section of American poets from the colonial era to the present. "[A] splendid collection of verse by women" (TIME) throughout the ages and around the world; now revised and expanded, with 38 American poets.

North American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language is an important new addition to the American Poets in the 21st Century series. Like the earlier anthologies, this volume includes generous selections of poetry by some of the best poets of our time as well as illuminating poetics statements and incisive essays on their work. Among the insightful pieces included in this volume are essays by Catherine Cucinella on Marilyn Chin, Meg Tyler on Fanny Howe, Elline Lipkin on Alice Notley, Kamran Javadizadeh on Claudia Rankine, and many more. A companion web site will present audio of each poet's work. Calling, Natasha Trethewey Mexico 1969 Why not make a fiction of the mind's fictions? I want to say it begins like this: the trip a pilgrimage, my mother kneeling at the altar of the Black Virgin, enthralled—light streaming in a window, the sun at her back, holy water in a bowl she must have touched. What's left is palimpsest—one memory bleeding into another, overwriting it. How else to explain what remains? The sound of water in a basin I know is white, the sun behind her, light streaming in, her face— as if she were already dead—blurred as it will become. I want to imagine her beforethe altar, rising to meet us, my father lifting me toward her outstretched arms. What else to make of the mind's slick confabulations? What comes back is the sun's dazzle on a pool's surface, light filtered through water closing over my head, my mother—her body between me and the high sun, a corona of light around her face. Why not call it a vision? What I know is this: I was drowning and saw a dark Madonna; someone pulled me through the water's bright ceiling and I rose, initiate, from one life into another.

Presents over two hundred poems written by American women poets, drawn from a period that ranges from the colonial era through the twentieth century.