Books in the Poets on Poetry series

Celebrating the voices, current and past, that surface in lyric poetry

"This is the latest book of critical prose from renowned poet and scholar of Jewish literature Norman Finkelstein. Through a rigorous examination of poets such as William Bronk, Helen Adam, and Nathaniel Mackey, the book engages the contemporary poetic fascination with transcendence through the radical delight with language. By opening up a given poem, Finkelstein seeks the gnosis or insight of what it contains so that other readers can understand and appreciate the works even more"--

Jane Miller loves poetry. In these provocative and deeply insightful essays, she unpacks the work of giants like Adrienne Rich, Paul Celan, Marina Tsevetaeya, Osip Mandelstam, and Garcia Lorca alongside painters such as Caravaggio and Paul Klee, as well as ancient Chinese music and techniques of the contemporary poem.

In this collection, Major Jackson reveals and revels in the work of poetry to not only limn and give access to the intellectual width and spiritual depth of poets, but also to amplify the controversies and inner conflicts that define our age: political unrest, climate crises, the fallout from traumas, and the social function of the art itself.

The line between poetry (the delicate, surprising not-quite) and the essay (the emphatic what-about and so-there!) is thin, easily crossed. The essays collected in The Little Death of Self are meditations toward poetry by a poet who finds this mysterious genre the weirdest, most compelling of all human ways to imagine - or fathom - the great world.

Kazim Ali uses a range of subjects - the politics of checkpoints at international borders; difficulties in translation; collaborations between poets and choreographers; and connections between poetry and landscape, or between biotechnology and the human body - to situate the individual human body into a larger global context, with all of its political and social implications.

Collects writing by one of America's most gifted and revered poets, Yusef Komunyakaa. While themes from his earlier prose collection, Blue Notes, run through Condition Red, this volume expresses a greater sense of urgency about the human condition and the role of the artist.

An exploration of poetry as an expression of biology

In these essays, Bruce Bond interrogates the commonly accepted notion that all poetry since modernism tends toward one of two traditions: that of a more architectural sensibility with its resistance to metaphysics, and that of a latter-day Romantic sensibility, which finds its authority in a metaphysics authenticated by the individual imagination.

An impassioned consideration of the place of poetry--and the poet--in an ever-changing world

In this penetrating yet personable collection of critical essays, David Baker explores how a poem works, how a poet thinks, and how the art of poetry has evolved-and is still evolving as a highly diverse, spacious, and inclusive art form.

Documents that chronicle the story of a literary partnership and marriage that did not end with death

Now back in print, two brilliant verse-essays on poets and poetry by an American master

A collection of essays which celebrate the liberatory and utopian possibilities that poetry's autonomy offers.

Examines the subjects of poetry, language, and truth, the conflict between truth and art, and the range of human attitudes to the prospect of truth-speaking. This book also includes a series of comments on and judgements of the poets Coleridge, Clare, Eliot, Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Lowell, Pound, Dylan Thomas, and W C Williams.

Collects unpublished interviews, poems, articles, aphorisms, and writing exercises from William Stafford, who kept a journal for nearly half a century and produced over 20,000 poems - a staggering output by any standard. The Answers Are Inside the Mountains confirms Stafford's enduringly important voice for our uncertain age.

Paul Hoover's wide-ranging subjects include the position of poetry in the electronic age, the notion of doubleness in the work of Harryette Mullen and others, the lyricism of the New York School poets, and the role of reality in American poetry.

From one of America's foremost contemporary poets, a scintillating, surprising collection of essays on everything from poetry and art to the fine art of sausage-making

Essays and interviews on the relationship of color and the literary canon

Appraises the work of significant American poets in engaging and erudite essays by a leading critic and scholar

Gathers essays, interviews, poems, and performance texts by one of America's most significant contemporary poets

A collection of essays that explore poetics, personal identity, feminism, and modern and contemporary literature.

Focusses on some of the renowned poets and artists, such as John Ashbery, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Robert Creeley. This work contains eleven essays, which include: ""Passionate Spectator: On Frank O'Hara's Art Criticism""; ""At the Movies with Weldon Kees and Frank O'Hara""; ""The Poet as Art Critic (On John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara)""; and more.

Essays by a prize-winning poet that explore the intersection of poetry and philosophy

A master of the lyric, Alfred Corn is also adept at working in forms, and has published several books featuring long poetic sequences, including a book-length narrative poem modeled on Dante's ""Divine Comedy"". This book features the poet/critic's personal, epistolary encounter with Flannery O'Connor.

How a poem tells a story, and the importance of narrative as core of a poem's body and key to its soul