Poems and Poets

This spirited anthology of contemporary American poetry focuses on the new poem-the hybrid-a synthesis of traditional and experimental styles.

First published by the legendary Something Else Press in 1967, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry was the first American anthology on the international movement of Concrete poetry. The work of the 77 writers collected in this anthology varies greatly in its aims and forms, but all can be said to emphasize the visual dimension of language, manipulating individual letters and minimal semantic units to produce poems that are for contemplating as much as for reading. Emmett Williams, the book's editor, added explanatory commentary for the poems and biographies of their authors, making this volume--long out of print--the definitive anthology of this movement, which has so influenced artists and writers of subsequent generations.

Czeslaw Milosz's A Book of Luminous Things--his personal selection of poems from the past and present--is a testament to the stunning varieties of human experience, offered up so that we may see the myriad ways that experience can be shared in words and images.

Hip-Hop is the largest youth culture in the history of the planet rock. This is the first poetry anthology by and for the Hip-Hop generation. The BreakBeat Poets features 78 poets, born somewhere between 1961-1999, All-City and Coast-to-Coast, who are creating the next and now movement(s) in American letters.

In this remarkable anthology, introduced and edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris, poetic visions from the twentieth century will be reinforced and in many ways revised. Here, alongside renowned masters, are internationally celebrated poets who have rarely, if ever, been translated into English.

Poetry has been at the heart of Farrar, Straus and Giroux's identity ever since Robert Giroux joined the fledgling company in the mid-1950s, soon bringing T. S. Eliot, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop onto the list. These extraordinary poets and their successors have been essential in helping define FSG as a publishing house with a unique place in American letters. The FSG Poetry Anthology includes work by almost all of the more than one hundred twenty-five poets whom FSG has published in its seventy-five-year history.

For nearly five centuries, the rich tapestry of Latino poetry has been woven from a wealth of languages and cultures—a “tremendous continental mixturao,” in the words of the poet Tato Laviera. Now, in an unprecedented anthology edited by the poet and critic Rigoberto González, Library of America brings together more than 180 poets whose poems bear witness to the beauty and power of this vital and expanding tradition.

Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry. This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project--including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among others--to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands.

In 2014, Christopher Soto and Lambda Literary Foundation founded the online journal Nepantla, with the mission to nurture, celebrate, and preserve diversity within the queer poetry community, including contributions as diverse in style and form, as the experiences of QPOC in the United States. Now, Nepantla will appear for the first time in print as a survey of poetry by queer poets of color throughout U.S. history.

Poetry's Geographies features some of the most prominent poet-translators from both sides of the Atlantic and radically foregrounds the role of translators as bridge-builders and activists. Revealing the structures through which poetry moves and circulates, and with essays discussing the poetics and politics of translation, this anthology shapes new understandings of contemporary poetry's transnational commitments. Rather than underscoring existing national canons, the anthology forms unruly geographical lines of connection.

Bringing together foundational postmodern poets like Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, and Allen Ginsberg with new voices like Christian Bok, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Katie Degentesh, this edition of Postmodern American Poetry is the essential collection for a new generation of readers.

This anthology amplifies and centers LGBTQIA+ voices and perspectives in a collection of contemporary nature poetry. Showcasing over two hundred queer writers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, Queer Nature offers a new context for and expands upon the canon of nature poetry while also offering new lenses through which to view queerness and the natural world.

Easily adaptable as both an anthology and an insightful guide to reading and understanding Romantic Poetry, this text discusses the important elements in the works from poets such as Smith, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Barbauld, Byron, Shelley, Hemans, Keats and Landon.

In this comprehensive and vibrant poetry anthology, bestselling author and poet Kwame Alexander curates a collection of contemporary anthems at turns tender and piercing and deeply inspiring throughout. Featuring work from well-loved poets such as Rita Dove, Jericho Brown, Warsan Shire, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, and Nikki Giovanni, This Is the Honey is a rich and abundant offering of language from the poets giving voice to generations of resilient joy, "each incantation," as Mahogany L. Browne puts it in her titular poem, is "a jubilee of a people dreaming wildly."