Personal Best

Auteur

About the Editors Erin Belieu is the author of five poetry collections, all from Copper Canyon Press, including her most recent, Come-Hither Honeycomb. Belieu literary activism earned her the AWP’s George Garrett Prize for her service to the national writing community, and she co-founded VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and Writers Resist. Belieu teaches in the University of Houston MFA/Ph.D. Creative Writing Program and for Lesley University’s low residency MFA program in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Carl Phillips is a seasoned poet, author, and translator who has published three prose books and sixteen poetry collections, most recently Then the War: New And Selected Poems 2007-2020. His honors include the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry (2023), a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis with a focus on contemporary poetry, classical philology, and translation.

Texte du rabat

Home to fifty-eight author-selected poems and accompanying essays, Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems That Matter Most is a far-reaching, essential touchstone for the art of poetry in the United States today.

Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems That Matter Most is home to fifty-eight author-selected poems and accompanying essays that explain how and why each poet chose a poem as their “personal best.” The anthology offers a provocative and surprising range of responses in which readers will find poetic context for the life of a poem and revelatory insight into the unique, personal experiences that shape the writing process itself. Including works from a wide variety of voices both new and well-established, Personal Best is a far-reaching, essential touchstone for the art of poetry in the United States today. The anthology gives readers—both long-time fans of poetry and those just discovering its possibilities—an intimate view of the heart and spirit that make poetry one of our most quintessentially human forms of expression. 

Contenu

Samuel Ace: “I Met a Man”

Kaveh Akbar: “Reading Farrokhzad in a Pandemic”

Rick Barot:			“The Names”

Oliver Baez Bendorf:		“Untitled [Who cut me from/growing into a buck?]”

Reginald Dwayne Betts:	from “House of Unending”

Mark Bibbins:			“At the End of the Endless Decade”

Jericho Brown:			“Pause”

Molly McCully Brown:	“God is Your Shoulder”

Victoria Chang:		“The Clock”

jos charles:			from “Feeld”

John Lee Clark:		“Line of Descent”

Martha Collins:		“White Paper 6”

CAConrad: “9 Shard”

Eduardo C. Corral:		“Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome”

Laura Da’:			“River City”

Oscar de la Paz:		“The Surgical Theater as Spirit Cabinet”

Mark Doty:			“No”

Rita Dove:			“Götterdämmerung”

Camille Dungy:		“Natural History”

Heid Erdrich:			“The Theft Outright”

Martín Espada:			“Haunt Me”

Tarfia Faizullah:		“Great Material”

Jennifer Elise Foerster:		“The Last Kingdom”

Carolyn Forché:		“The Garden of Shukkei-En”

Rigoberto Gonzáles: “Anaberto Skypes with His Mother”

Jorie Graham:			“Why”

Paul Guest:			“User’s Guide to Physical Debilitation”

Kimiko Hahn:			“The Unbearable Heart”

francine j. harris:		“Katherine with the lazy eye, short, and not a good poet.”

Brenda Hillman:		“At the Solstice, a Yellow Fragment”

Tyehimba Jess:			“Blood of my blood (walk away)”

Ilya Kaminsky:			“Marina Tsvetaeva”

Donika Kelly:			“Brood”

Yusef Komunyakaa:		“Crack”

Dorianne Laux:		“Arizona”

Dana Levin:			“Working Methods”

Ada Limón:			“Adaptation”

Cate Marvin:			“My First Husband Was My Last”

Adrian Matejka:		“On the B Side”

Airea D. Matthews:		“Sexton Texts Tituba from a Bird Conservatory”

Eileen Myles:			“My Boy’s Red Hat”

Craig Santos Perez:		“The Pacific Written Tradition”

Robert Pinsky:			“The Robots”

D. A. Powell: “chronic”

Roger Reeves:			“Something about John Coltrane”

Jason Reynolds:		“April 17, 1942 Jackie Robinson Gets His First Major League Hit and We Still Us”

Erika Sánchez:			“Saudade”

Diane Seuss:			“Still-Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl”

Solmaz Sharif:			“The Master’s House”

Cedar Sigo:			“A Handbook of Poetic Forms”

Jake Skeets:			“Maar”

Danez Smith:			“waiting on you to die so i can be myself”

Patricia Smith:			“Sweet Daddy”

Arthur Sze:			“Sleepers”

Mary Szybist:			“The Lushness of It”

Ocean Vuong:			“Not Even”

The Cyborg Jillian Weise:	“All the Littles in Exodus”

Monica Youn:			“Greenacre”