The New American Poetry of Engagement: A 21st Century Anthology
"Highly recommended." --Choice"This superb anthology of "engaged" poems, framed by the editors' seminal introduction, will help define the age. Challenging the easy opposition of political and personal, the collection includes all sorts of astounding, unsettling poems by poets ranging from Rae Armantrout to Frank Bidart, Galway Kinnell, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Claudia Rankine. This is the Hour of Lead, but the poems shimmer." --Steven Gould Axelrod, University of California, Riverside"Ann Keniston and Jeffrey Gray have provided us with what may be the definitive representation of the 21st century's troubled first decade. This brilliant anthology insists on the importance of public poetry...a tradition revived after 9/11 and reinforced by subsequent economic, political and natural disasters. From differing aesthetic positions, the poets collected in The New American Poetry of Engagement witness the unimaginable, say the unspeakable." --Michael Davidson, University of California, San Diego