The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries

Book excerpt: This landmark collection features emerging poets who combine a commitment to innovation and experimentation with a love for the lyric tradition, whose poetry transcends mainstream and avantgarde practice to create new and exciting poetic territories. These new American poetries for the twenty-first century and beyond reach back toward the Modernists and even earlier lyric poetries (such as those of Wyatt, Donne, Keats, and Dickinson) and, simultaneously, reach forward to poetic possibilities not yet realized or even imagined. Most of the poets included here have won publication prizes, awards, and fellowships, and some have had their work anthologized. Others are at earlier stages of recognition but have published in major journals. All are writing highly accomplished work that will soon find a wider audience. One distinguishing feature of this collection is the inclusion of substantial artistic statements from each contributor, in which the poets discuss their works, their influences, their aims, and their poetics. These statements are invaluable in giving readers a point of entry to the poems and can contribute to the development of a conversation among American poets that tran