Personal Best
Description
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.
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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.
Content
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"