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?
