Overview

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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9781556596520

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Reviews

Praise for Erin Belieu These poems continuously examine life, sometimes with reverence, sometimes with wry humor, as the poet offers an intelligent take on being a woman in the 21st century. -Library Journal, starred review In the world of [Belieu's] poems, no one is innocent; everyone is confined to the complexity, absurdity, and, above all, fallibility of their human condition -Publishers Weekly, starred review [Belieu's] gifts-for clarity, consolidation, humor and moments of hard-earned feeling-are old-fashioned ones. She's a comedian of the human spirit, in league with poets from Frank O'Hara through Deborah Garrison and Tony Hoagland. -Dwight Garner, The New York Times [Belieu's] latest collection toggles between lighthearted comedy and deep-seated loss, using paradox as a prerequisite for beauty... For every joke in Come-Hither Honeycomb, there's something tragic on the other side of the scale. -The New Yorker Praise for Carl Phillips I have a candidate for the author of the most interesting contemporary English sentences and it is not primarily a prose writer: the American poet Carl Phillips. -Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker Carl Phillips is a poet of enchantment and persuasion . . . I couldn't mistake these poems for any other poet's work. In a moment obsessed with snappy performances, Phillips's poems are contemplative, rich, and troubled. They are rarely axiomatic or quotable. Often, their power lies in their unfolding. -Los Angeles Review of Books With the incomparably gorgeous, deftly poetic sentences that make up his work, Carl Phillips has been exploring intimacy, sexuality, and interiority for more than a decade. -Literary Hub Almost no one, to my ear, charts the perpetually shifting moods and meanings of the interior psychic landscape as sensitively, or as beautifully, as he does. -The Washington Post

Author Information

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 2007-2020His 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.

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