The Best American Poetry 1996

by Adrienne Rich (Editor), David Lehman (Editor)

Overview

From Simon & Schuster, in its ninth year, The Best American Poetry 1996 is universally acclaimed as the best anthology in the field.

The compilation includes a diverse abundance of poems published in 1995 in more than 40 publications ranging from The New Yorker to The Paris Review to Bamboo Ridge.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780684814513
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	09/16/1996
Series:	Best American Poetry Series
Edition description:	Original
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

David Lehman, the series editor of The Best American Poetry, edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His books of poetry include The Morning Line, When a Woman Loves a Man, and The Daily Mirror. The most recent of his many nonfiction books is The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir. He lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York.

Editorial Reviews

Rich has amassed a far-flung group to represent her view of America. These poets were born in Jamaica, China, Mexico, South Africa, Canada, Hawaii and the mainland. There are professors and prisoners, a medical student and a jazz critic. Rich embraces both the bilingual and the long poem, but what is truly startling is how little these poets say of joy and how much of suffering. It is a heavy read. Alicia Ostriker writes of the Holocaust, Wang Ping of the deaths of Chinese stowaways, Gary Soto of the destitute. There are three poets born after 1975, testing human experience and response: Deborah Stein, Quentin Rowan and Natasha Le Bel ("my born body new and/ gravid with musical sensuality"). And four poets who passed away last year haunt the anthology with meditations on death: William Dickey, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill and Jean Starr ("I have felt each living link begin to wither"). David Lehman is the series editor. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

As those familiar with Rich's politics and persuasions would expect, her personal selection of outstanding poems published in 1995 offers the widest multicultural gathering of voicesfrom Wanda Coleman to Martin Espada to Stanley Kunitzyet represented in this annual series. It's an anthology of aching, straightforward narratives that explore the effects of victimization and injustice on the American psyche. Since much of this work springs from the need to witness and attest, experimental poetics take a back seat to direct, dignified expression, and the tone is more often one of anger and resignation ("We have done away with all noise, but the agony of respiration"David Shapiro) than of reverie. Rich does not exclude the famous (Atwood, Merrill, Merwin) in her quest for diversity, but as this series proves time and again, some of the most interesting poetry comes from the yet-to-be-known. Poets to watch for in the years to come: Wang Ping, C.S. Giscombe, and Beth Ann Fennelly. For all collections.Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.

Library Journal