Description
Title: Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems that Matter Most
Author: BELIEU ERIN/PHILLIPS CARL
Format: PAPERBACK
Publication date: 01/03/2024
Imprint: COPPER CANYON
Price: $40.00
Publishing status: Active
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.
Review:
Praise for Personal Best
\”Including a remarkable and diverse array of contemporary poets, Phillips and Belieu assemble a collection of singular poems, each selected by its poet and accompanied by an explication of how it came to be written, illuminating the choices that make each poem sing. With poems by Danez Smith, Ada Limon, Ocean Vuong, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ilya Kaminsky and many more, it was a welcome gift to reencounter poems I knew in fresh contexts, and it was equally enjoyable to explore poems new to me.\”-Freya Sachs, BookPage, STARRED REVIEW
\”Belieu and Phillips have put a finger to the pulse of American poetry with this anthology; they have demonstrated the importance of encountering poets in real time. Personal Best rejects the trend of venerating poets posthumously, centering the real and sometimes urgent motivations that drive some of the best authors of our generation. There’s something for everyone in this anthology, and I suspect that most readers will encounter at least a handful of poets who are new to them, and what a wonderful way to meet them.\”-The Poetry Question
\”For this lively and engaging anthology, fifty-seven poets, including Kaveh Akbar, Diane Seuss, Solmaz Sharif, and Ocean Vuong, choose one of their own poems and explain in an essay why it represents their ‘personal best.’ Together the poem-essay pairings provide an insightful look at the life of a poem and the personal experiences that shape the writing process.\”-Poets & Writers
\”This anthology endearingly reminds us that a poet’s own favorite poems often aren’t the much shared or anthologized or otherwise best known, and that our own favorites as readers are also often artifacts of time. The poets’ choices, and their rationalee-largely thoughtful, sometimes revelatory-are telling. Buy it as a gift, teach with it: I certainly will.\”-Rebecca Morgan Frank, Lit Hub
\”This anthology from Copper Canyon Press sits in my book stack on the breakfast bar, screaming my name. It marries many of my bookish passions: poetry, prose by poets, and craft essays. Highlighting writers I admire like Kaveh Akbar, Victoria Chang, Tarfia Faizullah, Donika Kelly, Ada Limon, Airea D. Matthews, Jake Skeets, Danez Smith, and Ocean Vuong, I can’t wait to inhale this cover to cover and learn which works poets consider their personal best.\”-Connie Pan, Book Riot
\”Publisher Copper Canyon has been a boldface name in the poetry world for more than 50 years. Think of this like a mixtape (or a playlist, for you younger readers) that will delight the verse-loving person in your life.\”-Michael Schaub, Los Angeles Daily News
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
Contents:
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: \”Goetterdammerung\”
Camille Dungy: \”Natural History\”
Heid Erdrich: \”The Theft Outright\”
Martin Espada: \”Haunt Me\”
Tarfia Faizullah: \”Great Material\”
Jennifer Elise Foerster: \”The Last Kingdom\”
Carolyn Forche: \”The Garden of Shukkei-En\”
Rigoberto Gonzales: \”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 Limon: \”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 Sanchez: \”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\”
Author Biography:
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.
ISBN: 9781556596520
Dimension: 229mm X 152mm