Best Poets Of 2016

"In Best New Poets, the term 'emerging writer' is defined as someone who has yet to publish a book-length collection of poetry. The goal of Best New Poets is to provide special encouragement and recognition to new poets, the many writing programs they attend, and the magazines that publish their work"--Page ix.

*Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award* *National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist* *Included in The New York Times Best Poetry of 2016* *Named one of The Washington Post's Best Poetry Collections of 2016* * Longlisted for the National Book Award* “Blackacre” is a centuries-old legal fiction—a placeholder name for a hypothetical estate. Treacherously lush or alluringly bleak, these poems reframe their subjects as landscape, as legacy—a bereavement, an intimacy, a racial identity, a pubescence, a culpability, a diagnosis. With a surveyor’s keenest tools, Youn marks the boundaries of the given, what we have been allotted: acreage that has been ruthlessly fenced, previously tenanted, ploughed and harvested, enriched and depleted. In the title sequence, the poet gleans a second crop from the field of Milton’s great sonnet on his blindness: a lyric meditation on her barrenness, on her own desire—her own struggle—to conceive a child. What happens when the transformative imagination comes up against the limits of unalterable fact?

Not a narrative. Not an essay. Not a shopping list. Not a song. Not a diary. Not an etiquette manual. Not a confession. Not a prayer. Not a secret letter sent through the silent Palace hallways before dawn. Making a daybook of oblivion, A Pillow Book leads the reader on a darkly comic tour through the dim-lit valley of fitful sleep. The miscellaneous memoranda, minutiae, dreamscapes, and lists that comprise this book-length poem disclose a prismatic meditation on the price of privilege; the petty grievances of marriage, motherhood, art, and office politics; the indignities of age; and the putative properties of dreams, among other themes, set in the dead of winter in a Midwestern townhouse on the eve of the end of geohistory. Feather-light in its touch, quixotic in its turns, and resolutely deadpan in its delivery, A Pillow Book offers a twenty-first-century response to a thousand-year-old Japanese genre which resists, while slyly absorbing, all attempts to define it.

Featuring “Good Bones”—called “Official Poem of 2016” by the BBC/Public Radio International. Maggie Smith writes out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by watching her own children read the world like a book they've just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot. These are poems that stare down darkness while cultivating and sustaining possibility, poems that have a sense of moral gravitas, personal urgency, and the ability to address a larger world. Maggie Smith's previous books are The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo, 2015), Lamp of the Body (Red Hen, 2005), and three prize-winning chapbooks: Disasterology (Dream Horse, 2016), The List of Dangers (Kent State, 2010), and Nesting Dolls (Pudding House, 2005). Her poem “Good Bones” has gone viral—tweeted and translated across the world, featured on the TV drama Madam Secretary, and called the “Official Poem of 2016” by the BBC/Public Radio International, earning news coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, the Guardian, and beyond. Maggie Smith was named the 2016 Ohio Poet of the Year. “Smith's voice is clear and unmistakable as she unravels the universe, pulls at a loose thread and lets the whole thing tumble around us, sometimes beautiful, sometimes achingly hard. Truthful, tender, and unafraid of the dark....”—Ada Limón “As if lost in the soft, bewitching world of fairy tale, Maggie Smith conceives and brings forth this metaphysical Baedeker, a guidebook for mother and child to lead each other into a hopeful present. Smith's poems affirm the virtues of humanity: compassion, empathy, and the ability to comfort one another when darkness falls. 'There is a light,' she tells us, 'and the light is good.'”—D. A. Powell “Good Bones is an extraordinary book. Maggie Smith demonstrates what happens when an abundance of heart and intelligence meets the hands of a master craftsperson, reminding us again that the world, for a true poet, is blessedly inexhaustible.”—Erin Belieu

Collects poems chosen by editor Edward Hirsch as the best of 2016, featuring poets such as Rick Barot, Emily Fragos, Philip Levine, and Adrienne Su.

Best New African Poets 2016 Anthology has 251 pieces from 131 poets and artists in 7 languages (English, Portuguese, French, Afrikaans, Shona, Yoruba and Kiswahili) from 24 African countries and Diasporas, with South African and Angolan poets dominating the list. We also have a healthy number of poets from Uganda, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Moçambique, Ghana, and Nigeria, as usual. The nationalist sense is the one that most predominates with its pink, blue and gray tints that are expressed in parallel with existentialist perspectives that in turn go hand in hand with love, desire, hankering, joy, sensuality that transports us to epic, lyrical, utopian contexts without being lost in fantasy, they are artistic lines sometimes with traditional and sometimes more innovative touches. However, in contrast and to a lesser extent, almost as if there were resistant and with restraint we also find desolation, pain, negation that can be so sweet or so bitter that it allows the imagination to stop in a lament or end in resignation.