Seth Abramson

Each month, this contemporary poetry review series selects collections published since 2000 to recommend to its readership. These collections are selected from a pool of more than a thousand books of contemporary poetry. Publishers interested in submitting review copies to the series should contact the author of this article. All...

Each month, this contemporary poetry review series selects between five and ten collections published since 2000 to recommend to its readership. These collections are selected from a pool of more than a thousand books of contemporary poetry. Publishers interested in submitting review copies to the series should contact the author...

Each month, this contemporary poetry review series selects between five and ten collections published since 2000 to recommend to its readership. These collections are selected from a pool of more than a thousand contemporary poetry collections. Publishers interested in submitting review copies to the series should contact the author of...

Each month, my contemporary poetry review series at The Huffington Post selects between five and ten collections published since 2000 to recommend to its readership. These collections are selected from a pool of more than a thousand contemporary poetry collections available for review. Publishers interested in submitting review copies to...

1. The Irrationalist, Suzanne Buffam (Canarium Books, 2010). These poems ruminate. They're aphoristic, and the intelligence behind them is robust enough (with room to spare) to command the sort of attention aphorism requires. If the traditional lyric-narrative form of parataxis is dead -- and it is, and it should be...

1. Under Virga, Joe Amato (Chax Press, 2006). This glorious mess is an exhausting but also exhilarating archive of language and metalanguage. If it functions (or purports to function) as a viable linguistic operation, it appears somewhere in this juxtaposition-happy assemblage: stage directions, mailing addresses, quotations, footnotes, cross-outs, untranslated foreign-language...

1. Rae Armantrout: Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2001). Those of us who've long been enamored with Armantrout should do better at letting others in on the secret: This poet is the sort of Master whose poetics can inform, instruct, and inspire an entire generation of writers....

The aim of this ongoing review series is to highlight superlative books of poetry from the last 10 years. Each entry offers an unranked, non-exhaustive list of such collections comprised of brief descriptions of each text and an excerpt. The first and second entries in the series can be found...

This is the second in a series of articles focusing on the very best works of contemporary poetry in the United States. The first entry can be found here.

To wander the narrow aisles of Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, perhaps the nation's most awe-inspiring compilation...

This is the first of a series of articles focusing on the very best works of contemporary poetry in the United States.

Of late there's been a strong sense in the national poetry community, and not entirely without warrant, that those with the largest megaphones for their opinions -- including...

At every baseball stadium in America, there's a prohibition against throwing objects onto the field of play. It's grounds for immediate ejection from the event, a possible ban from the facility, and in some instances criminal prosecution. The basis for the prohibition is the fear of multi-million dollar corporations --...

The twenty-five programs listed below fully fund a sizable percentage of incoming students, yet still receive less attention from applicants than they deserve. They are not -- or not yet -- among the very best creative writing MFA programs in the United States, but applicants looking to balance...

UPDATE (May 22, 2011): William J. Cobb, the Director of the creative writing Master of Fine Arts program at Pennsylvania State University, earlier this week issued the following public statement: "In this our 25th anniversary year, I'm glad to announce that our MFA Program is very much alive and well,...

Applicants to full-residency graduate creative writing programs have more options now than ever before -- there were 152 such programs in the United States and abroad at last count. Ever since novelist Tom Kealey advised MFA applicants, in the first edition of his Creative Writing MFA Handbook (2005),...

In an earlier article, six myths about the creative writing Master of Fine Arts were busted. Here, six more go under the ax (myths in bold, myth-busting in regular face):

1. There are more than 800 MFA programs now in operation.

In fact, there are 198

Disgraced memoirist James Frey, author of the fictional autobiography A Million Little Pieces, is facing renewed scrutiny for a publishing venture which, critics say, enslaves young writers in legally- and morally-unconscionable book contracts. The venture, Full Fathom Five, was recently exposed in New York Magazine by (prospective) disgruntled...

The first creative writing MFA program, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, was founded in 1936, at a time when the national community of literary artists numbered in the low thousands. In the mid-1930s it was not unreasonable for a small cadre of education activists in Iowa City to think...

These twenty-five (actually twenty-seven) programs fully fund 70% or more of students, yet receive less attention from applicants than they deserve:

Boise State University. A small but stellar program in a gorgeous city in the Great Northwest. The faculty is extremely strong in both poetry and fiction and...

If you're an avid follower of either MFA programs or Gawker, you've probably already read novelist and Columbia professor Janette Turner Hospital's now-infamous e-mail to former students at the University of South Carolina. If Gawker's comment-fields are any indication, most of the ire over...

Were the nation's 148 full-residency creative writing MFAs to be ranked on the basis of student funding, only one New York City MFA would crack the top 100, and two would tie for last place. If MFA programs were ranked by selectivity, only one New York City MFA would make...