Poetry Collections

This month, the series focuses on just two collections: works of such extraordinary merit that they require a longer-than-usual treatment: Peter Gizzi's Threshold Songs and Dean Young's Bender: New and Selected Poems.

If there is something singularly grandiose, didactic, and even preposterous about A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon it must forgiven in light of the fact that its author believes all he writes

There is an inimitable deftness of language in Jericho Brown's work; the level of torque and tension in these lines is enough to snap the neck of even the most jaded reader of contemporary poetry.

Brigitte Byrd's cerebral prose poems are couched in an air of hyper-rationality that belies their visceral energy.

Equal parts allegorical, rhetorical, and anecdotal, Yes, Master is -- the cover art compels a sports metaphor -- not a touchdown. It's not a touchdown because it's far more than that.

Under Virga, Joe Amato (Chax Press, 2006). This glorious mess is an exhausting but also exhilarating archive of language and metalanguage.

Those of us who've long been enamored with Rae 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.

These are simply books which achieve excellence in some manner or another, and which consequently (in the view of this author) deserve a wider audience.

The robust state of poetry in America is evidenced by this non-exhaustive, list of superlative books, all of which are must-reads for those looking to push back against the gloom-and-doom of poetry's ambient naysayers.