Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard University.
It is refreshing to find a book that gives equal weight and relish
to avant-garde minimalism, New Formalism, and so many of the
stations in between…The poems Burt selects would alone comprise a
valuable anthology of the American poetry of its time, and [she] is
an entertaining, thought-provoking and eager guide to them, keen to
ask all the questions that occur to [her] in [her] reading, and to
engage with the chicanery of thought it engenders. Each essay is
obviously a product of enjoyment, and encourages us to treat poems
with the same enthusiasm—to embrace difficulty and difference in
exchange for the articulate and involved pleasure that poetry, of
all the arts, can best provide.
*Times Literary Supplement*
[Burt] approaches a stunning variety of verse with the
obsessiveness and knowledge of a scholar and a fan. Burt is an
ideal guide for this trip through contemporary American
poetry…Burt’s close readings are sharp and illuminating…The death
of poetry has been proclaimed time and time again. But the sixty
universes that Burt uncovers in these poems show us how alive
poetry is, and how it needs to be read and appreciated for all its
weirdness and cacophonous music…Whether you dip in and out of this
book over months or read it all in a matter of days, it will help
you pay better attention to the nuances, difficulties, identities,
and music in American poetry…What comes through here is Burt's
sheer, voracious love of contemporary poetry, and it's infectious.
This book is a series of doors that all lead back to the poems
themselves, and it will likely be used in classrooms across
America. At least I hope so.
*Bookforum*
A fabulous guide…Each poem is introduced by an essay sketching out
how it works, why it matters, how it speaks to the wider worlds of
art and culture.
*The Guardian*
The Poem Is You is a collection of knowledgeable, useful and
affectionately committed short essays on sixty recent poems by
sixty American poets…[Burt writes with] unselfconscious erudition,
light touch, even tone.
*Poetry Review*
Throughout, the style of Burt’s writing is as relaxed and inviting
as its content is trenchant and learned. If the sheer capaciousness
of contemporary American poetry is one of its defining features,
Burt’s achievement here is to have been an enviably capacious
critic, responding to the event of each poem in labile and
unpredictable ways.
*Australian Book Review*
Drawing on endlessly deep wells of enthusiasm and acuity, The Poem
Is You offers not so much a sequence of explanations as a series of
invitations: Burt is more intent on describing how to think about a
particular poem than on telling us what to think. Unpredictable yet
unfailingly useful, The Poem Is You is a joyous book.
*James Longenbach, author of The Virtues of Poetry*
This is a splendid book. Many critics and poets have published
essays or reviews of contemporary poetry, but Burt is doing
something else here. She lavishes the poems with extraordinarily
nimble, alert, luminous attention. It’s hard to think of a better
introduction to contemporary American poetry.
*Jahan Ramazani, author of Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer,
Song, and the Dialogue of Genres*
Poet and critic Burt’s ambitious anthology of recent poems by
American authors, from 1981 to 2015, creates a coherent body of
work out of the vast landscape of recent American poetry. Burt’s 60
selections are eclectic, mingling instantly recognizable names
(John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich) with newer talents (Lucia Perillo,
Claudia Rankine.)…Burt’s many ways of looking at a poem will
inspire new students and accomplished poets, especially as many of
[her] meditations circle the question of what poetry does, or
should do: making readers pay attention, ask questions, and
experience new things. Burt’s formidable breadth of knowledge about
the practice of poetry, from Virgil up to 2015, allows [her] to
make nimble connections among authors and establish an ars poetica
for current American lyric poetry, an impressive feat given the
diverse selection just within this book.
*Publishers Weekly*
[Burt’s] critique is not only accessible to most all readers, but
it also shows [her] depth of knowledge and love of American poetry.
[Her] essays are very good at finding the meaning of the work while
placing each poem in context within the landscape of poetry…This
book is for anyone interested in the state of American poetry
today.
*Library Journal*
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