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Personal Best

Makers on Their Poems that Matter Most

Erin Belieu Carl Phillips

$39.99

Paperback

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English
Copper Canyon Press,U.S.
01 March 2024
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.
Edited by:   ,
Imprint:   Copper Canyon Press,U.S.
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 229mm,  Width: 152mm, 
ISBN:   9781556596520
ISBN 10:   1556596529
Pages:   282
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

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 2007-2020His 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.

Reviews for Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems that Matter Most

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


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