Publication Date: November 22, 2008 | Series: Best New Poets
The only publication of its kind, this annual anthology is made up exclusively of work by writers who have not yet published a full-length book. The poems included in this eclectic sampling represent the best from the many that have been nominated by the country’s top literary magazines and writing programs, as well as some two thousand additional poems submitted through an open online competition. The work of the fifty writers represented here provides the best perspective available on the continuing vitality of poetry as it’s being practiced today.
Distributed for the Samovar Press in cooperation with Meridian: The Semi-Annual from the University of Virginia
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BEST NEW POETS 2008 and THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2008 arrived here the same day. I read the latter every year, but surprisingly, the work in BEST NEW POETS 2008 seems superior. Spent a week in pleasure opening this book at random. Too many outstandingly good self-assured poems to name but I laughed out loud at Steve Kistulentz (whose poem's title cannot be reproduced here) and got good chills from Lisa McCullough's "The Boar Roast", a stunning narrative achievement and especially remarkable for a poet prior to her first collection. This book bodes well for American poetry. Thank you Mark Strand, editor, and Jeb Livingood series editor. (check out his bestnewpoets. org) Haven't liked a collection this much from the get-go since Donald Hall's CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY forty years ago. Earlier titles in the series -- 2005, 2006 and 2007 -- are still available and I for one am ordering all three.
I edit a small poetry journal, so I read a lot of new work. I found this book to be a great sampling of the best that is currently being written/published. To be eligible, a poet could not have published a full-length book. Poems were selected by taking nominations from journals and writing programs, and from poets who entered their own work. These poems were then culled to find the stongest fifty poems. I was delighted to see that many submitted by the poets themselves were selected. My particular favorite (nominated by University of Houston)is "Adorable Siren, Do You Love the Damned?" by Anna Journey. Fantastic.
This may be the best dollar I ever spent (tho' I suppose if you factor in the airfare it's not so hot). 'New' means unpublished in book form (chapbooks are OK), one poem per person, so as Livingood says they have to be pretty accessible, and two thirds of the way in I can report a 50% success rate - staggeringly high for a poetry book; that's 50% that go 'ding!' and hardly any that fail to connect *at all*. It would be invidious to mention favourites but the Sleepy's saga of Charlotte (Savidge), Jack, Scott and the mattress showroom is pretty affecting. As for the cool, appraising, come-hither-me-not chick on the cover, she may not be an 'emerging writer', but anything to keep poetry sexy!
