A text for practiced poets, this book offers a springboard beyond the basics into more daring poetic traditions, experimentation and methods. It lays out the myriad conversations influencing contemporary poetics, paying attention to its roots in historical and theoretical thinking. With a focus on innovation and breaking established boundaries, Advanced Poetry introduces you to the poetics shaping the contemporary literary moment, first guiding you through the contexts and principles of these forms using a range of practical examples, before prompting you to pick up the pen yourself. Spanning decades and continents, and covering the rich field of poets writing today, this book shows how to read, explicate, and write poetry and includes discussion of: - received traditions and innovative forms - confessional and epistolary poetry - aesthetic experimentation with voice - methods and theories developed by early Surrealists -deep image and the poetics of spells - ecopoetics & poetry of place - writing the body based on queer theory and disability studies - docupoetics and lyric research - racial imaginaries and poetics of liberation - digital poetics - writing in community with other poets and collaborative, interdisciplinary projects - revision processes and putting together a collection or chapbook -advice on writing artist statements and other professional materials Bringing together a comprehensive craft guide with a carefully collated anthology showcasing the (existing) limits of what is possible in poetry, this text explores how poetry since the 20th century has embraced traditional structures, borrowed from other disciplines, and invented wildly new forms. With close readings, writing prompts, excerpts of interviews from key figures in the field and a supplementary companion website, this is the definitive text for any poet looking to continue their poetic journey.

"What a strange and intense book this is! David Blair has a wild, restless imagination and he uses language like saw, a hammer, a velvet whip. He can write incredibly tender (and original) love poems and enfilading satirical poems, as well as many of the many other "kinds" of poems between those poles, and they all seem entirely at home, indeed, need to be in this book together. His music, his diction, his refusal to use (ever!) cliches, his syntax all drive his poems and their hearts forward. That is where his poems go: forward. He will be in the company of the best poets of his generation." --Thomas Lux "Nothing can remain horizontal or vertical for long" might as well be David Blair's mini ars poetica. A commitment to the pleasures and terrors of change, you might say. I have been reading Blair's poems for about ten years now--struck always by his unique pitch and tone, the tensile muscularity of his syntax and vibrational accents. His diction is totally unboxed. He reminds me a bit of August Kleinzahler or John Yau in this--a karaoke of urban hullabaloo sung slightly off the beat, all for the sake of swing....David Blair's acceptance of the world is signaled by his stylishness, provoked by the people and things he encounters. His brain knows that it's living in an animal body. And it moves among all these other minds and bodies in motion. Changed by the smallest of changes. Unbalanced but at ease. This poet's energy reminds me of Edwin Denby's comments about De Kooning's paintings from the 1930s: "He wanted everything in the picture out of equilibrium except spontaneously all of it...a miraculous force and weight of presence moving from all over the canvas at once." These poems wantthat, too. --David Rivard, /Boston Review/ "David Blair's work is both public and discreet, somewhere between black box theatre and a blind date with an utterly beguiling stranger. His poems are dinner parties, intimate and sumptuous, arranged with great care and yet full of unforeseen turns: the pope gives way to 'the first red coils of the peonies' and a the hair of a lost aviator becomes 'brown, fibrous light.' How refreshingly unlike contemporary poetry this book is; a pleasure. --D. A. Powell

The "World" in Robert Lee Brewer's Solving the World's Problems is a slippery world ... where chaos always hovers near, where we are (and should be) "splashing around in dark puddles." And one feels a bit dizzy reading these poems because (while always clear, always full of meaning) they come at reality slantwise so that nothing is quite the same and the reader comes away with a new way of looking at the ordinary objects and events of life. The poems are brim-full of surprises and delights, twists in the language, double-meanings of words, leaps of thought and imagination, interesting line-breaks. There are love and relationship poems, dream poems, poems of life in the modern world. And always the sense (as he writes) of "pulling the world closer to me/leaves falling to the ground/ birds flying south." I read these once, twice with great enjoyment. I will go back to them often. -Patricia Fargnoli, former Poet Laureate of New Hampshire and author of Then, Something

Naming the Unnameable: An Approach to Poetry for the New Generation assembles a wide range of poetry from contemporary poets, along with history, advice, and guidance on the craft of poetry. Informed by a consideration to the psychology of invention, Michelle Bonczek Evory¿s writing philosophy emphasizes both spontaneity and discipline, teaching students how to capture the chaos in our memories, imagination, and bodies with language, and discovering ways to mold them into their own cosmos, sculpt them like clay on a page. Exercises aim to make writing a form of play in its early stages that gives way to more enriching insights through revision, embracing the writing of poetry as both a love of language and a tool that enables us to explore ourselves and understand the world. Naming the Unnameable promotes an understanding of poetry as a living art and provides ways for students to involve themselves in the growing contemporary poetry community that thrives in America today.