It's a nervy thing for an anthology to label itself Best New Poets, but once again the collection lives up to its name. It's a rich and readable selection, reflecting no party-line aesthetic, and attesting to the formidable promise of the emerging generation. --David Wojahn.

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

An anthology of poetry selected as the best published in magazines and periodicals in 2007 by editor Charles Wright, featuring seventy-five poems by Carolyn Forche, Jorie Graham, Louise Gluck, Alex Lemon, and others.

Poetry. African American Studies. LGBT Studies. PLEASE explores the points in our lives at which love and violence intersect. Drunk on its own rhythms and full of imaginative and often frightening imagery, PLEASE is the album playing in the background of the history and culture that surround African American/male identity and sexuality. Just as radio favorites like Marvin Gaye, Donny Hathaway, and Pink Floyd characterize loss, loneliness, addiction, and denial with their voices, these poems' chorus of speakers transform moments of intimacy and humor into spontaneous music. In PLEASE, Jericho Brown sings the influence soul culture has on American life with the accuracy of the blues.

2009 Caldecott Honor Book An ALA Notable Book A New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book A Charlotte Zolotow Honor Book NCTE Notable Children’s Book When he wrote poems, he felt as free as the Passaic River as it rushed to the falls. Willie’s notebooks filled up, one after another. Willie’s words gave him freedom and peace, but he also knew he needed to earn a living. So he went off to medical school and became a doctor -- one of the busiest men in town! Yet he never stopped writing poetry. In this picture book biography of William Carlos Williams, Jen Bryant’s engaging prose and Melissa Sweet’s stunning mixed-media illustrations celebrate the amazing man who found a way to earn a living and to honor his calling to be a poet.

This essential handbook, revised and updated for 2010, provides everything you need to know about deciding where and how to apply to the best graduate creative writing programs for you. -The top programs in the United States. -How to decide where to apply. -Advice on preparing your application. -A look at PhD programs in writing. -Tips on becoming a teaching assistant. -How to get the most out of your MFA experience. A collection of articles edited by the staff of Poets & Writers Magazine, this handy resource includes straightforward advice from professionals in the literary field, additional resources to help you choose the best programs to apply to, and an application tracker to keep you organized throughout the process.

“Brenda Shaughnessy’s poems bristle with imperatives: ‘confuse me, spoon-feed me, stop the madness, decide.’ There are more direct orders in her first few pages than in six weeks of boot camp...Only Shaughnessy’s kidding. Or she is and she isn’t. If you just want to boss people around, you’re a control freak, but if you can joke about it, then your bossiness is leavened by a yeast that’s all too infrequent in contemporary poetry, that of humor.”—New York Times “Shaughnessy’s voice is smart, sexy, self-aware, hip . . . consistently wry, and ever savvy.”—Harvard Review “Brenda Shaughnessy . . . writes like the love-child of Mina Loy and Frank O’Hara.”—Exquisite Corpse "In its worried acceptance of contradiction, its absolute refusal of sentimentality and its acute awareness of time's 'scarce infinity,' this is a brilliant, beautiful and essential continuation of the metaphysical verse tradition." —Publishers Weekly, starred review “Human Dark with Sugar is both wonderfully inventive (studded with the strangenesses of ‘snownovas’ and ‘flukeprints’) and emotionally precise. Her ‘I’ is madly multidexterous—urgent, comic, mischievous—and the result is a new topography of the debates between heart and head.”—Matthea Harvey, a judge for the Laughlin Award "Seriously playful, sexy, sharp-edged, and absolutely commanding throughout....Here you'll meet an 'I' boldly ready to take on the world and just itching to give 'You' some smart directives. So listen up."—Library Journal In her second book, winner of the prestigious James Laughlin Award, Brenda Shaughnessy taps into themes that have inspired era after era of poets. Love. Sex. Pain. The heavens. The loss of time. The weird miracle of perception. Part confessional, part New York School, and part just plain lover of the English language, Shaughnessy distills the big questions into sharp rhythms and alluring lyrics. “You’re a tool, moon. / Now, noon. There’s a hero.” Master of diverse dictions, she dwells here on quirky words, mouthfuls of consonance and assonance—anodyne, astrolabe, alizarin—then catches her readers up short with a string of powerful monosyllables. “I’ll take / a year of that. Just give it back to me.” In addition to its verbal play, Human Dark With Sugar demonstrates the poet’s ease in a variety of genres, from “Three Sorries” (in which the speaker concludes, “I’m not sorry. Not sorry at all”), to a sequence of prose poems on a lover’s body, to the discussion of a disturbing dream. In this caffeine jolt of a book, Shaughnessy confirms her status as a poet of intoxicating lines, pointed, poignant comments on love, and compelling abstract images —not the least of which is human dark with sugar. Brenda Shaughnessy was raised in California and is an MFA graduate of Columbia University. She is the poetry editor for Tin House and has taught at several colleges, including Eugene Lang College and Princeton University. She lives in Brooklyn.

New European Poets presents the works of poets from across Europe. In compiling this landmark anthology, Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer enlisted twenty-four regional editors to select 270 poets whose writing was first published after 1970. These poets represent every country in Europe, and many of them are published here for the first time in English and in the United States. The resulting anthology collects some of the very best work of a new generation of poets who have come of age since Paul Celan, Anna Akhmatova, Federico García Lorca, Eugenio Montale, and Czeslaw Milosz.

"When Last on the Mountain is an open look at the many and astonishing ways our bodies bear both curses and blessing and is a testament to our abiding need to address in language and image the body's sure and swift betrayals. From a vantage point of life after fifty, with grace and humor these writers peer soberly at the future while maintaining their gaze on the past."—Gina Ochsner, author of The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight "A fun and varied read. Insightful, witty, and sometimes heartbreaking selections, but all with an underlying fire for life."—Will Weaver, author of Sweet Land: New & Selected Stories "Who better to bear witness to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune than writers over 50? The voices of experience collected by Lettmann and Roan are generous in their honest specificity. Prospective readers can be assured of a good and meaningful time with these stories, essays and poems."—Sam Hodges, reporter for The Dallas Morning News and author of B-Four "When Last on the Mountain is a book full of treasures. From these writers comes work of substance, surprise, and death-defying candor. To read these pieces is to be inside an art that sifts through comedy, irony, and hard facts to offer the intensely interesting (yes) exhilarations of the long view."—Joan Silber, author of Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories and The Size of the World "One day I will write my last downhill run, not on snow, but on paper. Not today. No. I dance, stop, dance, stop, dance, dance, dance down the mountain."—Kaye Bache-Snyder What sets these writers apart? Until we reach fifty, how we live and write is colored by our futures: those we expect to have and those we imagine. The perspective of the over-fifty writer takes on the hues of both past and future, tinted by memories of first loves, stained by memories of war and loss, and made more poignant by the knowledge that this spring's blooms or this morning's cup of coffee with a beloved husband may be the last and must be savored fully. These essays, stories, and poems were chosen from more than two thousand submissions of previously unpublished work. Some of the contributors—a poet laureate, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, a former foreign correspondent—have long literary histories; others—a social worker, a civil service employee, a clergywoman—began to write later in life. All of them were inspired by a call that asked for fresh and honest writing from the fullness of their lives. Vicky Lettmann, who writes fiction, essays, and poetry, served as an editor for the literary/arts magazines Speakeasy (the Loft Literary Center) and Under Construction (North Hennepin Community College). She received an MFA in fiction writing from Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in Twenty-Six Minnesota Writers (Nodin Press) and in Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude (Holy Cow! Press). Carol Roan teaches voice and stage presence in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She is the author of Clues to American Dance (Starrhill Press) and Speak Easy: A Guide to Successful Performances, Presentations, Speeches, and Lectures (Starrhill Press), and she writes a column on the "art of performance" for an online 'zine. She won a fellowship to Summer Literary Seminars, Russia, in 2006.

Annual series highlighting the best fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and flash fiction from exclusively online literary journals.