The premier anthology of contemporary American poetry continues with an exceptional volume edited by award-winning novelist and poet Sherman Alexie, now with a new essay by Alexie on reactions to the 2015 publication. Since its debut in 1988, The Best American Poetry has become a mainstay for the direction and spirit of American poetry. Each volume in the series presents the year’s most extraordinary new poems and writers. Guest editor Sherman Alexie’s picks for The Best American Poetry 2015 highlight the depth and breadth of the American experience. Culled from electronic and print journals, the poems showcase some of our leading luminaries—Amy Gerstler, Terrance Hayes, Ron Padgett, Jane Hirshfield—and introduce a number of outstanding younger poets taking their place in the limelight. A leading figure since his breakout poetry collection The Business of Fancydancing in 1992, Sherman Alexie won the National Book Award for his novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. He describes himself as “lucky enough to be a full-time writer” and has written short stories, novels, screenplays, and essays—but he is at his core a poet. As always, series editor David Lehman’s foreword assessing the state of the art kicks off the book, followed by an introductory essay in which Alexie discusses his selections. The Best American Poetry 2015 is a guide to who’s who and what’s happening in American poetry today.

How do poets engage issues of race? This timely collection of essays brings together the voices of living poets and scholars, including Garrett Hongo and Major Jackson, to discuss the constraints and possibilities of racial discourse in poetic language, offering new insights on this perennially vexed issue.

The Room and the World: Essays on the Poet Stephen Dunn is the first book of its kind to explore and unpack the Pulitzer-winning poet’s oeuvre. Including twenty-four essays, a foreword by poet and essayist Dave Smith, and an introduction by Laura McCullough, this anthology illuminates Dunn’s development as a writer, his thematic obsessions, and his strategies and maneuvers on the page; it also locates him in the pantheon of essential American poets. Philosophical, funny, and founded on the juxtaposition of ideas with masterful tonal layering and texture, Dunn’s poems are considered some of the best of his generation. The contributing poets and scholars, including Dunn’s contemporaries and former students, highlight Dunn’s meditations on freedom and constraint, sexuality and sorrow, sound and sense, and the mystery in the dailiness of living. Fans will find this a crucial text that reveals the complexities of Dunn’s poetry and much about the man himself.

Gerald Stern has been a significant presence and an impassioned and idiosyncratic voice in twentieth and twenty-first-century American poetry. Insane Devotion is a retrospective of his career and features fourteen writers, critics, and poets examining the themes, stylistic traits, and craft of a poet who has shaped and inspired American verse for generations. The essays and interviews in Insane Devotion paint a broad picture of a man made whole by the influence of the written word. They touch on the contentious and nuanced stance of Judaism in the breadth of Stern’s work and explore Stern’s capacious memory and his use of personal history to illuminate our common humanity. What is revealed is a poet of complexity and heart, often tender, often outraged. As Philip Levine writes in his lyrical foreword to the volume, Stern is both sweet and spiky, “a born teacher who can teach me to see the universe in an acorn and hear the music of the lost in an empty Pepsi can.”

Poetry. Poems located in the interstices of parenting and politics that vibrate with heat, anger, and strange grace. Rife with guns, tattoos, booze, wounds, and lost teeth, these explosive narrative lyrics imagine what it means to try and fail and still go on.

How do poets engage issues of race? This timely collection of essays brings together the voices of living poets and scholars, including Garrett Hongo and Major Jackson, to discuss the constraints and possibilities of racial discourse in poetic language, offering new insights on this perennially vexed issue.

NANO Fiction (print ISSN 1935-844X; digital ISSN 2160-939X) is non-profit literary journal that publishes flash fiction—a form of short story also known as micro fiction, micro narrative, micro-story, microrrelatos, postcard fiction, the short short, the short short story, kürzestgeschichten, and sudden fiction—of 300 words or fewer. Featuring twenty to thirty authors in each issue, NANO Fiction has roots that draw from Aesop’s Fables and Zen Koans. Notable practitioners of this prose form include Lydia Davis, Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, Naguib Mahfouz, and Linor Goralik, among others. This issue of NANO Fiction features works by: Allie Marini Batts, Barr Bielinski, Becky Bosshart, Cian Cruise, Chella Courington, Justin Lawrence Daugherty, Stephanie Dickinson, Barbara Westwood Diehl, Alisa Golden, Katy Gunn, Casey Hannan, Katie Jean Shinkle, Chase Holland, D. Seth Horton, Lisa Marie Hunter, Paul Kavanagh, Jacqueline Kharouf, Edan Lepucki, Matthew Mahaney, Laura McCullough, Wendy Merry, Vilaska Nguyen, Meg Pokrass, Jessica Probus, Laurence Ross, Forrest Roth, Woody Skinner, J. David Stevens, Laurie Stone, Vanessa Angelica Villarreal, Andrew Wickenden, Russ Woods, and Jacob Wren.