Firsts: 100 Years of Yale Younger Poets [Kietas viršelis]

"In the annals of publishing there is surely no comparable record of hospitality to poets, young or old.New York Times

"Like many of its disciples, I find myself both devoted to poetry itself and anthropologically fascinated by its many histories. Firsts: 100 Years of Yale Younger Poets is a feast in both regards. Here are hundreds of expertly, often surprisingly selected poemsPhillipss curation is defiantly unbeholden to whats already been heavily anthologized. The real bounty, though, is the zoomed-out look at the evolution of American poetry, which the Yale prize, as the oldest in the United States, is uniquely capable of providing. The greater homogeneityracial, sexual, aestheticof the prizes early days gives a sense of just how revolutionary Margaret Walkers For My People must have been in 1941, Olga Broumass Beginning with O in 1976, Fady Joudahs The Earth in the Attic in 2007, Eduardo C. Corrals Slow Lightning in 2011. Phillips writes: Racial diversity often coincides with prosodic diversity, and in Firsts we actually see it happeningan emerging contemporary poetic moment unified only by its infinite aesthetic and human range. That is the miracle of this collection, what makes it indispensible."Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell

"This poetry anthology, with its century of examples, offers a cultural history of taste and desire. Decade after evolving decade, the triumphs and failures of these ambitious young American poets have embodied unresolved national aspirations. Tectonic energies of privilege and democracy, the unique individual and the collective mass, notions of 'high' and 'low,' inside and out, past and present, create a geological record in lyrical form: the Yale Series of Younger Poets."Robert Pinsky