Best New Poets 2013: 50 Poems from Emerging Writers

Best New Poets

by Brenda Shaughnessy (Editor), Jazzy Danziger (Series Editor), L.J. Sysko (Contributor)

Entering its eighth year, "Best New Poets" has established itself as a crucial venue for rising poets and a valuable resource for poetry lovers. 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 is being practiced today.

Genres: Poetry

117 pages, Paperback

First published January 13, 2014

About the author

Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, in 1970 and grew up in Southern California. She received her B.A. in literature and women's studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and she earned an M.F.A. at Columbia University.

She is the author of Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), which was nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Norma Farber First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Bomb, Boston Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.

About her work, the poet Richard Howard writes: "The resonance of Shaughnessy's poems is that of someone speaking out of an ecstasy and into an ecstasy, momentarily pausing to let us in on the fun, the pain."

Shaughnessy is the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission Artist Fellowship. She is the poetry editor at Tin House magazine and currently teaches creative writing at Princeton University and Eugene Lang College at the New School.

Reviews

[Darrin · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some very good poems and poets in these collections. It is hard to even list all of my favorites. One stands out, however, Elizabeth Langemak's, An Apology. She has published no books of poetry on her own, however.

I strongly recommend to anyone interested in finding new poets to read or just wanting to read a really enjoyable book of poetry.

[Mike Good · Rating 5 out of 5]

delighted by the range as well as the small similarities

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A kaleidoscope of images—some lucida, others obscura—exhibiting and creating a variety of beautiful forms and patterns

[Chelsea K. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Considering that this is the product of fined poem-submission by completely unknown poets, there are bound to be duds. And there are definitely duds.

Tarfia Faizullah's "Self Portrait as Slinky" was sort of wonderfully formulaic, using a common, universal (also, perhaps, outdated) toy as a metaphor for minority image and self image doubts.

The collection's opening piece by Hannah Sanghee Park, "BANG", was a really, really great study of word and phonetics.

Had the tone set by these two (among others, of course) been kept throughout, this would have been a five star collection. But I suppose that's always a pipe dream in poetry collections, and here as well.

[David A Townsend · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some truth, some beuaty, many questions, few answers, some swings and misses, some homeruns