The New Long Poem

An energetic study of powerful, book-length poems recently published in English, including texts as core to 20th c. literature as Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo to books as archly exacting as John Ashbery's Flow Chart, as affably innovative as Lyn Hejinian's My Life, as ingeniously formal as Inger Christiansen's alphabet and as unruly as Frank Stanford's The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. Also: Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, Evan S. Connell’s Notes Found in a Bottle on a Beach at Carmel, W.S. Merwin’s The Folding Cliffs, and the intra-genre Cecilia Vicuna’s Spit Temple.