Imagine yourself in an ideal classroom under the spell of an ideal teacher of poetry. That’s what it’s like to keep company with James Longenbach in the pages of How Poems Get Made. Gentle, learned, free-spirited, wide-ranging in taste, Longenbach roams from Anglo-Saxon poetry through the Renaissance to poets reinventing the art in English in our day. — Rosanna Warren
From the publisher: How Poems Get Made is a comprehensive guide to writing or reading poetry, by “one of our most lucid and important critics” (American Academy of Arts and Letters).
James Longenbach is the author of many other books of both poetry and literary criticism, including Earthling: Poems, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, The Iron Key: Poems, The Art of the Poetic Line, and The Virtues of Poetry. Longenbach’s work is often published in the New Yorker and Paris Review, and his poems and essays have appeared in NER, most recently in NER 32.1.
How Poems Get Made can be purchased at your local independent bookseller or online.
This is a gorgeous book, visually, conceptually, and in the delights of reading. Stanley Plumly . . . thinks as a poet, writes as a poet, with the sure-footedness of an informed scholar and on-site researcher. Constable and Turner would come back to life just to see themselves in Elegy Landscapes, and do so, virtually, in Plumly’s vivid illuminations.” — Susan J. Wolfson, professor of English, Princeton University
From the publisher: Renowned poet Stanley Plumly, who has been praised for his “obsessive, intricate, intimate and brilliant” nonfiction (Washington Post), explores immortality in art through the work of two impressive landscape artists: John Constable and J.M.W. Turner . . . Plumly studies the paintings against the pull of the artists’ lives, probing how each finds the sublime in different, though inherently connected, worlds. At once a meditation on the difficulties in achieving truly immortal works of art and an exploration of the relationship between artist and artwork, Elegy Landscapestakes a wide-angle look at the philosophy of the sublime.
Stanley Plumly has authored ten books of poetry and four works of nonfiction, including Elegy Landscapes, Posthumous Keats, and The Immortal Evening. Winner of the Truman Capote Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize, among others. Plumly’s essay Does Ripe Fruit Never Fall? appeared in NER 37.1, and his poetry appeared most recently in NER 37.3
Elegy Landscapes can be purchased at your local bookstore or online.
In this country, AIDS is no longer a quick death sentence. Jacques J. Rancourt, born the year AZT was released, makes visible its wreckage in the present. The plague years—queer bodies kissed by death and public scorn—shadow the speaker as he cruises, travels, and marries. Rancourt’s language is finely chiseled, attentive to the spiritual and the carnal. Each poem reminds us to live, to remember. —Eduardo C. Corral (author of Slow Lightning, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize)
From the publisher: The BPJ team is thrilled to announce that the inaugural title in our chapbook series is Jacques J. Rancourt‘s In the Time of PrEP. Rancourt is the author of Novena, winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd prize (Pleiades Press, 2017). He has held poetry fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. In addition to NER (32.4) and other journals, Rancourt’s poems have appeared in the Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, and Virginia Quarterly Review, as well as in Best New Poets. He lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In the Time of PrEP can be found at your local independent bookseller or online.