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American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology Of New Poetry (2009)

by Cole Swensen(Favorite Author)

3.75 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0393333752 (ISBN13: 9780393333756)

languge

English

genre

Poetry

publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

review 1: Make no mistake: there are some truly compelling poets in this anthology. Among my favorites were Mei-Mei Brussenbruge, Rae Armantrout, Dean Young, Bin Ramke, the Waldrops, and Jennifer Moxley. But after having anticipated reading the anthology for so long, I found its methodology disappointing. For one thing, the arrangement of the poets in alphabetical order gives no sense of historical development or intertextual relationship. Nor do the brief bios of each poet help. In fact, the pretentiousness of those bios became an exercise in frustration for me only a third of the way through the anthology, after which it became simply laughable. Another complaint, the decision to include only poets with three published books necessarily excludes a whole host of exciting, innovativ... moree young poets that would fit the "hybrid" impulse the anthologists are looking to illuminate, including Noah Eli Gordon, Donna Stonecipher, Ada Limón, and Joe Wenderoth, to name a few. Finally, I found it astounding that there was not a single Latino poet in an anthology that obviously had ethnic diversity as one of its implicit, if not explicit, selection criteria. No Juan Felipe Herrera, Francisco X. Alarcón, Lorna Dee Cervantes? Really?
review 2: I used this for an upper level poetry workshop but was a little disappointed at the limitations of the book. I think many poems could be called "hybrid" in the contemporary poetry scene today, and so I think the book needed to be guided by a much clearer definition of just what a "hybrid" poem is. Then the poems chosen could have better reflected that clear definition. Instead the poems seemed to have been somewhat arbitrarily thrown together. I also felt the poems ultimately erred on the language/experimental side of poetry. This is not to say that I didn't enjoy this book; it just wasn't what I was expecting or needing as an anthology for students in this particular class. less

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