Contemporary American Poetry (Penguin Academics Series) (Penguin Academics)

Rating:
Summary: Great introduction to contemporary American poetry
Review: This is a great anthology. It should come to no surprise, since R.S. Gwynn is a well-respected anthologist, and has the highly successful Longman Pocket series (I highly recommend his Longman Poetry: A Pocket Anthology). And April Lindner brings a nice sensibility to this project. They cover the full range of poets and poetic schools, each with header notes. And unlike many other anthologies of contemporary poetry that I've seen, this one is affordable and has one of the best mixes of poets I've seen. My only complaint is that you won't find any poems by either Gwynn or Lindner within, and both are phenomenal poets. But I understand that they had limited space and chose to cut themselves out. Hopefully in the next edition...

So, if you are looking for a good introduction to contemporary American poetry, you won't find a finer anthology than this one. I highly recommend you add it to your shelves.