A Fine Excess : Contemporary Literature at Play

Rating:
Summary: An excessively wonderful anthology
Review: When I saw the list of contributors in A Fine Excess, I knew immediately that this was something I needed to look into. I found it even better than I had expected. I wasn't confronted with the standard list of politically-correct writers, with their oatmeal-flavored politically-correct poetry, that's been the fare of most contemporary anthologies I've seen. On the contrary, this book shows tremendous editorial integrity and risk to put known-but-not-necessarily-liked authors like e. e. cummings alongside relative unknowns like Jeff McDaniel, without many sure-fire sellers. The few expected names that do pop up are in here on their own aesthetic merit, not because they were/are powerful, or because their work plugs into any particular ideology; the only agenda is to pull together a picture of really inventive, linguistically and intellectually daring work. As a whole, this text really works, too, building an aesthetic that's not only lucid and definite, but actually delightful.

Not only is A Fine Excess a treasure to page through on a chilly afternoon, but I would also wholeheartedly recommend it as a text for a creative writing class--with the one caveat that it should be used in conjunction with discussion of authors like Shakespeare, Donne, Eliot, and so forth. The writers selected for A Fine Excess have a firm grounding in this kind of literary bedrock; the glorious thing is that they show us just how far, and how gracefully, a talented writer can leap into the artistic aether.