Poetry

Amorak Huey teaches creative writing at Grand Valley State University, Michigan, USA. He is recipient of a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and author of the poetry collection Ha Ha Ha Thump (2015) and the chapbooks The Insomniac Circus (2014) and A Map of the Farm Three Miles from the End of Happy Hollow Road (2016). His writing has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2012, The Southern Review, The Cincinnati Review, Poet Lore, Oxford American, Essay Daily, Brevity, The Collagist, and many other print and online journals.W. Todd Kaneko teaches creative writing at Grand Valley State University, Michigan, USA. He is the author of The Dead Wrestler Elegies (2014) and his poems, stories and essays have appeared in Bellingham Review, Los Angeles Review, Gulf Coast, Barrelhouse, PANK, The Normal School, and many other journals and anthologies. A Kundiman fellow, he co-edits the online literary magazine Waxwing.

With Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology, it is as if Huey and Kaneko have been looking over my shoulder at my class notes and have built a streamlined textbook specifically to meet my needs. Collected in one volume are chapters of practical advice and explanation about poetic elements (including a periodic table!), along with an amazing, truly up-to-date anthology of example poems. Most appropriate for students new to poetry, this book will serve as a solid review text for more advanced students as well.

• Preface: A Word of Welcome for Teachers and StudentsSection 1: An Introduction to Poetry1. Why do we write poems? 2. What is meaning?3. What does talent have to do with anything?4. Where do poems come from?5. What does it mean to be a Poet? Section 2: The Elements of Poetry6. Rhetorical Construction7. The ElementsSection 3: Practicalities8. The Poetry Workshop9. Revision10. Proceed with CautionSection 4: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetic ModesAppendix: 75 Poetry ExperimentsFurther ReadingIndex