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Contributors include: John Ashbery, Mary Jo Bang, Ted Berrigan, Lucie Brock-Broido, Jericho Brown, Stephanie Burt, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Chen Chen, Robert Creeley, Natalie Díaz, Rita Dove, Denise Duhamel, Nick Flynn, Alice Fulton, Jorie Graham, Jennifer Grotz, Edward Hirsch, Jane Hirshfield, Major Jackson, Saeed Jones, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Donika Kelly, W.S. Merwin, Frank O’Hara, Meghan O’Rourke, Gregory Orr, Gregory Pardlo, Carl Phillips, Sylvia Plath, Seido Ray Ronci, Patrick Rosal, Hayden Saunier, sam sax, Brenda Shaughnessy, Reginald Shepherd, Richard Siken, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Strand, James Tate, Natasha Trethewey, Jean Valentine, David Wojahn, Charles Wright, and many more.
More Truly and More Strange
100 Contemporary Self-Portrait Poems
Lisa Russ Spaar (Editor and Introduction)
We live in the age of the selfie, or rampant self-portraiture. Social media now offer anyone with a smart phone endless chance to create and display self-portraits. But American poets have been portraying themselves for centuries: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” Walt Whitman proclaimed. “I, too, sing America,” Langston Hughes retorted. “I’m nobody! Who are you?” Emily Dickinson provokes. Such assertions of selfhood, while intimate and individual, have helped us ponder who we are as people and a populace.
More Truly and More Strange collects astonishing self-portrait poems from the mid-twentieth century onward. The poems are as varied as they are memorable. Some are surprising catalogues of the poet’s physical form while others minimize the body in favor of other facets of the self, psychological or spiritual. Reflections, visual and existential, are everywhere.
In encountering the ways that our greatest poets have, often disarmingly, perceive themselves, we experience an ever-evolving gallery of American identity.
Lisa Russ Spaar is the editor of three previous poetry anthologies as well as seven books of poetry including Orexia, Vanitas, Rough, and Satin Cash. She is Professor of English at the University of Virginia.
Paperback / $20.00 (Can $27.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-506-2 / 216 pages / Poetry Anthology