In this volume, Stephanie Burt selects sixty poems as a small representation of the wide scope of contemporary American poetry, ranging from John Ashbery’s “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” published in 1981, to Ross Gay’s “Weeping” published in 2015. Each poem is accompanied by an essay that details the poem’s technique, sensibility, and context to help readers approach and enjoy the work with a new perspective. “These poems let us imagine someone else’s interior life, almost as if it were or could have been ours,” writes Burt in the introduction. “Each poem presents a way of arranging language, and a question about the culture from which it emerged; each poem is a way for a person to live in the world.”
