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Contemporary American poetry can often seem intimidating and daunting in its variety and complexity. This engaging and accessible book provides the first comprehensive introduction to the rich body of American poetry that has flourished since 1945 and offers a useful map to its current landscape. By exploring the major poets, movements, and landmark poems at the heart of this era, this book presents a compelling new version of the history of American poetry that takes into account its variety and breadth, its recent evolution in the new millennium, its ever-increasing diversity, and its ongoing engagement with politics and culture. Combining illuminating close readings of a wide range of representative poems with detailed discussion of historical, political, and aesthetic contexts, this book examines how poets have tirelessly invented new forms and styles to respond to the complex realities of American life and culture.
‘Andrew Epstein’s Cambridge Introduction to American Poetry since 1945 offers a lively, readable, and admirably even- handed account of the history of contemporary American poetry. Epstein’s book accomplishes what many handbooks of this kind aspire to but rarely achieve: it is accessible enough to be used by undergraduates as a textbook (indeed, I am using it in a course this semester) but still contains a wealth of scholarly references that make it a useful guide to the field for researchers. What makes it productive reading even for scholars already expert in contemporary poetry is the opportunity it offers for reflection on the dominant narratives of the history of poetry since 1945-and the question of whether those narratives continue to be relevant in the twenty-first century.’
Timothy Yu Source: Contemporary Literature
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