Jacket Copy Reviews Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation

Brett Fletcher Lauer and Lynn Melnick's anthology Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015) is here! At Jacket Copy, David L. Ulin reviews the editors's and poets's work collected inside. From Jacket Copy:

“Most poets,” Carolyn Forché writes, in the introduction to Brett Fletcher Lauer and Lynn Melnick’s anthology “Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation” (Viking: 290 pp., $16.99), “begin writing poetry in secret.” It’s a great line, and true as well. The 100 poems gathered here all got their start in those private moments, the intersection of the writer and the line.

There is Monica de la Torre, who begins “Letter From One Practitioner to Another” with a simple admonition: “For the love of words, stop describing!” Or Ada Limón, who tells us, in “The Unbearable”: “My grandmother only wants to tell me who died / and how. She tells me of all the traffic accidents / as if she was reading a menu to me out loud.”

In private, in secret, the succession of simple moments, the bedrock bits and pieces of reality by which we compose our days.

“Please Excuse This Poem” comes billed as a book for younger readers; hence, its low price tag. This is part of the sneaky power of the collection, which recognizes that poems are for readers of all ages, that it is not age but intention, empathy, clarity that counts. [...]

Continue reading at Jacket Copy.