Dora Malech

A fascinating collection of serious and playful poems that tap the inventive possibilities of the anagram and other constraining forms In Stet, poet Dora Malech takes constraint as her catalyst and subject, exploring what it means to make or break a vow, to create art out of a life in flux, to reckon with the body’s bounds, and to arrive at a place where one might bear and care for another life. Tapping the inventive possibilities of constrained forms, particularly the revealing limitations of the anagram, Stet is a work of serious play that brings home the connections and intimacies of language. “Stet,” from the Latin for “let it stand,” is a proofreading term meaning to retain or return to a previous phrasing. The uncertainty of changes made and then reconsidered haunts Stet as its poems explore what is left unsaid through erasures, redaction, and the limitations of spelling. How does one “go back” on one’s word or “stand by” one’s decisions? Can a life be remade or revised, or is the past forever present as in a palimpsest? Embodying the physicality and reproductive potentiality inherent in the collection’s forms and figures, Stet ends expectantly, not searching for closure but awaiting the messy, living possibilities of what comes next. By turns troubling and consoling, Stet powerfully combines lyric invention and brilliant wordplay.

Poems

Stet

Laura Smith

Poet and scholar team Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith collect and foreground an impressive range of sonnets, including formal and formally subversive sonnets by established and emerging poets, highlighting connections across literary moments and movements. Poets include Phillis Wheatley, Fredrick Goddard Tuckerman, Emma Lazarus, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Gertrude Stein, Fradel Shtok, Claude McKay, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ruth Muskrat Bronson, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dunstan Thompson, Rhina P. Espaillat, Lucille Clifton, Marilyn Hacker, Wanda Coleman, Patricia Smith, Jericho Brown, and Diane Seuss. The sonnets are accompanied by critical essays that likewise draw together diverse voices, methodologies, and historical and theoretical perspectives that represent the burgeoning field of American sonnet studies. Contributor List: Essayists Abdul Ali, Baltimore, MD Anna Lena Phillips Bell, University of North Carolina, Wilmington Jodie Childers, Queens, New York Benjamin Crawford, University of Alabama Meg Day, Franklin and Marshall College Donna Denizé, St. Albans School Michael Dumanis, Bennington College Jordan Finkin, Hebrew Union College Rebecca Morgan Frank, Northwestern University Anna Maria Hong, Mount Holyoke College Gillian Huang-Tiller, University of Virginia, Wise Walt Hunter, Clemson University John James, University of California, Berkeley Matthew Kilbane, University of Notre Dame Diana Leca, University of Oxford Ariel Martino, Colgate University Nate Mickelson, New York University Lisa L. Moore, University of Texas at Austin Timo Müller, University of Konstanz, Germany Carl Phillips, Washington University in St. Louis Zoë Pollak, Columbia University Jonathan F.S. Post, UCLA Stephen Regan, Durham University, UK Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia Hollis Robbins, University of Utah Nathan Spoon, Joelton, TN Marlo Starr, Wittenberg University Yuki Tanaka, Hosei University, Japan Tess Taylor, Ashland University Michael Theune, Illinois Wesleyan University Eleanor Wakefield, University of Oregon Lesley Wheeler, Washington and Lee University Jon Woodson, Howard University emeritus Contributors List: Poets Elizabeth Alexander, Agha Shahid Ali, Julia Alvarez, Maggie Anderson, Tacey Atsitty, Charles Bernstein, Ted Berrigan, Jen Bervin, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Bogan, Ruth Muskrat Bronson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jericho Brown, Lucille Clifton, Henri Cole, Wanda Coleman, Countee Cullen, William Cullen Bryant, E.E. Cummings, Meg Day, Natalie Diaz, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rhina Espaillat, Tarfia Faizullah, Robert Frost, torrin a. greathouse, Marilyn Hacker, Robert Hayden, Terrance Hayes, Anthony Hecht, Lynn Hejinian, Leslie Pinckney Hill, Anna Maria Hong, Langston Hughes, David Humphreys, Helen Hunt Jackson, Tyehimba Jess, Helene Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, June Jordan, Douglas Kearney, Richard Kenney, Joan Larkin, Emma Lazarus, Mani Levb, Amy Lowell, Robert Lowell, Nate Marshall, Bernadette Mayer, George Marion McClellan, Brandy Nalani McDougall, Claude McKay, Joyelle McSweeney, Lo Kwa Mei-en, James Merrill, Phillip Metres, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Simone Muench, Marilyn Nelson, Craig Santos Perez, Carl Phillips, Sylvia Plath, Alexander Posey, Lizette Woodworth Reese, Adrienne Rich, Lola Ridge, Muriel Rukeyeser, Kay Ryan, Diane Seuss, Fradel Shtok, Aaron Shurin, giovanni singleton, Patricia Smith, Mary Ellen Solt, Nathan Spoon, Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Su, Lorenzo Thomas, Dunstan Thompson, Natasha Tretheway, Fredrick Goddard Tuckerman, Mona Van Duyn, Ellen Bryant Voight, Margaret Walker, Lucian B. Watkins, Phillis Wheatley, John Wheelwright, Jackie K. White, Walt Whitman, James Wright, Elinor Wylie

An Anthology of Poems and Essays

The American Sonnet

"The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays showcases the diversity of the American sonnet. 800 years after the sonnet's invention, this volume celebrates the extraordinary development of the sonnet in the hands of American poets-and those living under US empire-from traditional to experimental, political and personal. Edited by poet and scholar team Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith, this anthology collects and foregrounds an impressive range of 20th and 21st century sonnets, including formal and formally subversive sonnets by established and emerging poets, and presents these alongside a selection of earlier American sonnets, highlighting connections across literary moments and movements. The critical essays likewise draw together diverse voices, methodologies, and historical and theoretical perspectives that represent the burgeoning field of American sonnet studies. Malech and Smith capture the central questions for American sonneteers. Who belongs to the tradition of the American sonnet? How do translation and multicultural and transnational identities complicate the Americanness of the "American" sonnet? How do Black, queer, trans, neurodiverse, working class, Appalachian, and Deaf poets claim the sonnet and how does it serve them? How do American poets experiment with meter, stanza, rhyme, lineation, and visuality to make the sonnet their own? And how are American sonneteers writing about love, loss, and trauma in new ways that change the sonnet tradition? The American Sonnet shows the form continuing to function as a poetic bellwether as centuries of poets use its peculiar confines to negotiate questions of nation, race, class, gender, sexuality, diaspora, and poetic tradition"--

In Flourish, multiple meanings catch light--as the leaves of growing things might, or the facets of cut gemstones, or a signal mirror flashing in distress. These poems explore themes of thriving, growth, innovation, and survival, while immersing the reader in the pleasures of language itself--the "flourish" of linguistic gesture, play, form, turn, and adornment. Here, the lens zooms in and out to micro and macro levels, asking us to see the familiar with new eyes. The collection engages with the materials of the worlds we inhabit--natural worlds and those of our own making--and a full spectrum of poetry's own materials, building worlds of words and illuminating the shadowed terrain of our interior landscapes as well.

Dora Malech

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