Personal Best - by Erin Belieu & Carl Phillips (Paperback)

About the Book

"An anthology of poems edited by Erin Belieu and Carl Phillips"--

Book Synopsis

Home to fifty-eight author-selected poems and accompanying essays, Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems That Matter Most is a far-reaching, essential touchstone for the art of poetry in the United States today.

Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems That Matter Most is home to fifty-eight author-selected poems and accompanying essays that explain how and why each poet chose a poem as their "personal best." The anthology offers a provocative and surprising range of responses in which readers will find poetic context for the life of a poem and revelatory insight into the unique, personal experiences that shape the writing process itself. Including works from a wide variety of voices both new and well-established, Personal Best is a far-reaching, essential touchstone for the art of poetry in the United States today. The anthology gives readers--both long-time fans of poetry and those just discovering its possibilities--an intimate view of the heart and spirit that make poetry one of our most quintessentially human forms of expression.

Review Quotes

Praise for Personal Best

"Including a remarkable and diverse array of contemporary poets, Phillips and Belieu assemble a collection of singular poems, each selected by its poet and accompanied by an explication of how it came to be written, illuminating the choices that make each poem sing. With poems by Danez Smith, Ada Limón, Ocean Vuong, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ilya Kaminsky and many more, it was a welcome gift to reencounter poems I knew in fresh contexts, and it was equally enjoyable to explore poems new to me."--Freya Sachs, BookPage, STARRED REVIEW

"Belieu and Phillips have put a finger to the pulse of American poetry with this anthology; they have demonstrated the importance of encountering poets in real time. Personal Best rejects the trend of venerating poets posthumously, centering the real and sometimes urgent motivations that drive some of the best authors of our generation. There's something for everyone in this anthology, and I suspect that most readers will encounter at least a handful of poets who are new to them, and what a wonderful way to meet them."--The Poetry Question

"For this lively and engaging anthology, fifty-seven poets, including Kaveh Akbar, Diane Seuss, Solmaz Sharif, and Ocean Vuong, choose one of their own poems and explain in an essay why it represents their 'personal best.' Together the poem-essay pairings provide an insightful look at the life of a poem and the personal experiences that shape the writing process."--Poets & Writers

"This anthology endearingly reminds us that a poet's own favorite poems often aren't the much shared or anthologized or otherwise best known, and that our own favorites as readers are also often artifacts of time. The poets' choices, and their rationalee--largely thoughtful, sometimes revelatory--are telling. Buy it as a gift, teach with it: I certainly will."--Rebecca Morgan Frank, Lit Hub

"This anthology from Copper Canyon Press sits in my book stack on the breakfast bar, screaming my name. It marries many of my bookish passions: poetry, prose by poets, and craft essays. Highlighting writers I admire like Kaveh Akbar, Victoria Chang, Tarfia Faizullah, Donika Kelly, Ada Limón, Airea D. Matthews, Jake Skeets, Danez Smith, and Ocean Vuong, I can't wait to inhale this cover to cover and learn which works poets consider their personal best."--Connie Pan, Book Riot

"Publisher Copper Canyon has been a boldface name in the poetry world for more than 50 years. Think of this like a mixtape (or a playlist, for you younger readers) that will delight the verse-loving person in your life."--Michael Schaub, Los Angeles Daily News

"Brilliant. . . . This is a book about art-making as world-making. It's about the why and what and how and who of writing poems. Why does anyone write? What is the point of poetry? What makes a series of words in a particular order settle and flutter in a heart? How does the act of writing transform the life of the writer? The act of making anything is terrifying and complicated. This book spoke to the writer in me, but even if what you make is not poems, or even words--if what you make is bread, or paintings, or conversations, or children, or maps or space or houses or friendships--this book is also for you. We are all makers."--Laura Sackton, Books & Bakes

Praise for Erin Belieu

"These poems continuously examine life, sometimes with reverence, sometimes with wry humor, as the poet offers an intelligent take on being a woman in the 21st century." --Library Journal, starred review

"In the world of [Belieu's] poems, no one is innocent; everyone is confined to the complexity, absurdity, and, above all, fallibility of their human condition"--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"[Belieu's] gifts--for clarity, consolidation, humor and moments of hard-earned feeling--are old-fashioned ones. She's a comedian of the human spirit, in league with poets from Frank O'Hara through Deborah Garrison and Tony Hoagland."--Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"[Belieu's] latest collection toggles between lighthearted comedy and deep-seated loss, using paradox as a prerequisite for beauty... For every joke in Come-Hither Honeycomb, there's something tragic on the other side of the scale."--The New Yorker

Praise for Carl Phillips

"I have a candidate for the author of the most interesting contemporary English sentences and it is not primarily a prose writer: the American poet Carl Phillips." --Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

"Carl Phillips is a poet of enchantment and persuasion . . . I couldn't mistake these poems for any other poet's work. In a moment obsessed with snappy performances, Phillips's poems are contemplative, rich, and troubled. They are rarely axiomatic or quotable. Often, their power lies in their unfolding."--Los Angeles Review of Books

"With the incomparably gorgeous, deftly poetic sentences that make up his work, Carl Phillips has been exploring intimacy, sexuality, and interiority for more than a decade."--Literary Hub

"Almost no one, to my ear, charts the perpetually shifting moods and meanings of the interior psychic landscape as sensitively, or as beautifully, as he does."--The Washington Post

About the Author

About the Editors

Erin Belieu is the author of five poetry collections, all from Copper Canyon Press, including her most recent, Come-Hither Honeycomb. Belieu literary activism earned her the AWP's George Garrett Prize for her service to the national writing community, and she co-founded VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and Writers Resist. Belieu teaches in the University of Houston MFA/Ph.D. Creative Writing Program and for Lesley University's low residency MFA program in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Carl Phillips is a seasoned poet, author, and translator who has published three prose books and sixteen poetry collections, most recently Then the War: New And Selected Poems 2007-2020. His honors include the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry (2023), a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis with a focus on contemporary poetry, classical philology, and translation.