The Poetry Reader - by Mark Yakich (Hardcover)

About the Book

A compact, eclectic, and teachable collection of poems based not on aesthetic, geographic, or historical parameters, but on specific aspects of poetry and poetic practices, ranging from identity and metaphor to sublimation and spirituality.

Book Synopsis

You have picked up this book because you are a poetry reader. Or you are about to be one. Because as soon as you read a poem, that's what you are.

Filled with the profound, the lyrical, the consoling, and the curious, The Poetry Reader: An Anthology is the book you would hope to find if you washed up alone on a deserted island: this companionable collection shows how poetry itself is a discussion, alive and flowing, and how poems speak to, with, and sometimes over one another.

If you are a teacher, this is the anthology you wish you had as a student - a text that doesn't try to survey entire time periods or aesthetic areas, but one that places side-by-side carefully selected poems that speak to each other over time as well as to today's readers.

- Section header notes provide critical commentary, framing the poems within their given topic
- Discussion and writing suggestions give interesting and actionable prompts
- Works as a standalone book, or can easily be used alongside Poetry: A Survivor's Guide, 2nd ed.

Drawing on traditional poems and contemporary works, this anthology offers globe-spanning, stylistically diverse poetry, ranging from canonical poems by the likes of Sappho and Shakespeare to those of new voices such as Layli Long Soldier and Mukoma wa Ngugi. As a compact, eclectic, and approachable collection based on specific aspects of poetry and poetic practices - from identity and metaphor to sublimation and spirituality - The Poetry Reader acts as a guide to understanding the essentials of both reading and writing poetry.

Review Quotes

"Spanning centuries and continents, The Poetry Reader represents the dazzling possibility of poetry and its limitless capacity to see the world slant. This is a generous, generative project, one of those rare teaching resources that is also a pleasure. Yakich has created something truly special: an anthology that invites conversation." --Erica Wright, Former Poetry Editor of Guernica Magazine and author of All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned (2017)

"This anthology captures the vigor and immediacy of the art of poetry. From Walt Whitman to Leila Chatti, William Shakespeare to Mukoma wa Ngugi, the selections feel surprising and inevitable. The Poetry Reader provides thorough, insightful, and thought-provoking discussion to support teachers, students, and writers, as well as variety and vitality to reward anyone reading for pleasure. This book will instruct
and delight." --Peter Campion, author of Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American Poetry (2019)

"A superb collection of great poems, paired with keen insights on what makes them tick." --Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Mark Yakich is Gregory F. Curtin, S.J. Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA, where he has been editor of New Orleans Review since 2012. He is the author of the poetry collections Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (2004), The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (2008), and Spiritual Exercises (2019); a novel, A Meaning for Wife (2011); and Object Lessons book on Football (Bloomsbury, 2022), and a guide to reading and writing poems, Poetry: A Survivor's Guide (Bloomsbury, 2016/2022).