Description: This groundbreaking anthology gathers modern and contemporary poems that use a wide array of techniques and approaches to ending the poem. In their introductory craft essay, co-editors Luke Hankins and Nomi Stone grapple with questions of closure, wholeness, pleasure, power, universalism, subjectivity, discord, exclusion, resistance, surprise, and bewilderment.
Review Quotes: "It goes without saying that Luke Hankins and Nomi Stone have curated a star-studded anthology of writers--from Ilya Kaminsky to C.D. Wright and Ross Gay--who cultivate an aura of surprise and wonder as their poems draw to a close. But to stop there would be to greatly underestimate Hankins's and Stone's powers as editors. What I find so compelling about this anthology--in addition to the masterful craft of the writers gathered here--is the project's ethical and philosophical underpinnings. Here, Hankins and Stone set forth an ethics of poetic closure, as well as a detailed and practical taxonomy of all the myriad ways a poem can 'break into blossom.' Hankins and Stone reveal a poem's aesthetics as being inextricable from its ethics, and this nuance makes for an incredible teaching tool. This volume is an achievement, a beacon, and a masterclass. Bravo!"
--Kristina Marie Darling, author of Look To Your Left: A Feminist Poetics of Spectacle and Daylight Has Already Come: Poems--Kristina Marie Darling