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Elisa New's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Elisa New recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Elisa New's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
In time for the holiday season, a beautiful paperback edition of Penguin’s landmark poetry anthology

Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States, introduces readers to the most significant and compelling poems of the past hundred years in The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Now available in paperback, this indispensable volume represents the full spectrum of aesthetic sensibilities—with varying styles, voices, themes, and cultures—while balancing important poems with vital periods of each poet. Featuring...
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Recommended by Elisa New, and 1 others.

Elisa NewRita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry brings readers right up to the poets of today; there isn’t another anthology that does that. She devotes about half of its pages to recent poets. (Source)

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2

Geography III

Poems

Whether writing about waiting as a child in a dentist's office, viewing a city from a plane high above, or losing items ranging from door keys to one's lover in the masterfully restrained "One Art," Elizabeth Bishop somehow conveyed both large and small emotional truths in language of stunning exactitude and even more astonishing resonance. As John Ashbery has written, "The private self . . . melts imperceptibly into the large utterance, the grandeur of poetry, which, because it remains rooted in everyday particulars, never sounds ‘grand,' but is as quietly convincing as everyday... more
Recommended by Elisa New, and 1 others.

Elisa NewThe work of Elizabeth Bishop is its own world, that has its own mesmerizing power. (Source)

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3

Lunch Poems

Important poems by the late New York poet published in The New American Poetry, Evergreen Review, Floating Bear and stranger places.

Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, coexistence, and depth, while never forgetting to eat lunch, his favorite meal.
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Recommended by Elisa New, and 1 others.

Elisa NewO’Hara writes these poems in a casual voice that’s characteristically his. He called them ‘I do this, I do that’ poems. You follow him around New York City and watch his imagination hunger after and take satisfaction in things. It’s like entering into intimacy with an extraordinary human being. (Source)

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4

The Cambridge History of American Poetry

The Cambridge History of American Poetry offers a comprehensive exploration of the development of American poetic traditions from their beginnings until the end of the twentieth century. Bringing together the insights of fifty distinguished scholars, this literary history emphasizes the complex roles that poetry has played in American cultural and intellectual life, detailing the variety of ways in which both public and private forms of poetry have met the needs of different communities at different times. The Cambridge History of American Poetry recognizes the existence of multiple... more
Recommended by Elisa New, and 1 others.

Elisa NewThere is no better scholarly compendium than The Cambridge History of American Poetry. In its pages, one finds many of the best critics of the last thirty years, absolute authorities, in fine form, distilling their classic takes. (Source)

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