SNEAK PEAK:

Bettering American Poetry – Volume 3 is about to BE BORN.

We are amazed by the work in this volume. IF YOU TEACH, please EMAIL us at BetterAmericanPoetry@gmail.com for a pdf of sample poems for adoption consideration!

WORDS OF SUPPORT:

Bettering American Poetry is a poetic battle cry for resistance. Comprised of captivating voices that transcend borders and defy the limits of our time, this anthology rattles readers awake with scintillating truth and tough love.

—Jamia Wilson Wilson, Executive Director of the Feminist Press

Imagine this. A calling of our names, a murmuring of our ghosts, a shouting in our blood. Thank you, dear editors and poets, for burning through to bone, for acknowledging our cuts, for naming our skeletal struggles. Thank you for this edge of safety, for this bit of home.

—Ching-In Chen, author of The Heart’s Traffic and recombinant (winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Trans Poetry)

Here lives poetry that resembles a sticky dance floor. Poetry that is at once terraformed music and primal shout and wet kiss and sweaty palm. The “American” in Bettering American Poetry is a kind of ghoulish placeholder for whichever more rebellious, more enlivening world comes next. Pay close attention to the future maps and manifestos and mantras these poets have dreamed up. Join them in the club, in the brown/black/feminist/decolonial commons, in which everyone is where they are supposed to be.

–Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of This Wound is a World, winner of the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize.

A world in which more than one anthology annually presents the poems their editors loved best is better than a world in which readers have to wait many years for the odd tome-like anthology to appear and attempt to define contemporary poetry. These anthologies help readers to understand what’s happening in poetry, and they especially help beginning poets to recognize the community they are joining. Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3 includes work by some of the most exciting poets writing today, and—and this is of the utmost importance—it makes poetry’s visible community larger.

—Shane McCrae, author of The Gilded Auction Block and In the Language of My Captor

American Poetry Editing EDITOR Education Global Warming Journalism literary activism Literature Poems Poet Poetics Poetry Political Campaign Politics Pop Culture Publishing Queer Culture Readings Religion Sexy Women Women's Rights Words Writer Writing American poetry amy king Anthology BETTERING AMERICAN POETRY BILLY-RAE BELCOURT Candace Williams CHEN CHEN Ching-in Chen EDITORS ERIKA WORTH GEORGE ABRAHAM Héctor Ramírez Jamia Wilson John Yau KENNING J. P. GARCIA Poetry poets SARAH CLARK Shane McCrae TEACHING WASHINGTON POST