Poets & Writers – July-August 2019

IN MEMORIAM

Warren Adler

Chris Albertson

Jonathan Baumbach

Robert L. Bernstein

Wayson Choy

David Brion Davis

Rachel Held Evans

To n y H o r w i t z

Martin Kilson

Chuck Kinder

John L’Heureux

John Lukacs

Vonda N. McIntyre

Lyra McKee

Les Murray

Stanley Plumly

Mark Saunders

Maya Turovskaya

Binyavanga Wainaina

James Winn

Gene Wolfe

Charles Rue Woods

Her ma n Wou k

I

n February novelist Jonathan

Lethem joined Bill Henderson,

founder of the Pushcart Press,

to launch a series of reissues of

Lethem’s favorite forgotten books,

starting with Bad Guy, a 1982

absurdist psychodrama by Rosalyn

Drexler. W. W. Norton, Pushcart’s

distributor, has signed on to distribute

the new series under the imprimatur

Lethem’s Legends.

Henderson and Lethem came up

with the idea for Lethem’s Legends

on the front porch of Henderson’s

nine-by-twelve-foot bookstore in

Sedgwick, Maine. Lethem, who sum-

mers in nearby Blue Hill, met Hender-

son at the local farmers market about

fifteen years ago and occasionally vis-

its what Henderson calls “the smallest

bookstore in the world.” After hear-

ing Lethem talk about his passion for

rediscovering forgotten writers and

books, Henderson proposed publish-

ing a series of the author’s favorites.

“It’s been my hope over many years

to rescue books and rescue authors.

That’s what we’ve done at Pushcart for

Rescuing Lethem’s Legends

TRENDS

17 POETS & WRITERS

The Anthologist

Deborah Miranda,

Terese Marie Mailhot,

and many more have

contributed essays

to Shapes of Native

Nonfiction: Collected

Essays by Contempo-

rary Writers (Univer-

sity of Washington

Press, June 2019). Drawing on the craft of

basket weaving, editors Elissa Washuta and

Theresa Warburton have organized the es-

says around four terms—technique, coil-

ing, plaiting, and twining—to “establish the

unique, pivotal work that Native authors are

doing to explore the boundaries of form.”

“What we have here is

a new kind of music,”

writes editor Cynthia

Cruz in the introduc-

tion to Other Musics:

New Latina Poetry

(University of Okla-

homa Press, April

2019). “A new genera-

tion of Latina/x poets is making beautiful,

smart, and interesting poetry, incorpo-

rating not just the Latino/a tradition but

also incorporating postmodernism, post-

postmodernism and new attempts at lyri-

cism.” Contributors include Xochiquetzal

Candelaria and Ada Limón.

In 1992 editor Marga-

ret Busby compiled

Daughters of Africa, a

landmark anthology

of writing by women

of African descent.

Twenty-seven years

later, Busby has put

together a follow-up

anthology, New Daughters of Africa: An In-

ternational Anthology of Writing by Women

of African Descent (Amistad, May 2019).

One thousand pages long, the collection

features more than two hundred poets and

prose writers from the nineteenth century

to present day, including Edwidge Danticat,

Nawal El Saadawi, and Margo Jefferson.

In The Eloquent

Poem: 128 Contem-

porary Poems and

Their Making (Persea

Books, May 2019),

more than a hundred

poets share previ-

ously unpublished

poems along with

micro-essays about the genesis of those

poems. Edited by poet Elise Paschen, the

collection is organized into different po-

etic approaches such as persona poems,

eclogues, and ekphrastic poems. The

book opens with an ars poetica by Joy

Harjo and ends with a collage poem by

Kevin Prufer.