The Best American Erotic Poems: from 1800 to the Present

Publisher Marketing: There is a deep tradition of eroticism in American poetry. Thoughtful, provocative, moving, and sometimes mirthful, the poems collected in "The Best American Erotic Poems" celebrate this exuberant sensuality. These poems range across the varied landscapes of love and sex and desire -- from the intimate parts of the body to the end of an affair, from passion to solitary self-pleasure. With candor and imagination, they capture the delights and torments of sex and sexuality, nudity, love, lust, and the secret life of fantasy. David Lehman, the distinguished editor of the celebrated "Best American Poetry" series, has culled a witty, titillating, and alluring collection that starts with Francis Scott Key, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Hart Crane, encompasses Frank O'Hara, Anne Sexton, John Updike, Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Kevin Young, and Sharon Olds, and concludes with the rising stars of a whole new generation of versifiers, including Sarah Manguso, Ravi Shankar, and Brenda Shaughnessy. In a section of the book that is sure to prompt discussion and further reading, the living poets write about their favorite works of erotic writing. This book will delight, surprise, and inspire. Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 11/19/2007 (EAN 9781416537465, Paperback) Publishers Weekly 11/19/2007 pg. 37 (EAN 9781416537458, Hardcover) Publishers Weekly 11/19/2007 pg. 37 (EAN 9781416537458, Hardcover) New York Times Book Review 03/16/2008 pg. 6 (EAN 9781416537458, Hardcover) Contributor Bio:  Lehman, David David Lehman, who founded The Best American Poetry" "series in 1988, is the editor of "The Oxford Book of American Poetry" and the author of seven books of poetry, including "When a Woman Loves a Man." He teaches in the graduate writing program at the New School and lives in New York City and in Ithaca, New York.