The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women - Softcover

The Extraordinary Tide is an extraordinary and important anthology that anyone interested in contemporary American poetry will want to read and cherish. The voices in this book are diverse; the kinds of poems gathered here are various in style and subject. But the one assumption that underlies and animates every line of every poem is that inclusiveness, intellectual and imaginative restlessness, impurity and radical play are the life blood of our language and our literature, renewing the very conventions and traditions they resist. Contemporary American women poets have given a great gift to all students of poetry, to all of us who go to poetry for news of what it means to be a human being at this moment in our history. -- Alan Shapiro, University of North Carolina It has been too long since such a comprehensive collection was published, and anyone who cares about women's poetry should read it... This book deserves a place on your bookshelf alongside the Norton and Oxford anthologies. San Diego Union Tribune

A collection of nearly 400 poems by more than 100 different writers, The Extraordinary Tide synthesizes and celebrates an entire era of poetry by women in America. Long overdue, the anthology includes America's most recognized poets as well as those emerging as exciting new artists of contemporary verse. Featuring recent work by poets as aesthetically diverse as Ai, Jane Kenyon, Ann Lauterbach, Carolyn Forche, and Leslie Scalapino, the collection is the most complete map now available of a vastly underexplored landscape in American writing. Also included are poems by Julia Alvarez, Lucille Clifton, Alice Fulton, Tess Gallagher, Amy Gerstler, Jane Hirschfield, Heather McHugh, Alice Notley, Lucia Perillo, Marie Ponsot, Mary Jo Salter, Ellen Bryant Voigt, C. D. Wright, and many others. "The delights of this anthology are in its plurality, its collection of such a rich and varied sampling of that tide flooding American shores."-from the Foreword by Eleanor Wilner, author of Otherwise and Sarah's Choice