Hammer and Blaze: A Gathering of Contemporary American Poets

Hammer and Blazeprovides a true cross-section of the best contemporary poets writing in North America today. Editors Ellen Bryant Voigt and Heather McHugh have brought together the work of sixty poets who have taught at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, one of the most respected and influential writing programs of its kind.The stellar group of contributors includes MacArthur fellows Campbell McGrath, Anne Carson, Edward Hirsch, Eleanor Wilner, Susan Stewart, and Lucia Perillo. Also represented here are works by Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Dunn and Louise Gluck; Ruth Lilly Prize winner Carl Dennis; and Robert Wrigley, Thomas Lux, and B. H. Fairchild, winners of the Kingsley Tufts Award. From the couplets of Pablo Medina to the neoclassical lyricisms of Carl Phillips, this anthology appropriately reflects the cross-cultural nature of contemporary North American poetry with its most diverse and prestigious voices. A number of the poems are previously unpublished, including work by Joan Aleshire, Stuart Dischell, Stephen Dobyns, Stephen Dunn, Roland Flint, Carol Frost, Barbara Greenberg, Edward Hirsch, Pablo Medina, Steve Orlen, Gregory Orr, Kathleen Peirce, Kenneth Rosen, Daniel Tobin, Alan Williamson, and Eleanor Wilner.Hammer and Blaze, a gathering of our best poets, should garner attention from the literary world at large as well as from students of contemporary poetry and creative writing.

Ellen Bryant Voigt is the author of six volumes of poetry, including Kyrie, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. She has also published The Flexible Lyric (Georgia), a collection of craft essays. Founder of low-residency graduate education for writers, she has been the Vermont State Poet, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writing Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. Heather McHugh is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of Washington, Seattle, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Among her works are The Father of the Predicaments, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality, and a translation of Euripides' Cyclops.