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The Poetry of Capital
Voices from Twenty-First-Century America
Edited by Benjamin S. Grossberg and Clare Rossini
“Fresh, memorable, original. The coeditors have constructed a meaningful and timely anthology that, in significant ways, gathers together a range of poems about money and class structures in America.”
—Judith Vollmer
What do we talk about when we talk about money? As the forty-four poets in this brilliant new anthology show, the answer is everything. From the impact of global economic crises to local tag sales, from the subversive effects of dark money on politics to the freedom granted by a summer job, from sweatshops where our clothes are produced to the malls where they are sold, this volume gets to the heart of Americans’ relationships to capital as only poetry can.
Editors Benjamin S. Grossberg and Clare Rossini selected poems to reflect broad themes of labor, history and economic forces, social equity, and the environment. In addition, they asked each poet to provide a brief prose comment to introduce their work. Some give broad statements on the nature of wealth in America today; others are intimate, offering insight into how life experiences inform their writing; still others reflect on the art of poetry itself and its unique power to speak to economic pressures of the moment.
Contributors include Mary Jo Bang, Xochiquetzal Candelaria, Alan Chazaro, Mark Doty, Denise Duhamel, Tony Hoagland, Yusef Komunyakaa, Dorianne Laux, Kimiko Hahn, Sharon Olds, George Perreault, Robert Pinsky, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Afaa Michael Weaver, David Wojahn, and others.
Clare Rossini is an artist-in-residence at Trinity College, where she teaches classes in literature and creative writing and directs a program that places Trinity students in core-city public school classrooms. Her books include Lingo, Winter Morning with Crow, and Selections from the Claudia Poems.
Benjamin S. Grossberg is the director of creative writing at the University of Hartford. His books include Space Traveler and Sweet Core Orchard, winner of a Lambda Literary Award. His latest collection is My Husband Would.
Praise
“Money may be, as Denise Duhamel notes in her mini-essay, one of the last taboo subjects in the arts as well as in polite company, but that’s exactly what the forty-four diverse and wide-ranging contemporary American poets in this wonderful anthology so memorably explore—if by ‘money’ you mean everything in our increasingly stressed and stressful capitalist society that money informs. There’s an embarrassment of riches here. You can bank on it.”
—Ronald Wallace
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Larger images
January 2021
LC: 2020017804 PS
264 pp. 6 x 9
44 b/w photos
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