This collection from poets and scholars Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith celebrates sonnets by American poets throughout history into the present. Written by poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Jericho Brown, Lucille Clifton, Marilyn Hacker, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Patricia Smith, Diane Seuss, Gertrude Stein, and Phillis Wheatley, these sonnets exemplify the various styles and voices expressed in this delicate form. In addition, the critical essays in the second half of the book offer studies on the methodologies, historical and theoretical perspectives, and reverence of the American sonnet. “American sonneteers early and late often write as if they are asserting the right to belong—or aren’t sure they want to belong—to the history of the sonnet, explicitly weaving their own landscape, politics, and interiority into the tradition,” write the editors in the introduction. “And while some in each generation have held the sonnet up as either the crowning jewel or an irrelevant relic of a poetic past, others have continued to plumb and sound its ongoing present.”
