The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them

A Guardian Best Book of the Year
A Poets & Writers “Best Books for Writers” Selection
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
A Harvard Book Store “Holiday Hundred” Selection
A Seminary Co-op Notable Book of the Year

“[Burt] approaches a stunning variety of verse with the obsessiveness and knowledge of a scholar and a fan. Burt is an ideal guide for this trip through contemporary American poetry…Burt’s close readings are sharp and illuminating…The death of poetry has been proclaimed time and time again. But the sixty universes that Burt uncovers in these poems show us how alive poetry is, and how it needs to be read and appreciated for all its weirdness and cacophonous music.”
—Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Bookforum

“It is refreshing to find a book that gives equal weight and relish to avant-garde minimalism, New Formalism, and so many of the stations in between…Each essay is obviously a product of enjoyment, and encourages us to treat poems with the same enthusiasm—to embrace difficulty and difference in exchange for the articulate and involved pleasure that poetry, of all the arts, can best provide.”
—Rory Waterman, Times Literary Supplement