The New Census, edited by Kevin A. Gonzalez and Lauren Shapiro, captures the kaleidoscopic range of contemporary poetry, spanning a complex array of aesthetic, formal, and social concerns. It includes over one hundred poems from forty poets: Carrie Olivia Adams, Eric Baus, John Beer, Nicky Beer, Ciaran Berry, Jericho Brown, Suzanne Buffam, Heather Christle, Eduardo C. Corral, Kyle Dargan, Darcie Dennigan, Sandra Doller, Timothy Donnelly, Joshua Edwards, Emily Kendal Frey, Dobby Gibson, Yona Harvey, Steve Healey, Tyehimba Jess, Keetje Kuipers, Nick Lantz, Dorothea Lasky, Dora Malech, Sarah Manguso, Randall Mann, Sabrina Orah Mark, Chris Martin, J. Michael Martinez, Adrian Matejka, John Murillo, Sawako Nakayasu, Kathleen Ossip, Kiki Petrosino, Zach Savich, Robyn Schiff, James Shea, Nick Twemlow, Sarah Vap, Jerry Williams, and Jon Woodward. Alongside the work of these forty bright stars, The New Census features twenty census polls of its poets as well as dynamic illustrations by artist Lauren Haldeman.
About the Author :
Lauren Shapiro is the author of BRID (Veliz Books, 2024), Arena (CSU Poetry Center, 2020), listed as a top poetry book of 2020 in The New York Times, and Easy Math (Sarabande, 2013), which was the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Debut-litzer Prize for Poetry. She is an associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.
Kevin González holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and his stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Narrative, Playboy, Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, and American Short Fiction, as well as in Best American Nonrequired Reading and Best New American Voices. He divides his time between San Juan and Pittsburgh, where he teaches at Carnegie Mellon University.
Review :
"Encountering the assembled poets in THE NEW CENSUS first of all attracts eye, ear, mind, heart, soul, whatever you call our life-fuel, whatever it is one wants to keep up and running. Demographics aside, what all these poets have in common is will, is faithfulness to poetry's multiplicities, is some kind, manifest as many kinds, of tenacious tending to those powerful places a page of poetry sets before us. We're meeting these poets just as they've begun to go on their ways, they've almost all published at least two, no more than three or four collections. It's a crucial time in an artist's story. She's arrived on the scene, someone has noticed, now she's at a crossroads. Where will she go? The original spirit one brings to one's earliest work needs to be acknowledged, possibly found again, possibly over and over again, if one is to continue. These poets have crossed over from private to public, they've sacrificed their privacy, they no longer keep their delicious secrets to themselves.
It's true that sometimes what we think we already know keeps us from seeing something fabulous and wonderful. What we know can obscure what we've never encountered before. The editors of THE NEW CENSUS have taken care to present to us what's new. It is coming over the horizon, toward us, to give us something, to alert us."--Dara Wier, from the Foreword
