Breaking Into Blossom
Poems with Extraordinary Endings
Luke Hankins editor Nomi Stone editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Texas Review Press
Publishing:1st Nov '25
£22.99
This title is due to be published on 1st November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Breaking into Blossom gathers modern and contemporary poems that use a wide array of techniques and approaches to ending the poem: endings that crescendo and exhort, double back or taper down, those that reverse expectation, embody paradox, or enact their logic in their formal DNA. In their introductory craft essay, co-editors Luke Hankins and Nomi Stone grapple with questions of closure, wholeness, pleasure, power, universalism, subjectivity, discord, exclusion, resistance, surprise, and bewilderment. Finding fracturing points in their own conversation while considering the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of different kinds of endings, the editors consider such questions as the value of epiphany, what kinds of endings might be likelier to be commodified, how the poem and the mind keep going beyond the page, and more. Hankins and Stone also offer a taxonomy of ending types to think with. This groundbreaking anthology includes poems about mystery, love, dread, cruelty, violence and war; poems of motherhood; of disability; of masculinity; of queerness; of baldness. Poems of transforming bodies and Black joy and failure and hope. The poems sometimes break into blossom; other times, they just break. Or they leave us in wonderment with their quiet buds unfolding into the world.
“It goes without saying that Luke Hankins and Nomi Stone have curated a star-studded anthology of writers—from Ilya Kaminsky to C.D. Wright and Ross Gay—who cultivate an aura of surprise and wonder as their poems draw to a close. But to stop there would be to greatly underestimate Hankins’s and Stone’s powers as editors. What I find so compelling about this anthology—in addition to the masterful craft of the writers gathered here—is the project’s ethical and philosophical underpinnings. Here, Hankins and Stone set forth an ethics of poetic closure, as well as a detailed and practical taxonomy of all the myriad ways a poem can ‘break into blossom.’ Hankins and Stone reveal a poem’s aesthetics as being inextricable from its ethics, and this nuance makes for an incredible teaching tool. This volume is an achievement, a beacon, and a masterclass. Bravo!” - Kristina Marie Darling, author of Look To Your Left: A Feminist Poetics of Spectacle and Daylight Has Already Come: Poems
ISBN: 9781680034387
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 284g
200 pages