The Romance of Happy Workers

Anne Boyer may be the most well-known younger poet without a trade book. Her reputation has been built through the internet-she keeps a popular arts and poetics blog-and counts a number of critics among her fans. Vibrant, playful, and distinctive, Boyer’s poetry melds Thomas Hart Benton with Woody Guthrie, and introduces them to early twenty-first century poetics. Like the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas, reading her poems out loud will use your whole mouth and give it plenty of exercise, and her use of exclamation points and whimsical vocabulary recalls Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch, as well as Alice Notley and Bernadette Mayer. Expect this collection to get plenty of critical attention and to make a splash in some unusual places.