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.
Contributions by: Kaveh Akbar, Agha Shahid Ali, Sarah Ghazal Ali, Rae Armantrout, Cam Awkward-Rich, Ellen Bass, Jericho Brown, Anne Carson, Tiana Clark, Lucille Clifton, Leonard Cohen, Wendy Cope, Morri Creech, Robert Creeley, Natalie Diaz, James Dickey, Rita Dove, B. H. Fairchild, Keith Flynn, Carrie Fountain, Vievee Francis, Ross Gay, Jack Gilbert, Aracelis Girmay, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Linda Gregg, Paul Guest, francine j. harris, Robert Hass, Robert Hayden, Terrance Hayes, Jane Hirshfield, Sarah Holland-Batt, Jay Hopler, Marie Howe, Thomas James, Denis Johnson, Ilya Kaminsky, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, David Kirby, Yusef Komunyakaa, Stanley Kunitz, Danusha Laméris, Li-Young Lee, Larry Levis, Paige Lewis, Osip Mandelstam, Cleopatra Mathis, William Matthews, Nathan McClain, W. S. Merwin, Philip Metres, Czeslaw Milosz, Harryette Mullen, John Murillo, Yehoshua November, Sharon Olds, Matthew Olzmann, Frank Paino, Morgan Parker, Linda Pastan, Carl Phillips, Spencer Reese, Jordan Rice, Jose Antonio Rodriguez, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Nicole Sealey, Diane Seuss, Charif Shanahan, Richard Siken, Danez Smith, Maggie Smith, Tracy K. Smith, William Stafford, Ruth Stone, Cole Swensen, Wislawa Szymborska, R. S. Thomas, Mosab Abu Toha, Natasha Trethewey, Jean Valentine, Ocean Vuong, Christian Wiman, Ross White, C. D. Wright, Charles Wright, Franz Wright, James Wright, Monica Youn, Adam Zagajewski
