Defining the current moment in poetry is no easy task; more so for the fact that poetry has entered a constant state of redefining itself. The marked resistance to a dominating aesthetic makes this era particularly difficult to pin down. And with apocryphal proclamations (“poetry is dead”) being as common as formal innovations, the task of understanding where today’s poetry fits in literary history and who is writing it is incredibly loaded.

Wesleyan’s new anthology, American Poets in the 21st Century, takes up this mantle. Edited by Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell, the work of 13 poets is exhaustively examined via poems, poetic statements, scholarly essays and sound recordings. Showcased are Joshua Clover, Stacy Doris, Peter Gizzi, Kenneth Goldsmith, Myung Mi Kim, Mark Levine, Tracie Morris, Mark Nowak, D.A. Powell, Juliana Spahr, Karen Volkman, Susan Wheeler and Kevin Young. The roster represents the extremely varied spectrum of poets writing today, from Tracie Morris’s sound performances to Kenneth Goldsmith’s procedural retyping of the newspaper.

The editors trace the lineage of these poets to the grand fork in recent poetic history: the language vs. lyric impulses. The tension between process-based and persona-based work is something with which each of these poets contends, and often reunifies in a startling hybrid aesthetic. In her introduction, Sewell says, “Almost all [of these poets] treat the speaking subject as provisional, expressing doubts about a lyric poetry that dramatizes the self’s fixed relationship to the world.” This drama is at the heart of the anthology, and becomes the logic for structuring it. The poets are arranged along a trajectory of the lyrical ego, ranging from identity to identity politics to identity evacuation, with the subject constantly being held in question; poked, prodded and ultimately disrupted.

The fact that this has been published by an academic press and edited by professors (with nearly every contributor listing degrees and professorships in the bio) perhaps most directly frames the issue at the core of poetry today: What does academy-based poetry mean for the future of the genre? At times, the critical essays felt like a crutch for some of the more inaccessible work. But with the range presented here, it’s clear that there’s still life stirring in the poetry world. Writers are continuing to engage with the boundaries of form and genre, and some in this anthology have managed to find highly unique expressions. American Poetry accomplishes an ambitious investigation into what just might represent poetry today.