Of the many poetry anthologies I've seen come out in response to the U.S. political events of 2016, Indolent Books' Poems in the Aftermath stands out to me as one of the most diverse, featuring poets with a broad range of ages and identities, hailing from many walks of life. It's also (deliberately) one of the most visceral/raw of these anthologies, since one of its inclusion criteria was that all the poems included had to have been written within 72 days of the event to which they were responding. My poem "The Morning After the Election" appears within these pages, alongside poems by Charles Bernstein, Denise Duhamel, Cornelius Eady, Timothy Liu, and others. Poems in here that I especially liked include Ed Madden's "9th November 2016, The Gates," a quasi-sonnet that sort of draws back from the large-scale political drama to limn an intimate narrative that resonates with exquisite subtlety with the background events; and Jason Schneiderman's "Anger," an epic dissection of an emotion, perhaps the single prevailing emotion of our times. Here is a link to Schneiderman's poem: http://www.indolentbooks.com/transiti...
I have poems in two other anthologies that came out around the same time as this one, Lost Horse Press's Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse and Red Hen Press's Two-Countries: U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents. Lost Horse Press's anthology, like Indolent Books', was put together in direct response to the 2016 election. In contrast, Red Hen Press's had been in the works for a long time, and it was only coincidental that it was published when it did, but after it appeared, people realized it spoke with an uncanny directness to the altered tenor of the times as well.
Each of the three anthologies takes a different slant on things. Nasty Women Poets collects poems by women poets about womanhood that, regardless of their date of first composition, can be viewed as speaking in retort to the anti-woman attitudes of some people in positions of power now. Two-Countries reminds us of the essential humanity of immigrants, from the point-of-view of some of the people who know them most intimately -- their children -- at a time when anti-immigrant attitudes seem to be resurging. Poems in the Aftermath reaches across all American demographic groups, placing no restrictions on the identities of the contributing poets to assemble a polyphonic chorus of voices going on the record with their most raw, vulnerable, uncensored thoughts and feelings on the times. I value all three anthologies in different ways.
I have poems in two other anthologies that came out around the same time as this one, Lost Horse Press's Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse and Red Hen Press's Two-Countries: U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents . Lost Horse Press's anthology, like Indolent Books', was put together in direct response to the 2016 election. In contrast, Red Hen Press's had been in the works for a long time, and it was only coincidental that it was published when it did, but after it appeared, people realized it spoke with an uncanny directness to the altered tenor of the times as well.
Each of the three anthologies takes a different slant on things. Nasty Women Poets collects poems by women poets about womanhood that, regardless of their date of first composition, can be viewed as speaking in retort to the anti-woman attitudes of some people in positions of power now. Two-Countries reminds us of the essential humanity of immigrants, from the point-of-view of some of the people who know them most intimately -- their children -- at a time when anti-immigrant attitudes seem to be resurging. Poems in the Aftermath reaches across all American demographic groups, placing no restrictions on the identities of the contributing poets to assemble a polyphonic chorus of voices going on the record with their most raw, vulnerable, uncensored thoughts and feelings on the times. I value all three anthologies in different ways.