The Selected Poems of Barbara Guest (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Barbara Guest (1920–2006) was one of the most formally inventive poets of postwar America. Moving from the witty, image-driven lyricism of her early years among Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, Guest moved toward an increasingly radical engagement with abstraction, visual art, and the materiality of language on the page. The Selected Poems of Barbara Guest, edited by Norma Cole and Joseph Shafer, traces the full arc of her invention. Drawing on Guest's entire oeuvre, from The Location of Things (1960) and Moscow Mansions (1973) through Fair Realism (1989), Defensive Rapture (1993), and the late, increasingly dispersed works Rocks on a Platter (Wesleyan, 1999) and The Red Gaze (Wesleyan, 2005), this volume shows a poet of the daring imagination. In her introduction, Elizabeth Willis argues that Guest's lifelong commitment to poetic risk positions her as one of the essential lyric experimentalists of twentieth-century American poetry. Guest continually reinvented what a poem could do. Here, her essential work is gathered in a single volume for a new generation of readers.