Spaar, Lisa / Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson

Our least predictable, most contradictory founder, a scholar, builder, inventor, revolutionary optimist, liberator, oppressor, skeptic, and sometime self-deceiver, Jefferson--along with the places he planned--gives these contemporary poets an inexhaustible subject and a multiplicity of roads to approach it. Here are his roses, his pomologies, his hypocrisies, his horses, his bees, his diaries, his families, in monostichs and understatements and rhymeless tercets and elaborate qualifications and quite a lot of ways to look at the contemporary language--and at the language that he would have used, and at the house and grounds where he--and his loved ones, and his ideals, and the people he claimed to own--also lived. 'Every story begins here, ' writes one poet, Tracy K. Smith; this various collection invites us to ask how she might be right. --Stephen Burt, Harvard University

9780813938509
Hardcover
February, 2016

Spaar, Lisa / Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson