Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century
Edited By Michael Dumanis and Cate Marvin

Winner of the 2006 American Poetry Anthology Award

"Here are the opening salvos and refusals, the forms and fragments—the combustible texts—of a talented new generation. Legitimate Dangers is rich and varied, decisive, wide–ranging, and unexpected. It is explosive."

—Edward Hirsch

"Legitimate Dangers is a brilliant record of what is genius in contemporary American poetry. It reflects the questions, and modes of questioning that shape our present aesthetic values. What we have here are the terms and the direction of our future salvation."

—Claudia Rankine

In the tradition of such classics as Paul Carroll’s 1968 The Young American Poets and the 1985 The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets edited by Dave Smith and David Bottoms, this comprehensive, groundbreaking anthology offers a broad and representative introduction to some of the most exciting, fresh, ambitious, and original new voices on the contemporary poetry landscape by gathering together generous selections from the work of eighty–five younger American poets. The poets in this book were born after 1960, published their first book within the last ten years, and have no more than three books published. Some are already the heralded recipients of numerous prizes and awards, while others, who are making their first appearance in a poetry anthology, are quickly beginning to make significant contributions to the poetry of the twenty–first century. While these poets are extraordinarily diverse in their aesthetic sensibilities and approaches to craft, they are all distinguished by their inimitable voices, their virtuosity, their willingness to take meaningful risks in terms of form and content, an intellectual depth, an emotional honesty, and an ability to take the reader’s breath away.

The poets in this volume include:

Michael Dumanis was born in 1976 in Moscow, in the former Soviet Union, and grew up in Buffalo and Rochester, New York. He holds a BA from Johns Hopkins University, an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD from the University of Houston. His poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, New England Review, Verse, and many other journals. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the James Michener Foundation, and Yaddo, he has previously served as Poetry Editor of Gulf Coast and the Poetry Curator at Brazos Bookstore. He now lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, and is an Assistant Professor of English at Nebraska Wesleyan University.

Cate Marvin was born in 1969 in Washington, D.C. She holds a BA from Marlboro College, an MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston, an MFA in Fiction from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Her first book, World’s Tallest Disaster (Sarabande, 2001), was awarded the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize by Robert Pinsky and the 2002 Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University. She is an Assistant Professor of English at College of Staten Island, City University of New York.

Cate Marvin's second book, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in 2007.