Edited by Daniel Nester
The first anthology of the poetic form of sestina. Here, 100 writers—from John Ashbery to David Lehman to Matt Madden and Patricia Smith—offer their sestinas. A 39-line poetic form, the sestina is the one form all poets agree can exist in a free-verse world, as formalists and avant-gardes love sestinas for their ornate, maddeningly complicated rules of word repetition.