If you’ve read the back of a poetry book recently, you’ve probably learned that many contemporary poets are “reimagining the possibilities of lyric poetry,” “challenging the conventional boundaries of poetic form,” or otherwise transgressing and subverting the supposedly rigid limits of the lyric poem. This sort of rhetoric has been applied to prose poetry, to narrative poetry, and to professedly political poetry. The language of subversion has also become increasingly common in discussions of poetry that does not defy our expectations in any obvious way. Now, it is readily applied to first books of poetry as a form of high praise.
