The City That Never Sleeps

As Shawkat M. Toorawa writes in his preface, "Not every poet loves New York, but each and every one is mesmerized by it." Indeed, with its protean mix of cultures, languages, natives, transplants, and exiles, New York City seems to exert a special hold over the poetic imagination. The sixty-one poems, extracts of poems, and song lyrics collected here reflect a wide range of responses to New York, both positive and negative, insider and outsider. Arranged in four sections--Morning, Day, Evening, and Night--the collection not only gives the reader the opportunity to experience twenty-four hours in New York through poetry, but also puts poems and poets in conversation, debate, and even occasionally in conflict with one another.

Rather than attempting to be exhaustive or definitive, this volume juxtaposes well-known poets and lyricists such as Maya Angelou, Bob Dylan, Denise Levertov, and Walt Whitman with important and emerging voices such as Valzhyna Mort, Purvi Shah, and Melanie Rehak, as well as poets less frequently included in such anthologies, such as Mahmoud Darwish, Anna Margolin, and Nicanor Parra. The result is a collection of poems that vary in their aesthetics, tone, mood, and subject, and thereby reflect the vexed and manifold nature of their subject--New York, the city that never sleeps.