This book is a living anthology of commentaries on poems, as well as more extended essays on literary production, reception and form, written by undergraduate students at New Hampshire’s public liberal arts institution, Keene State College.

We are interested in sharing the excitement and controversies among readers and writers of poetry as they wrestle with broader questions about language, culture and imagination. To this end, we offer comments on both exemplary and representative poems that have shaped the tradition of writers and readers, as well as discussions of the poems that have surfaced more recently as a result of archival and editorial work. Our efforts are at the same time engaged with poetics, including the critical and theoretical conversation concerned with American poetry, the historical and cultural contexts in which poetry has been written, and the diverse ways poems have been (and continue to be) read.