Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford

Ann Stanford, David Trinidad, Maxine Scates, eds.

Within a decade of her death, each of Ann Stanford’s books had slipped out of print, and her final manuscript—completed just before she died—remained unpublished. Through the effort of two former students, poets Maxine Scates and David Trinidad, this creeping silence has finally ended with the publication of a major selected poems. Like her fellow Californian Robinson Jeffers, Stanford’s poems are consumed by natural landscape and lost nature. Yet she is an urban poet, a poet of Los Angeles, a poet who, during her lifetime, published ten books, including poetry, criticism, a translation of The Bhagavad Gita, and the first major anthology of women’s poetry.

ISBN: 9781556591587

Format: Paperback

About the Author

Ann Stanford was born in California in 1916. She attended Stanford University, earned her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, and taught at California State University, Northridge. She authored eight volumes of poetry, two verse plays, and a book-length study of Anne Bradstreet; she also translated the classic Sanskrit text The Bhagavad Gita, and edited The Women Poets in English, an anthology that gathered, for the first time, hundreds of years of poetry by women. Her own poems …

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About the Editor

David Trinidad’s books include Plasticville and Hand Over Heart: Poems 1981–1988. His poems have appeared in such magazines as The American Poetry Review, Harper’s, The Paris Review, and New American Writing, and have been included in numerous anthologies. He teaches poetry at Rutgers University, where he directs the Writers at Rutgers Reading Series; he is also a member of the core faculty of the MFA program at The New School. Originally from Los Angeles, Trinidad has lived in New York …

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About the Editor

Maxine Scates is the author of three books of poetry, Undone, Toluca Street, and Black Loam. She is co-editor, with David Trinidad, of Holding Our Own: The Selected Poetry of Ann Stanford. Her poems have been widely published in such journals as AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Ironwood, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her work has received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Oregon Book Award, the Lyre Prize, and a Pushcart Prize.

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Reviews

“Ann Stanford is a brilliant poet—one of the important writers of our time.” —Los Angeles Times

“Stanford’s work shouldn’t be neglected again.” —Booklist, starred review

“The editors are to be commended for their work!” —Deane R. Doolen, from a “Reader Response” card