Saints of Hysteria

David Trinidad is the author of more than a dozen books, including Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera, Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems, The Late Show, and Plasticville, a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He has received awards from The Fund for Poetry and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and his work has appeared in numerous periodicals and several anthologies, including Best American Poetry, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, and Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology.Denise Duhamel is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including: Blowout, Ka-Ching!, and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems. Duhamel has received grants and awards from numerous organizations, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and she served as the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2013. She teaches creative writing and literature at Florida International University and lives in Hollywood, Florida.Maureen Seaton has authored fourteen poetry collections, both solo and collaborative--most recently, Stealth, with Sam Ace; Sinéad O’Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds, with Neil de la Flor; and Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen--and a memoir, Sex Talks to Girls, winner of the Lambda Literary Award.

Collaborative poetry -- poems written by one or more people -- grew out of word games played by French surrealists in the 1920s. It was taken up a decade later by Japan's Vou Club and then by Charles Henri Ford, who created the chainpoem, composed by poets who mailed their lines all over the world. After WW II, the Beat writers' collaborative experiments resulted in the famous "Pull My Daisy." The concept was embraced in the 1970s by feminist poets as a way to find a collective female voice. Yet, for all its rich history, virtually no collections of collaborative poetry exist. This exhilarating anthology remedies the omission. Featured are poems by two, four, even as many as 18 people in a dizzying array of forms: villanelles to ghazals, sonnets to somonkas, pantoums to haiku, even quizzes, questionnaires, and other nonliterary forms. Collaborators' notes accompany many of the poems, giving a fascinating glimpse into the creative process.