And Know this Place: Poetry of Indiana

Edited by Jenny Kander and C. E. Greer, And Know This Place: Poetry of Indiana, features the work of 116 poets who live or who have lived in the state long enough to acquire a sense of the place. The book is the first collection of Indiana poetry to appear for more than a hundred years, with the last major anthology, Poets and Poetry of Indiana, published in 1900. The list of poets in this volume include such notable figures from the past as James Whitcomb Riley, William Vaughn Moody, Jessamyn West, and Marguerite Young, as well as such modern masters as Etheridge Knight, Mary Ellen Solt, Jared Carter, and Norbert Krapf. In addition, the book has a foreword, An Extraordinary Legacy, written by Roger Mitchell, former director of the creative writing program at Indiana University, where he held the Ruth Lilly Poetry Chair. As Kander and Greer note in the book s preface: Our central criterion for selection was quality of the writing, and we chose those poems which cover the spectrum of experience in both place and time, in settings from city streets to wilderness tracks, covering the state from Goshen in the north to Floyd s Knobs by the Ohio River, and from Gessie on the Illinois line to Cottage Grove a hundred and fifty miles east.

Hardcover.  283 pages. 2011, Indiana Historical Society Press. Various contributors.