The Routledge Anthology of Cross-Gendered Verse is an entertaining journey through six centuries of poets writing in the voice of the opposite sex. Whether concerned with the playful or the tragic, the mundane or the mystical, each poem reveals a new depth in this unique and engaging anthology.
Poems both canonical and less traditional, from early modern England to present-day Africa, are in this remarkable collection. In a lively introduction and conclusion the editors explore the historical, cultural and theoretical context of the poems and of cross-gendered writing. They also provide an extensive bibliography of further reading.
Poetry lovers will delight in The Routledge Anthology of Cross-Gendered Verse. It will also be a valuable contribution to issues of gender, masks and voices in fields such as literary, gender and performance studies and creative writing.
Over eighty poets are represented here, including: Geoffrey Chaucer, John Donne, Mary Sidney Wroth, Aphra Behn, Alexander Pope, William Blake, Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Emily Bronte, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Suniti Namjoshi Ai, Yusef Kumunyakaa, Heather McHugh, Rita Dove.

Both male and female poets cross the gender line: men assume a female voice and women a male voice.
The Routledge Anthology of Cross-Gendered Verse is a fascinating collection of such poems, beginning in the age of Chaucer and working its way through to the present day. Together these poems offer a unique collection of masks, personae and voices, rife with issues of class, gender and race.
Alan Parker and Mark Willhardt, in bringing together these poems for the first time, assert an entirely new paradigm; a theoretical and practical reading of a heretofore undefined genre. They also provide a critical introduction which synthesizes traditional literary debates with current gender theory and, through the lens of historical, literary, social and theoretical issues, present a new way to interpret these 'ventriloquized' poems.
The Routledge Anthology of Cross-Gendered Verse provides a wealth of material for students and teachers of literature and gender studies. It is a compelling collection which will also appeal to poetry lovers.

Elephants & Butterflies combines the imaginative forays of The Vandals with the more meditative approach of Love Song with Motor Vehicles, Both wild and calm, boisterous and quiet, the poems in Elephants & Butterflies use surprise, song, and startling metaphor while allowing the ideas to simmer just below the surface of the lyric. The poems manage the difficult task of being highly readable and accessible, while still containing complex philosophical and personal knowledge. Alan Michael Parker (www.amparker.com) teaches at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. He also teaches at Queens University, where he is core faculty in the low-residency MFA program.

Poetry. Thirty years ago, when Dylan told us, 'the pump don't work 'cause the vandals took the handle,' who could know they'd be reconstellated here, with all their sweet weirdness and fierce wisdom, in Alan Michael Parker's remarkable and brilliant new collection of poems-- David St. John. In this book of tresspass and insubordination, Alan Michael Parker pillages all the tints and tones of diction on his way to an outrageous, courageous new poetics ... Rather than minding their manners, his poems unhinge asthetic decorum. They exist in the synapse and spark between word and object, mind and world, where meaning takes shape. Turbulent and musical, profound and absurd, they gesture toward the universal waves of farewell-- Alice Fulton.

"In Love Song with Motor Vehicles," Alan Michael Parker marshals a penetrating wit and sharp irony that mirrors that of Charles Simic and John Berryman. Parker's robust imagination explores the music in places poetry doesn't usually travel. His poems find their epiphanies early on, and, most strikingly, do not close at their endings but, rather, open.

Alan Michael Parker is the author of two books of poetry, and co-editor of two scholarly works, "The Routledge Anthology of Cross-Gendered Verse "and "Who's Who in 20th Century World Poetry "(Routledge Books). In 2000, his poems were included in all three major volumes of "younger American poets" (Carnegie Mellon University Press, University of Southern Illinois Press, and University of New England Press).