The Incredible Sestina Anthology

More than 800 years after its invention in medieval France, the sestina survives and thrives in English. A fixed, 39-line poetic form of six, six-line stanzas followed by a three-line stanza called an envoi, where words appear at the end of the line in a prescribed order, the sestina is a form of poetry that all camps agree can exist in a free verse world. Formalists and avant-gardes alike love the sestina for its ornate, maddeningly complicated rule of repetition. For The Incredible Sestinas Anthology, the first-ever anthology of this form, editor Daniel Nester has gathered more than 100 writers--from John Ashbery and David Lehman to Matt Madden and Patricia Smith--to show the sestina in its many incarnations: prose and comic sestinas, collaborative and double sestinas, from masters of the form to brilliant one-off attempts, all to show its evolution and the possibilities of this dynamic form.