The Traveler’s Vade Mecum

Everyman’s meets Twitter. Most anthologies gather poems already written. This is a crowd-sourced compilation of new poems, inspired by a tweet that linked the anthologist to an historical document. It’s a compendium of new works by 65 poets, including some of the most celebrated working today. For poetry lovers and lovers of history.

The original Traveler’s Vade Mecum, published in 1853, contained thousands of telegrams. Ross chose telegrams as titles for poems solicited from dozens of poets, including Bollingen Prize winner Frank Bidart and former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins to create a digital-age compendium of old-world poetics. Here are lyric poems, language poems, prose poems, found poems, haikus, pantoums, ekphrases, epistolary poems, acrostics, sonnets and mirror sonnets. Demonstrating the range of what poetry can do, this book provides a fascinating glimpse into the habits and social aspects of 19th century America?and shows how we have evolved 163 years later.