John D'Agata, ed., _The Lost Origins of the Essay_

I'M GOING TO say that this was the best book I read in 2009. Not a meaningful statement, perhaps, seeing as the book is an historical anthology, and the bulk of its contents are pieces long acknowledged as masterpieces by writers long acknowledged as masters -- Heraclitus, Sei Shonagon, Basho, Montaigne, Swift, Blake, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and so on. But since even these long-familiar texts gain new resonance by being in each other's company, since the pieces new to me are astonishing (excerpts from Yourcenar's Fires and Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, both of which I promptly ordered) and the right contemporary pieces chosen with unerring instinct (Lisa Robertson's "Seven Walks," Kamau Braithwaite's "Trench Town Rock"), I nonetheless have to say it -- best book I read in 2009.

D'Agata's previous anthology, The Next American Essay, was one of those anthologies that changed the landscape -- like Rothenberg's Technicians of the Sacred or Silliman's In the American Tree, or, to shift from literature to music, Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music or Lenny Kaye's Nuggets. Now, if you can imagine Ron Silliman following up In the American Tree with an even fatter book of the historical precursors to language poetry, imagining a kind of tradition that language poetry could be seen as belonging to -- how amazing would that have been? That's how amazing The Lost Origins of the Essay is. Indeed, some of the same writers who might have been in an historical anthology of language poetry are here -- Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Christopher Smart, Francis Ponge.

By showing the next essay was always already here, D'Agata has immeasurably advanced his claims for it, it seems to me. It's a whole new ballgame.