More than 800 years after its invention in medieval France, the sestina survives and thrives in
English. A fixed 39-line poetic form with of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a three-
line stanza known as an envoi, tornada, or tercet, the sestina is the one form of poetry that poets
from all camps agree can exist in a free verse world. Formalists and avant-gardes love sestinas
for their ornate, maddeningly complicated rules of word repetition. For The Incredible Sestinas
Anthology, editor Daniel Nester has gathered more than 100 writers-from John Ashbery to
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.