I love poetry with every fibre of my being ... but anthologies don't make sense to me. But what they do for me is introduce me to new poets. I usually do find a few poems that excite me and the essays that preface this volume are superb. Lehman took the time to talk down the censorship that was starting to take way (just two short years ago) and for that matter the editor, Major Jackson, also acknowledged that he would stand by his decisions, as they were subjective on the poems he chose. My tho...

Poetry is hit or miss with me and it often is more about the moment I’m reading a poem than about the poem itself. Some of the poems I starred as being ones I liked I re-read and wondered why I liked them. It’s mystifying. One I did like though, "Four Marys" by Paisley Rekda, I still liked when I re-read it. Which is promising since the 2020 edition is edited by her. Onward!

I read the 2017 installation a few years ago and recently got the 2019 installation because I realized I got a lot out of the collection. This type of collection is a safer way to engage with poetry than author-specific collections, many of which have been disappointing compared to the first few poems I encountered from the authors. Usually I appreciate the forewords in these "Best of..." type collections, but I found this year’s to be underwhelming: one a limp screed against political correctne...

Personally, I usually find that poetry books have 10-25% memorable, coherent poems, and that the other 90-75% are too personal to be clear, and/or too dramatic and self-praising to be enjoyable. This book was more 50-50 in its choices of poems, and that was enjoyable. There were five or six poems I will read again and keep in mind for my English classes (I teach high school) and my own reflection: Joshua Bennett. “America Will Be” Gabriela Garcia. “Guantanamera”Camille Guthrie. “Virgil, Hey”Majo...

What a stupid and pathetic excuse of scholarly writing this whole volume was. I do not know if Lehman is forced to choose Major Jackson, whose collection is so horrible (strangely, the only poem I liked was his, and what's more strange is that he added his poem to the collection).Please avoid The Best American Poetry series. I have so far read 2015,16,17,18,19,21, and only 2016 is worth reading for a handful of poems. Americans are BAD at poetry, and the people choosing the poems are either so b...

Funny, of course, a collection of poetry will include all of the topics I listed as "shelves." These are the very stuff of poetry. I'll list some of my favorite poets and poems on my first trip through this "Best of" collection, so that I can come back to them."Phase One" by Dilruba Ahmed a poem about forgiveness, the poet's forgiveness, not of herself, I think, but of another...although who the other might be is only implied. The poem ends" for treating your mother with contempt when she deserv...

I was hoping 2018's lackluster Best American Poetry was just a blip in the radar, but I found myself not enjoying BAP 2019 much, either. Major Jackson's intro was interesting—many people find poetry confusing, but poetry can be meaningful and challenging without being "precious" or obfuscated. I'm a progressive person but I think BAP has become too much about diversity picks and liberal beliefs (I've noticed the past several installments have authors mentioning some varation of "orange man bad"

It's hard to review poetry I suppose. It seems even more subjective than prose, and it can certainly be more abstract, loose, and open for interpretation. Nonetheless, some poems may strike a chord, and some may not. For me, this was a decent collection. Some poems, as Major Jackson emphasizes in his flowery, long-winded, but thoughtful introduction (which I will soon excerpt), do indeed embody that complexity and difficulty, the shape and contours of our deep humanity and aloneness, the words t...

This year's collection is a decidedly mixed bag with some stellar moments amidst a lot of anger over the political climate. A lot of familiar names from the contemporary poetry world. [I received an advanced reader's copy through Netgalley.]

I picked this up because I don't read enough poetry, frankly. I wanted a "sampler" to get a feel for what poetry is like these days. Although this was edited amid a confusing time in America, where practicalities and political ideas seemed to be pushing back against arts and sciences, against what's better for most, there really is a diversity of writers and work presented here. One I really liked was the playful and arch "Who Knows One" by Jane Shore that originally ran in the New Yorker, reall...

Wild to me that I’ve read enough poetry in the last 2 years that I actually recognized some of the poets in this collection. Some gems in here but skimmed most of themFaves from new-to-me poets: A Brief History Of A Future Apocalypse (Rebecca Lindenberg; “A heart sorrow-whipped and cowering will still nose its rib cage to be petted.”), Hive (Kevin Young), Four Marys (Paisley Rekdal), Central Park (Catherine Barnett), Skin-Light (Natalie Diaz), Afternoons at the Lake (Fleda Brown), Dark and Lonel...

I have to give this anthology 5 stars because the best in it is surely 5 stars, and if not to me, to someone else. My main source of conflict is that I find I need the series editor or even this volume editor to define their use of the word "American." I assumed USA, since that is the fairly standard use of American on its own, while acknowledging that this has always been problematic. But two fairly prominent Canadians appear in these pages - Margaret Atwood and Leonard Cohen. Margaret is known...

There are many reasons to read an annual collection like this. Foremost is probably the desire to read some great poems. Another is to see what condition contemporary poetry is in. A third is to discover new voices. And a fourth is to see what is on the minds of poets today. This year's collection scores highly in all four areas. There were many good and a few astonishingly brilliant poems in this book. I ordered two books by people I had never heard of before. Jane Shore's poem "Who Knows One",...

Notes on my favorite poems of the collection:"Phase One" by Dilruba Ahmed (pgs. 1-3). Forgiveness. The enjambment & repetition lending itself to layered meanings. "For growing / a capacity for love that is great / but matched only, perhaps, / by your loneliness" (lines 49-52)."America Will Be" by Joshua Bennett (pgs. 9-10). Hard-hitting. Elicited a deep, visceral emotional response. The lack of punctuation + enjambment and resulting the thematic implications. Lines like "between us. He is 68 yea...

The 2019 edition of The Best American Poetry begins with an impassioned introduction by David Lehman on political correctness in today's society. Major Jackson is the guest editor this year and poses the theme of artistic dignity vs street cred. With both of the introductions, I was expecting the poetry to follow suit. The poetry, however, doesn't seem to have the punch I was expecting from the introductions. Although very modern in form and seemingly less conservative, although not less controv...

When you get right down to it, the poetry we enjoy -- the poetry that speaks to us -- is different for everyone. This year's BAP demonstrates just how true this is. With this in mind, I hereby express my deepest condolences for sticking this book with a devastating two-star rating. Like I said, it's a matter of taste. And I'm not so finicky as to not see the value in these poems. In fact, Alan Shapiro's "Encore" damn near brought me to tears. There were other poems that I thought were good, in t...

This is a marvelous contemporary collection of poems written by a wide range of American poets. Varieties of form and theme and a broad sampling of diverse literary traditions energize this collection. Some old favorites like Juan Felipe Herrera, Natasha Trethewey, and Jane Hirshfield are represented along with lesser-known poets. Images of youth, grief, extinction, nature, borders, spirit, and history create a collage of the American cultural and creative melting pot. This anthology makes an id...

Best american poetry pulls different poems from many different authors' work. Because of this, there are many different styles of poetry. Unfortunately, I only enjoyed a few of the poems in this collection. Most of them were harder to understand. This should have been expected because most of these poems are from a completely different era of poetry. It was pretty hard to find the meaning behind each poem because the line breaks were so scattered or because the language was almost shakespearean

Every year, I try to read a poem a day, and a collection like this one is very good for that. Though there are definitely less than 365 poems in this book (366 since I started to read it in 2020), I didn't follow my every day goal very well. I never know how to catalog it when I've read it over two years, but I guess since I finished it in 2021, it'll go here. I enjoyed this collection a lot. I love seeing the variety of tones, styles, and types of poems that have been written from the skilled p...

I read one poem a day from this collection in 2019, and then I reread them/author's commentary at the same time. The length I spent with this book makes it difficult to rate; I'm only recently becoming more familiar with contemporary poetry, so it is also difficult for me to comment on the inclusions of the book. certainly didn't enjoy all of these poems and got the feeling many were included not for the quality of the work but for the fact that they are well known names, I enjoyed it overall. J...