Renowned poet Mary Jo Salter, whose command of verse forms and high intelligence is universally acknowledged, selects the poems for the 2024 edition of The Best American Poetry, a 'best' anthology that really lives up to its title (Chicago Tribune).

The Best American Poetry series has been one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world (Academy of American Poets) since 1988. Each volume presents a curated selection of the year's most brilliant, striking, and innovative poems, with comments from the poets themselves offering unique insight into their work.

Here, guest editor Mary Jo Salter, whose own poems display a sublime wit driven by a compulsion to confront the inexplicable (James Longenbach), has picked seventy-five poems that capture the dynamism of American poetry today. The series and guest editors contribute valuable introductory essays that assess the current state of American poetry, and this year's edition is certain to capture the attention of both Best American Poetry loyalists and newcomers to the most important poetry anthology of our time.

Award-winning poet Elaine Equi selects the poems for the 2023 edition of The Best American Poetry, a 'best' anthology that really lives up to its title (Chicago Tribune).

Since its debut in 1988, The Best American Poetry series has been one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world (Academy of American Poets). Each volume presents some of the year's most striking and innovative poems, with comments from the poets themselves offering insight into their work.

For The Best American Poetry 2023 guest editor Elaine Equi, whose own work is deft, delicate [and] subversive (August Kleinzahler), has made astute choices representing contemporary poetry at its most dynamic. The result is an exceptionally coherent vision of American poetry today.

Including valuable introductory essays contributed by the series and guest editors, the 2023 volume is sure to capture the attention of both Best American Poetry loyalists and newcomers to the series.

Renowned poet Mary Jo Salter, whose command of verse forms and high intelligence is universally acknowledged, selects the poems for the 2024 edition of The Best American Poetry, a 'best' anthology that really lives up to its title (Chicago Tribune).

The Best American Poetry series has been one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world (Academy of American Poets) since 1988. Each volume presents a curated selection of the year's most brilliant, striking, and innovative poems, with comments from the poets themselves offering unique insight into their work.

Here, guest editor Mary Jo Salter, whose own poems display a sublime wit driven by a compulsion to confront the inexplicable (James Longenbach), has picked seventy-five poems that capture the dynamism of American poetry today. The series and guest editors contribute valuable introductory essays that assess the current state of American poetry, and this year's edition is certain to capture the attention of both Best American Poetry loyalists and newcomers to the most important poetry anthology of our time.

Here is the eagerly awaited new edition of The Oxford Book of American Poetry brought completely up to date and dramatically expanded by poet David Lehman. It is a rich, capacious volume, featuring the work of more than 200 poets-almost three times as many as the 1976 edition. With a succinct and often witty head note introducing each author, it is certain to become the definitive anthology of American poetry for our time.

Lehman has gathered together all the works one would expect to find in a landmark collection of American poetry, from Whitman's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry to Stevens's The Idea of Order at Key West, and from Eliot's The Waste Land to Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But equally important, the editor has significantly expanded the range of the anthology. The book includes not only writers born since the previous edition, but also many fine poets overlooked in earlier editions or little known in the past but highly deserving of attention. The anthology confers legitimacy on the Objectivist poets; the so-called Proletariat poets of the 1930s; famous poets who fell into neglect or were the victims of critical backlash (Edna St. Vincent Millay); poets whose true worth has only become clear with the passing of time (Weldon Kees). Among poets missing from Richard Ellmann's 1976 volume but published here are W. H. Auden, Charles Bukowski, Donald Justice, Carolyn Kizer, Kenneth Koch, Stanley Kunitz, Emma Lazarus, Mina Loy, Howard Moss, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, James Schuyler, Elinor Wylie, and Louis Zukosky. Many more women are represented: outstanding poets such as Josephine Jacobsen, Josephine Miles, May Swenson. Numerous African-American poets receive their due, and unexpected figures such as the musicians Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Robert Johnson have a place in this important work.

This stunning collection redefines the great canon of American poetry from its origins in the 17th century right up to the present. It is a must-have anthology for anyone interested in American literature and a book that is sure to be consulted, debated, and treasured for years to come.

A prose poem is a poem written in prose rather than verse. But what does that really mean? Is it an indefinable hybrid? An anomaly in the history of poetry? Are the very words prose poem an oxymoron? This groundbreaking anthology edited by celebrated poet David Lehman, editor of The Best American Poetry series, traces the form in all its dazzling variety from Poe and Emerson to Auden and Ashbery and on, right up to the present. In his brilliant and lucid introduction, Lehman defines the prose poem, summarizes its French heritage, and outlines its history in the United States. Included here are important works from masters of American literature, as well as poems by contemporary mainstays and emerging talents who demonstrate why the form has become an irresistible option for the practicing poet today. Great American Prose Poems is a marvelous collection, a must-have for anyone interested in the current state of the art.

Matthew Zapruder picks the poems for the 2022 edition of The Best American Poetry, a 'best' anthology that really lives up to its title (Chicago Tribune).

Since 1988, The Best American Poetry series has been one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world (Academy of American Poets). Each volume presents a selection of the year's most brilliant, striking, and innovative poems, with comments from the poets themselves lending insight into their work.

For The Best American Poetry 2022 guest editor Matthew Zapruder, whose own poems are for everyone, everywhere...democratic in [their] insights and feelings (NPR), has selected the seventy-five new poems that represent American poetry today at its most dynamic. Chosen from print and online magazines, from the popular to the little-known, the selection is sure to capture the attention of both Best American Poetry loyalists and newcomers to the series.

The series and guest editors contribute valuable introductory essays that illuminate the current state of American poetry.

The 2021 edition of the leading collection of contemporary American poetry is guest edited by the former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, providing renewed proof that this is a 'best' anthology that really lives up to its title (Chicago Tribune).

Since 1988, The Best American Poetry series has been one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world (Academy of American Poets). Each volume presents a choice of the year's most memorable poems, with comments from the poets themselves lending insight into their work. The guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2021 is Tracy K. Smith, the former United States Poet Laureate, whose own poems are, Toi Derricotte's words, beautiful and serene in their surfaces with an underlying sense of an unknown vastness. In The Best American Poetry 2021, Smith has selected a distinguished array of works both vast and beautiful by such important voices as Henri Cole, Billy Collins, Louise Erdrich, Nobel laureate Louise Glück, Terrance Hayes, and Kevin Young.

Robert Pinsky, distinguished poet and man of letters, selects the top 100 poems from twenty-five years of The Best American Poetry

This special edition celebrates twenty-five years of the Best American Poetry series, which has become an institution. From its inception in 1988, it has been hotly debated, keenly monitored, ardently advocated (or denounced), and obsessively scrutinized. Each volume consists of seventy-five poems chosen by a major American poet acting as guest editor--from John Ashbery in 1988 to Mark Doty in 2012, with stops along the way for such poets as Charles Simic, A. R. Ammons, Louise Glück, Adrienne Rich, Billy Collins, Heather McHugh, and Kevin Young. Out of the 1,875 poems that have appeared in The Best American Poetry, here are 100 that Robert Pinsky, the distinguished poet and man of letters, has chosen for this milestone edition.

A landmark work of cultural history that tells the story of how four young poets, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch, reinvented literature and turned New York into the art capital of the world.

Greenwich Village, New York, circa 1951. Every night, at a rundown tavern with a magnificent bar called the Cedar Tavern, an extraordinary group or painters, writers, poets, and hangers-on arrive to drink, argue, tell jokes, fight, start affairs, and bang out a powerful new aesthetic. Their style is playful, irreverent, tradition-shattering, and brilliant. Out of these friendships, and these conversations, will come the works of art and poetry that will define New York City as the capital of world culture--abstract expressionism and the New York School of Poetry.

A richly detailed portrait of one of the great movements in American arts and letters, The Last Avant-Garde covers the years 1948-1966 and focuses on four fast friends--the poets Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch. Lehman brings to vivid life the extraordinary creative ferment of the time and place, the relationship of great friendship to art, and the powerful influence that a group of visual artisits--especially Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and Fairfield Porter--had on the literary efforts of the New York School.

The Last Avant-Garde is both a definitive and lively view of a quintessentially American aesthetic and an exploration of the dynamics of creativity.

From Sherlock Holmes to Sam Spade; Nick and Nora Charles to Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin; Harry Lime to Gilda, Madeleine Elster, and other femmes fatales--crime and crime solving in fiction and film captivate us. Why do we keep returning to Agatha Christie's ingenious puzzles and Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled murder mysteries? What do spy thrillers teach us, and what accounts for the renewed popularity of morally ambiguous noirs? In The Mysterious Romance of Murder, the poet and critic David Lehman explores a wide variety of outstanding books and movies--some famous (The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity), some known mainly to aficionados--with style, wit, and passion.

Lehman revisits the smoke-filled jazz clubs from the classic noir films of the 1940s, the iconic set pieces that defined Hitchcock's America, the interwar intrigue of Eric Ambler's best fictions, and the intensity of attraction between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. He also considers the evocative elements of noir--cigarettes, cocktails, wisecracks, and jazz standards--and offers five original noir poems (including a pantoum inspired by the 1944 film Laura) and ironic astrological profiles of Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich, and Graham Greene. Written by a connoisseur with an uncanny feel for the language and mood of mystery, espionage, and noir, The Mysterious Romance of Murder will delight fans of the genre and newcomers alike.

The latest installment of the yearly anthology of contemporary American poetry that has achieved brand-name status in the literary world.

Guest edited by Terence Winch--NEA Fellow and editor of the pick of the week on the Best American Poetry blog--the 2025 edition marks a poignant farewell to series editor David Lehman, celebrating more than three decades of poetic excellence.

For thirty-eight years, The Best American Poetry series has won widespread acclaim as the nation's most influential and vital poetry anthology. BAP, which has inspired similar ventures abroad, has garnered plaudits for its ability to capture the zeitgeist of American poetry. This year's anthology is guest edited by the esteemed poet and songwriter Terence Winch, who brings to the task his work as a musician and poetry editor as well as his many years of experience as head of publications at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. Winch, known for his inspired selections on the Best American Poetry blog, curates a vibrant array of compelling voices.

The Best American Poetry 2025 is a landmark edition that not only showcases the finest contemporary American poetry but also honors David Lehman's achievement as the anthology's founding editor. The list of editors is a who's who of US poetry elites, writes Oxford professor of poetry A. E. Stallings. And behind it all, the poet David Lehman, the series editor, has labored quietly and diligently ensuring its continuity and continued relevance.

Lehman's vision and dedication have shaped these collections into much-anticipated annual events, sparking lively discussion, controversy on occasion, and always a jubilant affirmation of modern American poetry. This year's edition stands as a testament to David Lehman's legacy--and to the enduring power of poetry.

The 2020 edition of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Paisley Rekdal, the award-winning poet and author of Nightingale, proving that this is a 'best' anthology that really lives up to its title (Chicago Tribune).

Since 1988, The Best American Poetry anthology series has been one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world (Academy of American Poets). Each volume in the series presents some of the year's most remarkable poems and poets.

Now, the 2020 edition is guest edited by Utah's Poet Laureate Paisely Rekdal, called a poet of observation and history...[who] revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries by the Los Angeles Times. In The Best American Poetry 2020, she has selected a fascinating array of work that speaks eloquently to the contraries of our present moment in time.

The 2019 edition of The Best American Poetry--one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world (Academy of American Poets)--now guest edited by Major Jackson, award-winning poet and poetry editor of the Harvard Review.

Since 1988, The Best American Poetry has been the leading anthology of contemporary American poetry. The Washington Post said of the 2017 edition, The poems...have a wonderful cohesion and flow, as if each contributes to a larger narrative about life today...While readers may question some of the selections--an annual sport with this series--most will find much that resonates, including the insightful author notes at the back of the anthology.

The state of the world has inspired many to write poetry, and to read it--to share all the rage, beauty, and every other thing under the sun in the way that only poetry can. Now the foremost anthology of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Major Jackson, the poet and editor who, makes poems that rumble and rock (poet Dorianne Laux). This brilliant 2019 edition includes some of the year's most defining, striking, and innovative poems and poets.

Guest edited by Terence Winch--NEA Fellow and editor of the pick of the week on the Best American Poetry blog--the 2025 edition marks a poignant farewell to series editor David Lehman, celebrating more than three decades of poetic excellence.

For thirty-eight years, The Best American Poetry series has won widespread acclaim as the nation's most influential and vital poetry anthology. BAP, which has inspired similar ventures abroad, has garnered plaudits for its ability to capture the zeitgeist of American poetry. This year's anthology is guest edited by the esteemed poet and songwriter Terence Winch, who brings to the task his work as a musician and poetry editor as well as his many years of experience as head of publications at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. Winch, known for his inspired selections on the Best American Poetry blog, curates a vibrant array of compelling voices.

The Best American Poetry 2025 is a landmark edition that not only showcases the finest contemporary American poetry but also honors David Lehman's achievement as the anthology's founding editor. The list of editors is a who's who of US poetry elites, writes Oxford professor of poetry A. E. Stallings. And behind it all, the poet David Lehman, the series editor, has labored quietly and diligently ensuring its continuity and continued relevance.

Lehman's vision and dedication have shaped these collections into much-anticipated annual events, sparking lively discussion, controversy on occasion, and always a jubilant affirmation of modern American poetry. This year's edition stands as a testament to David Lehman's legacy--and to the enduring power of poetry.

This eagerly awaited volume in the celebrated Best American Poetry series reflects the latest developments and represents the last word in poetry today. Paul Muldoon, the distinguished poet and international literary eminence, has selected -- from a pool of several thousand published candidates -- the top seventy-five poems of the year. The all-consuming interests of American poetry are the all-consuming interests of poetry all over, writes Muldoon in his incisive introduction to the volume.
The Best American Poetry 2005 features a superb company of artists ranging from established masters of the craft, such as John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, and Charles Wright, to rising stars like Kay Ryan, Tony Hoagland, and Beth Ann Fennelly.
With insightful comments from the poets elucidating their work, and series editor David Lehman's perspicacious foreword addressing the state of the art, The Best American Poetry 2005 is indispensable for every poetry enthusiast.

Started in 1997 by poets David Lehman and Star Black, the KGB Bar poetry series is widely recognized as the hottest and perhaps the best reading series in New York. Located in the hip East Village KGB Bar, these Monday-night readings boast a fantastic variety and quality of internationally known poets from Charles Simic, Molly Peacock, and Katha Pollit to Marie Howe, Mark Strand, and Yusef Komunyakaa.

Now Lehman and Black have gathered work from the first three seasons into a wonderful anthology. Together with a generous supply of photographs and anecdotes from contributors on the most memorable thing ever to happen to them at a poetry reading, this unique book of poems reflects the amazing variety and energy of poetry today.

The poems range in style from Douglas. Crase's Astropastoral (I have seen you on every horizon, how you are stored/And encouraged and brought to the brim/Until the round bounds of one planet could not hold you in) to Anne Porter's Five Wishes. Offering a wide window into contemporary poetry, The KGB Bar Book of Poems debunks the myth of poetry's ivory tower to reveal the kind of raw, candid reading experience that truly brings poetry to life.The pre-Russian revolutionary locale gives the gathering a committed, not to say conspiratorial air, and it somehow manages to foster a true sense of camaraderie, experimentation, and open exchange between readers and audience. I've seldom enjoyed an evening of poetry and friendship more.--Jonathan Galassi (President of The Academy of American Poets), the KGB Bar poetry series

Every Monday night, the KGB Bar's poetry readings are packed to overflowing. Pulitzer Prize winners bum cigarettes from grad studentsand martini glasses are refilled between readings, while the best poets in the country share their latest work with a rapt audience.

The KGB Bar is the sexiest and arguably the best venue for poetry in New York City, and now The KGB Bar Book of Poems brings this hot literary series to the page. Icons like John Ashbery and Charles Wright appear here with other favorites such as Molly Peacock and Katha Pollitt. Many of the poets have also written anecdotes about their own most memorable poetry readings.

With dynamic black-and-white photographs throughout, The KGB Bar Book of Poems reflects the dazzling variety and tremendous energy of poetry today.

A mid an explosion in the interest of poetry nationwide (The New York Times), The Best American Poetry 2000 delivers one of the finest volumes yet in this renowned series. Guest editor Rita Dove, a distinguished figure in the poetry world and the second African-American poet ever to win the Pulitzer Prize, brings all of her dynamism and well-honed acumen to bear on this project. Dove used a simple yet exacting method to make her selections: The final criterion, she writes in her introduction, was Emily Dickinson's famed description -- if I felt that the top of my head had been taken off, the poem was in. The result is a marvelous collection of consistently high-quality poems diverse in form, tone, style, stance, and subject matter. With comments from the poets themselves illuminating their poems and a foreword by series editor David Lehman, The Best American Poetry 2000 is this year's must-have book for all poetry lovers.

In this lively, enjoyable look at the best American and British detective fiction, David Lehman investigates the mystery of mysteries: the profound satisfactions we get from evil, disorder, mayhem, and deception--that we know will be put right by the last page.
As Lehman shows, the detective story draws deeply from ancient storytelling traditions. The mystery's conventions--the locked room, the clue hidden in plain sight, the diabolical double, the villainous least likely subject--work on us as childhood fairy tales do; they prey upon our darkest fears, taking us to the brink of the unbearable before restoring a comforting sense of order. The myth of Oedipus, for example, contains the essential elements of a whodunit, with the twist that the murderer the detective pursues is himself.
With their wisecracking gumshoe heroes, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler fashioned an existential romance out of the detective novel. More recent writers such as Ross MacDonald, P. D. James, and Ruth Rendell have raised the genre to a new level of psychological sophistication. Yet the form evolves still, and Lehman guides us to the epistemological riddles of Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco, who challenge the notion of a knowable truth. Originally published in 1989, this new edition features an additional chapter on the mystery novels of the 1990s.
A lively study of the development and varieties of the detective story since Poe, its relations with other forms high and low, and the latter-day appropriation of its techniques by such writers as Borges and Eco. . . . A thoroughly intelligent and readable book. --Richard Wilbur, Pulitzer-Prize winning poet
David Lehman is the series editor of both the The Best American Poetry, published by Scribner, and the Poets on Poetry series published by the University of Michigan Press. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle, and the author of several books of criticism and collections of poems.

Following in the footsteps of such poets as Emily Dickinson, William Stafford, and Frank O'Hara, David Lehman began writing a poem a day in 1996 and found the experience so rewarding that he continued for the next two years. During that time, some of these poems appeared in various journals and on Web sites, including The Poetry Daily site, which ran thirty of Lehman's poems in as many days throughout the month of April 1998.
For The Daily Mirror, Lehman has selected the best of these daily poems -- each tied to a specific occasion or situation -- and telescoped two years into one. Spontaneous and immediate, but always finely crafted and spiced with Lehman's signature irony and wit, the poems are akin to journal entries charting the passing of time, the deaths of great men and women, the news of the day. Jazz, Sinatra, the weather, love, poetry and poets, movies, and New York City are among their recurring themes.
A departure from Lehman's previous work, this unique volume provides the intimacy of a diary, full of passion, sound, and fury, but with all the aesthetic pleasure of poetry. More a party of poems than a standard collection, The Daily Mirror presents an exciting new way to think about poetry.