David Lehman, the series editor of The Best American Poetry, is also the editor of the Oxford Book of American Poetry. His books of poetry include Poems in the Manner Of, New and Selected Poems, Yeshiva Boys, When a Woman Loves a Man, and The Daily Mirror. He lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York.
This year's annual roundup of poems published in literary magazines includes the usual big names (John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Adrienne Rich, Charles Simic) and a sampling of lesser known, newer writers (Sandra Beasley, G.C. Waldrep, Mark Wunderlich) as well as a few true newbies like Matthew Yeager, whose talky excerpted long poem asks some laugh-out-loud-funny questions: "Do you eat the crusts of pizza, or only/ when they're excellent or you're hungry?" James Richardson's aphorisms, fifty of which appear here, will quietly blow minds: "My best critic is me, too late," reads number 40. Lucia Perillo's "Inseminating the Elephant" describes exactly what the title suggests. James Tate takes a rambling walk in prose that amounts to a meditation on what depression really means. In her introduction, Gerstler extols poetry's capacity to serve joyful as well as "darker, maybe more complicated needs." As usual, this anthology has something for every kind of poetry reader, and serves as a helpful introduction for newcomers curious about the contemporary poetry landscape. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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