The Best American Poetry 2010
Guest Editor, Amy Gerstler
(amazon)David Lehman (View Bio)
Hardcover: Scribner, 2010.
Amy Gerstler's commitment to innovative poetry that conveys meaning, feeling, wit, and humor informs the cross section of poems in the 2010 edition of The Best American Poetry. The works collected here represent the wealth, the breadth, and the tremendous energy of poetry in the United States today. Featuring poems from some of our country’s top bards, including John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Louise Glück, Sharon Olds, and Charles Simic, The Best American Poetry 2010 also presents poems that poignantly capture the current moment, such as the sonnets John Updike wrote to chronicle his dying weeks. And there are exciting poems from a constellation of rising stars: Bob Hicok, Terrance Hayes, Denise Duhamel, Dean Young, and Elaine Equi, to name a very few.
"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." — Publishers Weekly