The Best American Poetry 2024 (edited by David Lehman and Mary Jo Salter)

Back when I was in grad school, I have fond memories of going to Borders or Barnes & Noble in early September, hoping that year's Best American Poetry would be on the shelf.  So it was nice to have an excuse to buy this again! 

The RHC category was "pick a 2015 Read Harder Challenge task to complete." As you may recall, I started doing the challenge in 2016, and I've been slowly crossing off the 2015 challenges after the fact. I was down to four, and one was "a collection of poetry" so I figured I'd feed two birds with one grape, as we say on my team at work, in lieu of the more violent metaphor.  There's just something about reading each poem on paper, and flipping back to the notes to see what the author has to say about the poem, and then going back and re-reading it, and dog-earing my favorites... on Kindle it's just not the same.

Unfortunately I don't think Mary Jo Salter and I share the same taste. A lot of exact rhyme. A lot of long poems about nature. A lot of "big names." Very little contemporaneity or silliness, no prose poetry at all.  A lot of poems I thought were actively bad. There will always be hits and misses in any anthology, but as a whole, the collection didn't do it for me.

Still, there are some gems in here as far as I'm concerned. My favorite poem was probably Cleptopolitan by Brendan Constantine, which is exactly the type of James Tate-esque surrealism I enjoy. I also liked Domestic Retrograde by John Hennessey, Sentimental Evening by Natalie Scenters-Zapico, and The Days by Adrienne Su.  And I did dog-ear a handful of other poems that I enjoyed or found moving.

Looking up the 2025 version, it looks like it will be David Lehman's last. I might have to visit Barnes & Noble in September, one more time, just for old time's sake.

An Extraordinary Union (by Alyssa Cole)

Read for the RHC categtory "a romance book that doesn’t have an illustrated cover." I'm not much of a romance reader, so this is one of the more difficult categories for me this year.  This book is about a free woman with an eidedic memory posing as a mute slave to spy for the Union, and a Pinkerton detective pretending to be a Confederate soldier, both loosely based on real people, against the backdrop of the Civil War.

Despite the setting, it doesn't have a sense of realism - really more of a frothy romance despite what you might expect. Alyssa Cole is a Black author and clearly she wanted to keep true ugliness out of it - of course many horrors are alluded to; still, how it plays out is absolutely a romance fantasy and not grounded in reality of the time and place. Ditto with the spy element - if you're fucking in the bushes and sleeping over at each other's places, and you are a white man and a Black (ostensibly enslaved) woman, you're pretty bad spies with zero sense of self-preservation!

I also am indifferent to sex scenes, which I know are the whole point of romance but, shrug, that's why I don't read them. A lot of people loved this novel though so maybe it's not them, it's me.  On to the next category!

Swimming Studies (by Leanne Shapton)

It's been a minute! This is another one of the paper books sitting on my shelf - where it had been for probably 10 years - that I always meant to read but never got around to reading because I ignore paper books. Not in 2025, baby! 

This is a very loose, impressionistic memoir that combines stories of Shapton's childhood as a competitive swimmer with her adult life in various pools around the world. It includes amazing artwork and photography, including pages of bathing suits and information about where they are from, and abstract renderings of pools.  And the writing is just, so lovely.  Like this description of a sunset:  “I’m serenaded by sky blue and pink, an intense Tahitian Treat pink. Popsicle, Care Bear, little-girl colours. I’ve never seen sky like this. It’s optical glucose."

Optical glucose - I will never forget this metaphor, it hit me like an incredible line of poetry.  This book is from 2013 so not exactly breaking news, but it's really lovely and I recommend it! 

I reshelved it to keep (especially due to the artwork) but for my next paper book decluttering, I just gave away The Tale of Genji. I have no plans to read it, and if I do change my mind and read it, it can be on my Kindle.