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.