Of all the volumes that I've read, this one seems the most likely to actually introduce a reader to new voices. It has if not invigorated my faith in the series at least ensured that I'll give the 2015 edition a chance.

The guest editor for this year's volume is Terrance Hayes, a very talentedblack energetic poet. I enjoy his poems. Although his selections for thiscollection I was less than pleased overall. Many are nearly frenetic in theirsurreal flows. A few I had no idea what the writer was getting at except theirpyrotechnics of language. Saying that, I loved the very first poem in the bookby Sherman Alexie,"Sonnet, With Pride." It is a prose poem about a pride oflions that escaped from a zoo in Baghdad and

I've yet to try a Best of American Poetry that is enjoyable at all. I imagine there is so much pressure on the editors to be "worthy," that the collections end up trying to "prove" something in a way that poetry should never have to prove. My 2¢.

So for my review of this year’s installment of the Best American Poetry, 2014, guest edited by Terrance Hayes, I thought I'd do something a bit different and just provide some select quick impressions I jotted down for each poem in a sort of journal-like way (not every poem, because it got too long for that and there is a character limit for these reviews -- which means this is too long!) I should say that I think Hayes brought a much needed energy to guest editing this year's volume, and I espe...

Patricia Lockwood,"Rape Joke"The rape joke is that you were 19 years old.The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. “Ahhhh,” it thinks. “Yes. A goatee.”No offense.The rape joke is that he was seven years older. The rape joke is that you had known him for years, since you were too young to be interesting to him. You liked that

Content warning / mention of assaultI borrowed the 2014 edition of Best American Poetry before the library closed and have finally been digging in.In it is the most fantastic poem I've read this year: "Rape Joke" by Patricia Lockwood.There are also more than a dozen other gems in these pages (although there are also some I don't care for, important to note just to point out that everyone's taste varies). Favorites included work by Traci Brimhall, Lucie Brock-Broido, Jericho Brown, Kurt Brown, Jo...

I like Kevin Lawrence's response to this book, both his approach and a number of individual judgements he gets right. It's all about the poems, after all. Hayes' volume in this series offers a useful snapshot of the field in a year during which I read more in non-fiction and fiction than in poetry. Here are seventy-five American poets, and while I gratefully sat in Yusef Komunyakaa's Harlem class one semester twenty years ago, and have met several other of the poets, the vast majority are unknow...

Stunning. Superb. Incredible. I can't write enough great things about this anthology. It's a leaps and bounds improvement over the 2013 volume and I couldn't be happier with it. From the sultry but serious rhythms of Sherman Alexie and Rita Dove, to the heart-stopping made-me-cry (and think for hours) Camille Dungy, this poetry is some of the most passionate and complex I've encountered in years.It's a rare Best American I read all of, but I did with this one. Lehman's searing rebuke to those pr...

Once again I've taken a dangerous trip into the world of poetry, a land that I admit I have very bad footing in. This year the Best American Poetry series was edited by Terrance Hayes, who provides a lively introduction in the form of an "interview" with an academic, and we learn the interesting numerical correlation between the number of characters in a Tweet (140) and the number of lines in a sonnet (14). Coincidence?As for the poems themselves, it was the usual mixed bag of many I liked, and

Out of the 75 poems in this collection, I would name 8 as superb, perhaps 10 as above average, and the remaining ones mediocre at best. I will mention the superb ones both to recommend them to other readers and to come back to them myself: "The River Twice" by Kathleen Graber; "In My Last Past Life" by Hailey Leithauser; "Rape Joke" by Patricia Lockwood; "An Etiquette for Eyes" by Cate Marvin; "Masticated Light" by Jamaal May; "vivisection (you're going to break my heart)" by Marty McConnell; "S...

This is a runaway favorite out of the Best American Poetry volumes that I have read. Out of 1997, 2007, 2010, and 2011, only '97 was even close to as consistently great as this anthology was. I found myself marking almost every poem with a mark of medium positive to highly positive opinion and even the ones I was definitively not impressed by did not engender active dislike the way the bottom end of any of these collections so often do. There was, as usual, a nice mix of old, familiar names--She...

I read this series' annual issue every year, usually more than once. Usually at least three times. Usually, I skim it once to find the poems I know I'm going to like, then read it front to back, and then read the end notes while flipping back to the poems. Hence although this was my Christmas gift in 2014, it's taken me until now to finish it.Terrance Hayes and I aren't eye-to-eye on what we like best about poetry, but I can surmise that he's a sucker for strong endings, which is also true of me...

I'm a big Terrance Hayes fan and enjoyed seeing his aesthetics reflected in the introduction and anthology contents. The intro shows his playful, subversive side: it's framed as an interview with Dr. Charles Kinbote (the unreliable narrator of Nabokov's Pale Fire, which I didn't know till know, bad me). The poems themselves reflect Hayes' interests in music ("Juilliard Cento Sonnet," "The Blues Is a Verb," "Liner Notes for Monk"), racial identity ("Negritude," "The Spring Cricket Repudiates His

A variety of voices and styles, but unfortunately in 2014 evidently the styles didn't agree with me. Nothing caught my eye.

This suffered from comparison, because I read it at the same time as Matthea Harvey's Modern Life. Reading the latter was such a joyful experience; the language made me so goddamn happy. This book . . . eh, not so much. Of course there were exceptions. I loved Kathleen Graber's The River Twice, and Camille Dungy's Conspiracy (to breathe together), and Caconrad's wondering about our demise while driving to Dsneyland with abandon. I guess part of the point of anthologies is finding new poets to lo...

The last volume of this I read (2005), I quite enjoyed. This one...I love how the series has new editors for each year. But, of course, that creates different aesthetics and different judgements for what's the "Best." And while many of the poems are excellent, most in this collection felt a bit too heady for me, the ideas and forms and themes going beyond my meager knowledge of poetry and leaving me thinking, "I guess that was a good poem..."Moreso than fiction, at least to me, poetry seems to h...

An excellent collection of poetry published in 2014, this particular year of curation was fascinating, striking, and bold. Out of the entire series of BEST AMERICAN, the poetry collections seem to be the most consistently good.While there is no way to talk about this collections in any uniform way, the following really stood out to me in this year's collection: Hicock’s “Blue Prints,” Griggs’ “Script Poem,” Kearney’s “The Labor of Stagger Lee…”, Lockwood’s “Rape Joke,” Makey’s “Old Time…”, Marvi...

Overall, I would give this collection a high B average (technically an 87.08% avg.) as far as the quality of the poems contained. I know that attempting to quantify poetic effect/value is a ridiculous gesture, but I am simply a ridiculous person. Of course, this is purely based off of my own tastes and will not necessarily reflect your average satisfaction rate.I started a mission a few months ago to read the last few entries in the Best American Poetry series so that I can begin to get a better...

3.5 stars.As I review the collections in this series, I think I'm just going to be putting in notes. This time, gifs are included (under spoiler tags for formatting reasons). Oh yeah, I've become that kind of Goodreads member. Oh yeah, baby. Buckle up, 'cause we're going for a ride! (It's not that kind of ride, though. It's going to be very tame.)~ In "With Birds," Erin Belieu writes: "the exact shade of an aubade". As soon as I read that I was like:(view spoiler)[ (hide spoiler)]...then I l...