2024 the best of 2023 review
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(as of Nov 16, 2024 09:44:09 UTC - Details)
Award-winning poet Elaine Equi selects the poems for the 2023 edition of The Best American Poetry, “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune).
Since its debut in 1988, The Best American Poetry series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume presents some of the year’s most striking and innovative poems, with comments from the poets themselves offering insight into their work.
For The Best American Poetry 2023 guest editor Elaine Equi, whose own work is “deft, delicate [and] subversive” (August Kleinzahler), has made astute choices representing contemporary poetry at its most dynamic. The result is an exceptionally coherent vision of American poetry today.
Including valuable introductory essays contributed by the series and guest editors, the 2023 volume is sure to capture the attention of both Best American Poetry loyalists and newcomers to the series.
Publisher : Scribner (September 5, 2023)
Language : English
Paperback : 224 pages
ISBN-10 : 1982186755
ISBN-13 : 978-1982186753
Item Weight : 7.4 ounces
Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.7 x 8.38 inches
Reviewer: Knowlengr
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A must-have for US poetry lovers
Review: OK, not a must-have. It would come after the grocery bill and rent -- not a given for poetry lovers in the U.S.But if you can afford it, I recommend this well-curated collection. I order them every year and prize the full set of them (even if later volumes reflect a dismayingly uninventive trend toward postmodernist identity poetry and away from the refined era of Wallace Stevens).
Reviewer: Amazon Customer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: As good as I thought
Review: Nothing to dislike
Reviewer: Robert G Yokoyama
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: I love the themes of the poems in this collection.
Review: I love the diversity of themes in this collection of poems. My favorite poem is "A Deafening Prayer". The poem's title is a kind of an oxymoron. The poet is saying on the surface that prayer is an activity that is done loudly, but the poem is a more about the reasons why people pray like for peace or for rain. My other favorite poem is "Brown Furniture". I like this poem because it is a reminder that memories can be attached to pieces of furniture like a chair, a dining table, and a bookshelf. I enjoy the sentiment of this poem very much. I also enjoy the poem "I Meant To". This poem is about a man lamenting about getting old, but this poem reminds me to cherish getting older and wiser. "Places With Terrible Wi Fi" is a funny poem because I am always looking for places with good wi fi to do my work. 330 College Avenue is a beautiful poem about a man whose mother has passed. Even though my mom is still alive, this poem is a reminder that I can improve our relationship. The themes in these poems in this collection resonate with me very much.
Reviewer: Ethan F Staats
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Not enthused with the poems
Review: see above
Reviewer: Andrew D. Oram
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Some are "best," others good enough
Review: The selections here were enjoyable and worth reading; some even rise to the level boldly claimed by the series title. The editor, Elaine Equi, captured a reasonable variety of styles and voices. I cavilled about many of the poems at first but was won over as I read along.Many of the poems were lyrically very satisfying, some astonishing in their subversion of the English language, some urgent in a shake-you-awake kind of way.Equi values humor, which is fine unless it veers into flippancy, and has a fondness for trendy phrases and topics such as "working virtually" and "comfort zone."Although I don't tend to like artist statements that explain their poems, some of the ones at the end of this book did help me feel connected to the poets and their work.
Reviewer: Jon Corelis
Rating: 1.0 out of 5 stars
Title: That it should come to this
Review: We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon usâand if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket.-- John KeatsI forget now in which of her film reviews Pauline Kael said that the film under review was so bad that after sitting through it she actually felt stoned on boredom, but after reading through The Best American Poetry 2023 I can see what she meant. The selections have a tedious variety: each one seems to amount in its own smugly ingenious way to a tendentious, strained argument for why you have to like it as a poem. But to be worth reading and remembering, a poem must seduce, not demand. Reading through the poems in this collection is like watching a series of brief video clips showing various people trying to get a date by issuing subpoenas.But if the book is of scant interest as poetry, it is of considerable value as an example of what has happened to poetry in American society: it has become academic in the worst sense of the word. Beneath their spurious variety, these poems are actually narrowly limited to the types of diction, subject, tone, and poetic and rhetorical strategies sanctified by contemporary creative writing programs, grant applications, and academic hiring and tenure committees. These poems are not works of art, they are credentials. Rather than quote passages here to support my criticism (an exercise which I am reluctant to inflict either on my readers or on myself) I think it would be easier to suggest that any who may be unintimidated by the bookâs implicit demand that âyou have to like this because itâs poetryâ read through the book with my comments in mind, and then ask themselves whether the Emperor is wearing any clothes.It is as astonishing as it is discouraging that the poetry of the nation which produced Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H. D., Robert Frost, Robinson Jeffers, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, e e cummings, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Allen Ginsberg should be reduced to this yawn-inducing assemblage of arid pretentious exercises.[Two footnotes: (1) The collection includes a hitherto unpublished poem by W. H. Auden which is very good. I donât see why he never published it; perhaps he felt he was continuing in a style which he had already done enough with. (2) The bookâs cover is illustrated with a portrait of Anna Akhmatova, a fine poet, but why choose a portrait of a Russian poet to illustrate a collection of American poetry?]
Reviewer: Frequent book purchaser
Rating: 1.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Few
Review: Very few of great interest.