Read more
"A 'best' anthology that really lives up to its title." —Chicago Tribune Guest edited by award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder, the leading anthology of contemporary American poetry returns.
About the author
David Lehman, the series editor of
The Best American Poetry, edited
The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His books of poetry include
The Morning Line,
When a Woman Loves a Man, and
The Daily Mirror. He has written such nonfiction books as
Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. He lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York.
Matthew Zapruder is the author of six collections of poetry, including
Come on All You Ghosts, a
New York Times Notable Book of the Year;
Father’s Day;
Why Poetry; and
Story of a Poem, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; and
I Love Hearing Your Dreams. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship. His poetry has been adapted and performed by Gabriel Kahane and Brooklyn Rider and Attacca Quartet at Carnegie Hall and San Francisco Performances and was the libretto for
Vespers for a New Dark Age, a piece by Missy Mazzoli commissioned for the Ecstatic Music Festival at Carnegie Hall. He was Guest Editor of
Best American Poetry 2022, and from 2016 to 2017, he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the weekly Poetry Column for
The New York Times Magazine. He lives with his wife and son in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is editor at large at Wave Books, and teaches in the MFA in creative writing program at Saint Mary’s College of California.
Summary
Matthew Zapruder picks the poems for the 2022 edition of The Best American Poetry, “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune).
Since 1988, The Best American Poetry series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume presents a selection of the year’s most brilliant, striking, and innovative poems, with comments from the poets themselves lending insight into their work.
For The Best American Poetry 2022 guest editor Matthew Zapruder, whose own poems are “for everyone, everywhere...democratic in [their] insights and feelings” (NPR), has selected the seventy-five new poems that represent American poetry today at its most dynamic. Chosen from print and online magazines, from the popular to the little-known, the selection is sure to capture the attention of both Best American Poetry loyalists and newcomers to the series.
The series and guest editors contribute valuable introductory essays that illuminate the current state of American poetry.
