Description: Here, guest editor Mary Jo Salter, whose own poems display a sublime wit "driven by a compulsion to confront the inexplicable," has picked seventy-five poems that capture the dynamism of American poetry today. The series and guest editors contribute valuable introductory essays that assess the current state of American poetry, and this year's edition is certain to capture the attention of both Best American Poetry loyalists and newcomers to the most important poetry anthology of our time.
Brief description: Mary Jo Salter is Professor Emerita in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she taught from 2007 to 2022. She is the author of nine collections of poetry, all published by Knopf, including most recently The Surveyors and Zoom Rooms. Former poetry editor of The New Republic, coeditor of three editions of The Norton Anthology of Poetry (1996, 2005, and 2018), and editor of Amy Clampitt's selected and collected poems, Salter is also an essayist, a lyricist, and a children's book author. She lives in Baltimore.
Review Quotes: "Every poem in this collection has been selected by an extraordinarily fine and thoughtful poet. In her introduction, [Mary Jo] Salter writes, 'I still find it almost impossible to come up with Universally Useful Criteria for evaluating a poem, ' but reading the work she's assembled here is a terrific way of broadening and understanding your own criteria." -Ron Charles, The Washington Post