Series editor David Lehman offers up his 27th sterling anthology of Best American Poetry with this year's guest editor, Terrance Hayes, who Lehman says has undertaken his daunting task with vigor and inventiveness. Hayes's introduction is in the form of a playful, fictitious conversation between himself and Charles Kinbote (the fictional narrator of Nabokov's Pale Fire). Besides commenting on some poems in the collection, the witty banter touches on a key matter Lehman also addresses: is there too much poetry? Does anyone care about or buy it? Hayes's 75 choices--"gifts"--salute the form and, he hopes, transform the reader.
Many are marked by literary inventiveness: prose poems, ad hoc forms, a "script" poem, poems displaying a swashbuckling use of form and meter. Hayes has chosen poems by established and emerging poets, even some poems he "literally" can't understand--Rae Armantrout's "Control" or Kiki Petrosino's "Story Problem"--but loves the "hunch" each sparks. There's even an irreverent piece from the cutting-room floor that he sneaks in via his introduction, Alan Dugan's "Priapus": "I am the only man in the world/ because I have no t*ts."
The surprises continue with Sherman Alexie's prose poem "Sonnet, with Pride"; Jon Sands's fragment-filled piece about Trayvon Martin, "Decoded"; and Rita Dove's "The Spring Cricket Repudiates His Parable of Negritude." Patricia Lockwood's controversial and lengthy high-wire act, "Rape Joke," puzzles, jokes and shocks: "The rape joke is that the next day he gave you Pet Sounds. No really. Pet Sounds. He said he was sorry."
Enjoy, and be transformed. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher