THIS YEAR'S SEVENTY-FIVE poems are diverse, woke, and resourceful while tending to stay close to home. In these respects, they are a lot like 2020.
"Home" in this case would be the sort of well-made, reasonably intricate, relatively accessible poem one often encounters in New Yorker or Parnassus or the Georgia-Kenyon-New England-Massachusetts-Sewanee Reviews. We do get a handful of more out-there things, Heather Christle, Ariana Reines, but we're mainly staying indoors with our memories of our parents and subtle observations on what is seen through our windows or glimpsed in our news feeds, rendered in Jamesian syntax.
Paisley Rekdal includes some great sequences this year: Rick Barot, John Murillo, Arthur Sze.
As so often, the arbitrariness of alphabetical order yields some arresting juxtapositions. Steven Leyva's "When I Feel a Whoop Comin' On" includes the lines, "There / at least a hip moment of locomotion / where no one could charge / you with a lack of blackness." And then the very next poem is Cate Lycurgus's "Locomotion." Nice!
By my count, Matthew Zapruder has now had the final poem in Best American Poetry four times, which I think ties Kevin Young. Keep your eye on Rachel Zucker and Monica Youn, though, because things could shift.
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