Alice Quinn, ed., _Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic_

THIS MAKES SEVEN posts on seven poetry collections in seven days, and yes, I am feeling a little pleased with myself.

Here we have 100+ poems, seemingly mainly from spring 2020, doing basically what the volume's subtitle indicates. 

A lot of really good poems from some really good poets here, but the book has mainly served to remind me of the relief I felt when Alice Quinn stepped down as New Yorker poetry editor.

Given the stylistic spectrum of American poetry, the anthology occupies a rather narrow range, one familiar to anyone who read the poetry in the New Yorker during the Quinn era. These are well-educated, well-behaved poems, mainly in conversational syntax, bundles of ingenuity in the figurative language but rhythmically subdued, quite a few loosely-handled closed forms, lots of poems ending with a little fwip like a Tupperware container for which the right lid has been found.

It's not that I cannot or do not enjoy that sort of thing--but when ninety out of a hundred poems in an anthology are all executing the same set of compulsory exercises (so to speak), they start to blur into each other. I was grateful for the occasional Eileen Myles, Shane McCrae, or Claudia Rankine poem that changed things up a bit.

Not that some of the milder-mannered poems were not excellent. I really enjoyed Susan Kinsolving's "My Heart Cannot Accept It All," for instance. Hats off also to Joshua Bennet, Traci Brimhall, Erin Belieu, Aleksander Hemon, Ada Limón, Matthew Zapruder. 

But I found myself wishing Quinn had worked with a co-editor, Cole Swenson perhaps, Jericho Brown, someone who might have wandered farther off the path once in a while.