MY AMBITION EVERY year is to get BAP read before the next BAP appears, and every year I fail. My secondary ambition is to read it before the calendar year ends, and this year I made it, on December 31.
It's a good BAP. It checks my top two personal BAP boxes.
1. The poetry does not all sound a lot like the year's editor's work. Check!
2. A good mix of old hands and new names. Check! Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, and Stanley Moss on the one hand, Su Cho, Adam O. Davis, Emily Lee Luan, Hannah Marshall, and Angbeen Saleem, Darius Simpson, and Monica Sok on the other.
Since a lot of the poetry herein was published in 2021, a good deal of it was likely written in 2020, and accordingly George Floyd is a presence, sometimes named (as in Terrance Hayes's "George Floyd"), sometimes not (as in Ed Roberson's "Air"). Traces of the pandemic linger as well, but the state and other violence visited on Black bodies is the volume's strongest undercurrent.
By my count, this is the fourth BAP to end with a Kevin Young poem. I wonder what the record is? Dean Young, may his memory be for a blessing, must have had quite a few. Besides his four anchor spots, Kevin Young has three appearances just ahead of Matthew Zapruder.
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