Elaine Equi, guest editor, and David Lehman, series editor, _The Best American Poetry, 2023_

 AMONG THE RIPPLES of retirement is that I read the 2023 BAP well before the 2024 BAP was published. It's a new day.

Some guest editors make a point of very broad-church, stylistically diverse selections (Denise Duhamel in 2013, for example), but more of them, I would say, provide a narrower stylistic spectrum fairly close to that of their own work (the Hirsch-Trethewey-Gioia run of 2016-18, for example). Elaine Equi is more in the latter camp.

Equi's introduction spells out as plainly as possible that she likes poems that are short, humorous, and witty. The 2023 BAP thus has a pronounced penchant for the short, humorous, and witty, which makes for a brisk read, but can sometimes leave the impression that you are reading a collection by a single poet rather than an anthology. 

I like short poems, too, but a few longer ones would have been welcome. The book's longest poem, Dunya Mikhail's "Tablets VI," turns out to be 24 very short poems. 

Not that many unfamiliar names this time, but some really nice things by familiar ones: a Timothy Donnelly "chariot" that was not in Chariot, great poems I had not seen before from Victoria Chang, Matthew Zapruder, Cole Swenson, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Diane Seuss. And, happily, a poem by Elizabeth Willis--has she been in BAP before? She must have been, but I know she hasn't appeared frequently.