The Best American Poetry 2019 - Paperback

by David Lehman (Author), Major Jackson (Author)

The 2019 edition of The Best American Poetry--"one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world" (Academy of American Poets)--now guest edited by Major Jackson, award-winning poet and poetry editor of the Harvard Review.

Since 1988, The Best American Poetry has been the leading anthology of contemporary American poetry. The Washington Post said of the 2017 edition, "The poems...have a wonderful cohesion and flow, as if each contributes to a larger narrative about life today...While readers may question some of the selections--an annual sport with this series--most will find much that resonates, including the insightful author notes at the back of the anthology."

The state of the world has inspired many to write poetry, and to read it--to share all the rage, beauty, and every other thing under the sun in the way that only poetry can. Now the foremost anthology of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Major Jackson, the poet and editor who, "makes poems that rumble and rock" (poet Dorianne Laux). This brilliant 2019 edition includes some of the year's most defining, striking, and innovative poems and poets.

Author Biography

David Lehman, the series editor of The Best American Poetry, edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His books of poetry include The Morning Line, When a Woman Loves a Man, and The Daily Mirror. He has written such nonfiction books as Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. He lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York.

Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry including the forthcoming collection The Absurd Man (Norton: 2020), Roll Deep (Norton: 2015), Holding Company (Norton: 2010), Hoops(Norton: 2006) and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia: 2002), finalist of a National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. He is the editor of Library of America's Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in Agni, American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and World Literature Today. Major Jackson lives in South Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard A. Dennis Professor of English at the University of Vermont. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.