Since 1988, The Best American Poetry anthology series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume in the series presents some of the year’s most remarkable poems and poets. Now, the 2020 edition is guest edited by Utah’s Poet Laureate Paisely Rekdal, called “a poet of observation and history...[who] revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries” by the Los Angeles Times. In The Best American Poetry 2020, she has selected a fascinating array of work that speaks eloquently to the “contraries” of our present moment in time.

    Edited by Lee Ann Brown. SONNETS, first published in 1989 as Tender Buttons Number 1 is widely considered to be one of the most generative and innovative works of contemporary American poetry, radically rethinking the traditional sonnet form. This expanded 25th Anniversary edition includes a new preface by Bernadette Mayer, an editor's note by Tender Buttons Press publisher Lee Ann Brown, and a selection of previously unpublished archival material including the Skinny Sonnets, described as Hypnogogic Word Playing in Reporters' Notebooks which further expand our map of Bernadette Mayer's ground- breaking works of writing consciousness.

    African American Studies. TWERK unveils an identity shaped by popular media and history, code switching and cultural inclusivity. The poems, songs, and myths in this long-awaited first book are as rooted in lyric as in innovation, in Black music as in macaronic satire. TWERK evokes paradox, humor, and vulnerability, and it offers myriad avenues fueled by language, idiom, and vernacular. From a poet unafraid to take risks, this book asks only that we imagine America as it has always existed, an Americana beyond the English language."Here it is: a dope jam of dictions; a remixed, multicultural, polyphonic dance of vocabularies; a language of high stakes, hi-jinx, and hybridity. TWERK is subversive, vulnerable, and volatile. TwERK twists tongues. TwERK tweaks speech. Reading these amazing poems mostly makes me say, Wow! Open your ears to take this music in, open your mouth to say it out loud. And: Wow!"--Terrance Hayes"Tweaking parallel languages, rebooting and putting them to (hard, hard) work, TWERK's non-stop shimmy-shimmy embarks on an anime-iigjag idio-lingual-lectical booty-roll and doesn't come down until the break of dawn. La Reina de Harlem responds to Lorca's Big-Apple-opolis heteroglossia with her own inimitable animations, incantations and ululations, twisting tongues so mellifluously that you don't even realize you've been dancing on Saturn with Sun Ra for hours and still could have begged for more. Welcome LaTasha Diggs: this is her many-splendored night out!"--Maria Damon"From this time forward, TWERK, can refer to a collection of cultural coordinates of a radically transformed Americas. TWERK--is rare poetics, a vine enmeshed onyx slab of gypsum glyphs inscribed. Cut, swirly, and nervy, N. Diggs's fractal-linguistic urban chronicles deftly snip away at the lingering fears of a fugitive English's frisky explorations. In her first major work, N. Diggs doesn't so much 'find' culture as she conjures up the new emerging happy peoples herein. Five thousand updates--download now!"--Rodrigo Toscano

    There are conquerors, slaves, and rebels from Caribbean history; the "Mayan astronomer" calmly smoking a cigarette in the middle of a New York tenement fire; a nun staging a White House vigil to protest her torture; a man on death row mourning the loss of his books; and even Carmen Miranda.

    The book and the dream are the poet’s primary objects of investigation here. Through deft, quietly authoritative lyrics, Fisher meditates on the problems and possibilities—the frail craft—of perception for the reader, the dreamer, maintaining that “if the eye can love—and it can, it does—then I held you and was held.” In her foreword to the book, Louise Glück writes that Fisher’s poetry is “haunting, elusive, luminous, its greatest mystery how plain-spoken it is. Sensory impressions, which usually serve as emblems of or connections to emotion, seem suddenly in this work a language of mind, their function neither metonymic nor dramatic. They are like the dye with which a scientist injects his specimen, to track some response or behavior. Fisher uses the sense this way, to observe how being is converted into thinking.”

    Its language negotiates a past -- "How was it to be the first arrivals in rows and columns" -- as well as a present -- "A perceiver without a state", and has already gained Kim recognition as among the most moving and important "translators" in contemporary poetry.

    a grave, attentive holding of a light” by the contest judge, the distinguished poet W. S. Merwin. The poems are set above and below the Cave Country of south central Kentucky, where McCombs lives and which is home to thousands of caves. The book is framed by two sonnet sequences, the first about a slave guide and explorer at Mammoth Cave in the mid-1800s and the second about McCombs’s experiences as a guide and park ranger there in the 1990s. Other poems deal with Mammoth Cave’s four- thousand-year human history and the thrills of crawling into tight, rarely visited passageways to see what lies beyond. Often the poems search for oblique angles into personal experience, and the caves and the landscape they create form a personal geology.

    In the world of these poems, no one is innocent; everyone is confined to the complexity, absurdity, and, above all, fallibility of their human condition…. Anchoring the work is a conversational, lyrical speaker willing to implicate herself as part of the political and social constructs she criticizes, as when she depicts a Southern American culture still reeling from its history of social injustice, and even the Civil War: “Don’t tell us/ history. Nobody hearts a cemetery/ like we do.” It’s a fantastic collection; Belieu desires not to dress issues up but confront them.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review“A smart and nettling book of poems — about love, sex, social class and our free-floating anxieties — from a writer who is a comedian of the human spirit. Her crisp free verse has as many subcurrents as a magnetic field.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times"Politics, pop culture, and parenthood appear here along with reflections on our collective moments of hypocrisy and hope. '12-Step,' one of the most resonant entries, begins innocuously with a meditation about lighthouses, then the speaker gathers speed and confidence and reaches a risky but profound one-word stanza—'myself'—before ending with a haunting inversion of the Serenity Prayer used by Alcoholics Anonymous. Amid the quips and the elegant observations about immortality, Belieu's speakers never forget their responsibilities, or their possibilities." —Booklist"From poem to poem in the smart, savvy Slant Six, Belieu channels an updated American idiom, one of stubborn in-betweenhood. Like the plain-spoken poetry that plumbed the depths of American consciousness in the 20th century, Belieu trawls the shallows of today’s America and finds just as much caught in its oily reflections as in its murkier subcurrents. It’s '[b]etter,' she suggests, 'to forget perfection.'" —The Boston Globe“I’ve never read a poem by Erin Belieu that I didn’t want to immediately rip from its bindings so I could fold it up and carry around in my pockets and read so many times that the paper turned back into pulp. She’s just that good. That honest and brave and beautiful and wise and funny. She writes poems we need. Poems that say who I am and who you are and how and why we got to be this way. Poems that wonder if we can ever change. Poems that know us and show us and grace us. Poems that remember us and forget us and leave us dazzled in their dust. In Slant Six, she’s outdone herself. It’s a spellbinding, heart-opening beauty of a book.” —Cheryl Strayed"Erin Belieu . . . is always ready to surprise, to astonish, and, ultimately, to defy comparison."—Boston Book Review"[One] of America's finest poets."—Robert Olen ButlerErin Belieu's fourth collection, Slant Six, is an inundation of the humor and horror in contemporary American life—from the last saltine cracked in the sleeve, to the kitty-cat calendar in an office cubicle. With its prophecies of impending destruction, and a simultaneous flood of respect for Americans, Erin Belieu's poems close like Ziploc bags around a human heart.From "12-Step":I am consideringlighthousesin a completely new light—their butch neutrality, their grandbut modest surfaces.A lighthouse could appearhere at any moment.I have been making this effort,placing myself in uncomfortable positions,only for the documented health benefits . . .

    Lyrically complex and startling—yet forthright and unflinching— these poems address rape, abortion, sex work, and other subjects frequently omitted from male-dominated literary traditions, without forsaking the pleasures of being embodied, or the value of personal freedom, of moonlight, and of hope. Throughout, the topography and mythology of California, as well as the uses and failures of language itself, are players in what it means to be a woman, a sexual being, and a trauma survivor in contemporary America.

    It's a poetry book, from the perspective of a journal entry in the National Archives. The National Archives live in a building in Seattle behind barbed wire, directly next door to the Center for Spiritual Living. This is no accident. Gentleman Practice is a disarming de-haunting of accidents. There are no stunt doubles performing the honesty in this book. Head raised and victorious, he has crafted a translation of the human spirit on a small, practical patch, with a very fine tooth indeed. And, while many poetry books read like a thick epic series of sections, Gentleman Practice will no doubt rest in your hands like a well-oiled novel.

    By turns seductive and self-deprecating, Women in Public navigates a world where the erotics of the body and mind do battle against the constructs that would demean and define them, using lyric, fragment, humor, and repetition to create a space flexible enough to hold the many contradictions of reality. Where expectations and desires can be piled too easily upon the body, Kahn digs in her heels, writing in attempt to liberate physical form from society's confines.Praise for Women in Public:"'Do you think that you are greater than a mom?' This is an intensely honest, honestly intense poetry. Humorous, carnal, accusatory, celebratory––Women in Public tells me to get lost so I do. When I find myself later, I'm re-reading Women in Public."––Rod Smith"In these exhilarating poems, Elaine Kahn shoots from the groin, championing a ferociousness that rages against asperity while playfully seducing the reader to misbehave. Hers is a realm where oceans beat against genitals, and Hannah Wilke warms the earth. I don’t want to let go of Women in Public for I want its boldness all to myself."––Dodie BellamyAbout the Author:Musician, poet, artist, Elaine Kahn was born in Evanston, Illinois and is currently based in Oakland, California. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a BA from California College of the Arts. Kahn is the author of three poetry chapbooks, A Voluptuous Dream During an Eclipse (2012), Customer (2010), and Radiant Bottle Caps (2008), and is a contributor to Art Papers. Her music project, Horsebladder, has toured widely throughout the U.S. and Canada. She is also co-founder of the feminist puppet troop P. Splash Collective and managing editor of the small press Flowers & Cream.

    Her prize: A rent-free year in a cottage in the Berkshires, where she could finish a first book. But Taylor—outside the city for the first time in nearly a decade, and trying to conceive her first child—found herself alone. To break up her days, she began to intern on a small farm, planting leeks, turning compost, and weeding kale. In this calendric cycle of 28 poems, Taylor describes the work of this year, considering what attending to vegetables on a small field might achieve now. Against a backdrop of drone strikes, “methamphetamine and global economic crisis,” these poems embark on a rich exploration of season, self, food, and place. Threading through the farm poets—Hesiod, Virgil, and John Clare—Taylor revisits the project of small scale farming at the troubled beginning of the 21st century. In poems full of bounty, loss and the mysteries of the body, Taylor offers a rich, severe, memorable meditation about what it means to try to connect our bodies and our time on earth.

    River Hymns is the lyrical journey of a young black man’s spiritual reckoning with his family history.

    The title refers to the idea that those who are deviant propel the world forward at top speed. Delving into the center of the endless webs of repression against our bodies, desires, politics, and imaginations, are those whose actions and motion cut away at the systemic limitations of society. This collection of poems was written with the inspiration and work of these people in mind.As a working class queer poet, Conrad has had to fight through different stratifications of oppression his entire life. His poems vibrate with the flamboyant desire that manifests itself in queer culture, where the right to act on basic desires can become a battleground, and everyday acts of love and devotion must be enacted as a political form of defiance. The poems that emerge from this life long struggle illustrate the sharp edge of that defiance and desire, where joy is closely linked to death. In a world ruled by those who govern with fear, and in a landscape barbed with those who are terrified of desire, moving at speed of deviants is the only way to transform potential into action, and desire into positive change.

    But this poetry is not a sentimental celebration of the goodness of nature, and harmony with the world is never something assumed. The harmony Forché seeks goes deeper than simple submission to natural processes or identification with an ethnic group, and it must be fought for with a tenuous faith, the balance that must be found between the ugliness, the harshness of her history—both natural and social—and its intense beauty, is what distinguishes Forché’s poetry, gives it is depth and dimension.