The Best American Poetry 2001

The annual publication of "The Best American Poetry" is an eagerly awaited event among poetry fans across the country. This year's volume in the critically acclaimed series presents American poetry in all its dazzling variety at a moment of extraordinary richness and originality.

Guest editor Robert Hass, a former Poet Laureate and a central figure in the poetry world, brings his passionate intelligence to "The Best American Poetry 2001." In his engaging introduction, Hass writes that after sifting through dozens of literary magazines, he "found that there were large numbers of poems that gave me pleasure, seemed to have inventive force, or intellectual passion or surprise." The works he selected are diverse in every way and have only their excellence in common. Ranging from the traditional to the innovative, the book features important new poems from Anne Carson, Robert Creeley, Michael Palmer, Robert Pinsky, and Adrienne Rich; rare posthumous works by Elizabeth Bishop and James Schuyler; and poems by marvelous newcomers like Amy England, Olena Kalytiak Davis, and Rachel Zucker.

With comments from the poets illuminating their work, and series editor David Lehman's always entertaining foreword assessing the current state of the art, "The Best American Poetry 2001" is a book every reader of poetry will want to have.