The Best American Poetry 2018
edited by dana gioia
scribner, 240 pages, $18.99
American poetry lost three greats last year: John Ashbery, Richard Wilbur, and Donald Hall. But it also welcomed A. R. Ammons’s “Finishing Up,” A. E. Stallings’s “Pencil,” and Anne Stevenson’s “How Poems Arrive”—verses from The Best American Poetry 2018 that prove poetry in America is far from moribund. As Dana Gioia writes in the introduction to the anthology: “The poetry scene isn’t a cemetery; it’s a crowded, noisy maternity ward.”
