Every year brings a new guest editor for this anthology, so what you take away largely depends on that editor’s tastes and preferences. Unfortunately, Mary Jo Salter and I don’t seem to have similar tastes at all. Here you will find many meandering, longwinded (not the same as long, necessarily) poems with prose-like tendencies. Many poems felt just like a lineated stream-of-consciousness. Many poems felt like they could be plucked out of someone’s journal, as is, unedited. Many poems about New York. Many poems about the process of writing and writers (or other artists). Everything here felt very insular, like the world of these poems was so very small; I kept wanting them to look outward. This feels especially egregious in the year 2024. I’m just so disappointed here at the lack of urgency, texture, and imagination, as I feel like I am constantly reading wonderfully evocative poems elsewhere literally every day.

This year’s anthology also seems to be a classic instance of publishing poets rather than poems—nearly all the writers included are already very well-established. Even the “new” poets that Salter highlights in her introduction were names I already knew. Come on.

Here are the few highlights that prevented me from giving this anthology one star:

“First Philosophy” by Joshua Bennett
“The Remnant” by Kwame Davis
“How to Fold” by Terrence Hayes
“Closure” by Omotara James
“Sentimental Evening” by Natalie Scenters-Zapico
“The Days” by Adrienne Su
“The Field Is Hot and Hotter” by Claire Wahmanholm
“Ashkenazi Birthmark” by Michael Waters