The Best American Poetry 2024

“Every poem in this collection has been selected by an extraordinarily fine and thoughtful poet. In her introduction, [Mary Jo] Salter writes, ‘I still find it almost impossible to come up with Universally Useful Criteria for evaluating a poem,’ but reading the work she’s assembled here is a terrific way of broadening and understanding your own criteria.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

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.

Mary Jo Salter is Professor Emerita in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she taught from 2007 to 2022. She is the author of nine collections of poetry, all published by Knopf, including most recently The Surveyors and Zoom Rooms. Former poetry editor of The New Republic, coeditor of three editions of The Norton Anthology of Poetry (1996, 2005, and 2018), and editor of Amy Clampitt’s selected and collected poems, Salter is also an essayist, a lyricist, and a children’s book author. She lives in Baltimore.