The Best American Poetry 2009, a volume in The Best American Poetry series, was edited by poet David Wagoner

David Wagoner

David Russell Wagoner is an American poet who has written many poetry collections and ten novels. Two of his books have been nominated for National Book Awards....

, guest editor, who made the final selections, and David Lehman

David Lehman

David Lehman is a poet and the series editor for The Best American Poetry series. He teaches at The New School in New York City.-Career:...

, the general editor for the series.

This book is the 22nd volume in the most popular annual poetry anthology in the United States.

Poets and poems included

Listed in alphabetical order by author's name:

John Ashbery

John Ashbery

John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...

, "They Knew What They Wanted"
Appeared in: The London Review of Books

Caleb Barber, "Beasts and Violins"
Appeared in: Poet Lore

Mark Bibbins, "Concerning the land to the South of Our Neighbors to the North"
Appeared in: La Petite Zine

Bruce Bond

Bruce Bond

Bruce Bond is a poet, editor for American Literary Review , and an English professor at the University of North Texas.His poetry has been featured in a variety of literary publications, such as: The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Georgia Review, The Yale Review, The Harvard Review, and Poetry,...

, "Ringtone"
Appeared in: Ploughshares

Marianne Boruch

Marianne Boruch

Marianne Boruch is an American poet. She graduated from the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1979, and after teaching at Tunghai University in Taiwan, and at the University of Maine at Farmington, went on to develop the MFA program in creative writing at...

, "The Doctor"
Appeared in: The Cincinnati Review

Fleda Brown

Fleda Brown

Fleda Brown is an American poet and author. She is also known as Fleda Brown Jackson.-Biography:Fleda Brown was born in Columbia, Missouri, and raised in Fayetteville, Arkansas. In 1978 she joined the University of Delaware English Department. There she founded the Poets in the Schools Program,...

, "Roofers"
Appeared in: The Georgia Review

Catherine Carter, "The Book of Steve"
Appeared in: Asheville Poetry Review

Suzanne Cleary, "From the Boy's Own Book: A Compleat Encyclopedia of All the Diversions Athletic, Scientific, and Recreative, of Boyhood and Youth, by William Clarke"
Appeared in: Margie

Billy Collins

Billy Collins

Billy Collins is an American poet, appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He is a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York and is the Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute, Florida...

, "The Great American Poem"
Appeared in: The Virginia Quarterly Review

Rob Cook

Rob Cook

Rob Cook is a Republican member of the Montana Legislature. He was elected to House District 27 which represents the Conrad area.-References:...

, "The Song of America"
Appeared in: Fence

James Cummins

James Cummins

James Cummins is an American poet.- Biography :Cummins teaches at the University of Cincinnati and is the curator of the Elliston Poetry Collection. He is married to the poet and art critic, Maureen Bloomfield...

, "Freud"
Appeared in: The Antioch Review

Mark Doty

Mark Doty

Mark Doty is an American poet and memoirist.-Biography:He was born in Maryville, Tennessee, earned his Bachelor of Arts from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and received his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Goddard College in Vermont.In 1989, his partner Wally Roberts tested...

, "Apparition (Favorite Poem)"
Appeared in: Five Points

Denise Duhamel

Denise Duhamel

-Background:Duhamel received her B.F.A. from Emerson College and her M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. She is a New York Foundation for the Arts recipient and has been resident poet at Bucknell University...

, "How It Will End"
Appeared in: Barrow Street, Good Foot

Alice Friman, Getting Serious
Appeared in: Ploughshares

Margaret Gibson

Margaret Gibson (poet)

-Life:Margaret Gibson grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and was educated at Hollins College, and the University of Virginia. She went to Yaddo in 1975.Gibson has been a Visiting Professor at The University of Connecticut since 1993....

, "Black Snake"
Appeared in: The Georgia Review

Douglas Goetsch, "First Time Reading Freud"
Appeared in: New York Quarterly

Albert Goldbarth

Albert Goldbarth

Albert Goldbarth is an American poet born January 31, 1948 in Chicago. He is known for his prolific production, his gregarious tone, his eclectic interests and his distinctive 'talky' style. He has been a Guggenheim fellow and won the National Book Critics Circle award in 1991 and 2001, the only...

, "Zones"
Appeared in: Shenandoah

Barbara Goldberg, "The Fullness Thereof"
Appeared in: The Gettysburg Review

Michael J. Grabell, "Definition of Terms"
Appeared in: Southwest Review

Debora Greger

Debora Greger

Debora Greger is an award-winning American poet as well as a visual artist.She was raised in Richland, Washington....

, "Eve in the Fall"
Appeared in: The New Criterion

Jennifer Grotz

Jennifer Grotz

Jennifer Grotz is an American poet and translator who teaches English and creative writing at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers and at the University of Rochester, where she is Assistant Professor...

, "The Record"
Appeared in: The Southern Review

Barbara Hamby

Barbara Hamby

-Life:She was born in New Orleans and raised in Hawaii. Her poems have been printed in numerous publications and her first book of poetry, Delirium , received literary recognition...

, "Ode to Aireheads, Hairdos, Trains to and from Paris"
Appeared in: Indiana Review

Sarah Hannah, "The Safe House"
Appeared in: Painted Bride Quarterly

Jerry Harp, "Houses"
Appeared in: Pleiades

Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison

James "Jim" Harrison is an American author known for his poetry, fiction, essays, reviews, and writings about food. He has been called "a force of nature", and his work has been compared to that of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway...

, "Sunday Discordancies"
Appeared in: Five Points

Dolores Hayden

Dolores Hayden

Dolores Hayden is an American professor, urban historian, architect, author, and poet. She teaches architecture, urbanism, and American studies at Yale University.-Background:...

, "Grave Goods"
Appeared in: Southwest Review

Terrance Hayes

Terrance Hayes

Terrance Hayes is a prize-winning American poet. His recent poetry collection Lighthead won the National Book Award for Poetry...

, "A House is Not a Home"
Appeared in: Callaloo

K. A. Hays, "The Way of All the Earth"
Appeared in: The Antioch Review

Bob Hicok

Bob Hicok

-Life:Hicok is an associate professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech. He is from Michigan and before teaching owned and ran a successful automotive die design business...

, "Mum's the Word"
Appeared in: The Georgia Review

Daniel Hoffman

Daniel Hoffman

Daniel Gerard Hoffman is an American poet, essayist, and academic. He was appointed the twenty-second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1973.-Biography:Hoffman was born in New York City...

, "A Democratic Vista"
Appeared in: The New Criterion

Richard Howard

Richard Howard

Richard Howard is an American poet, literary critic, essayist, teacher, and translator. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio and is a graduate of Columbia University, where he studied under Mark Van Doren, and where he now teaches...

, "Arthur Englander's Back in School"
Appeared in: The New Republic

P. Hurshell, "In Winter"
Appeared in: Calyx

Michael Johnson, "How to Be Eaten by a Lion"
Appeared in: Mid-American Review

Tina Kelley, "To Yahweh"
Appeared in: Southwest Review

Maud Kelly, "What I Think of Death, If Anyone's Asking"
Appeared in: American Literary Review

Lance Larsen, "Why do you keep putting animals in your poems?"
Appeared in: Indiana Review

Phillis Levin

Phillis Levin

-Life:She is the daughter of Charlotte E. Levin and Herbert L. Levin of Yardley, Pa.Phillis Levin graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1976, and The Johns Hopkins University in 1977....

, "Open Field"
Appeared in: The Kenyon Review

Philip Levine

Philip Levine (poet)

Philip Levine is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet best known for his poems about working-class Detroit. He taught for over thirty years at the English Department of California State University, Fresno and held teaching positions at other universities as well...

, "Words on the Wind"
Appeared in: The Georgia Review

Sarah Lindsay

Sarah Lindsay

Sarah Lindsay is an American poet from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In addition to writing the two chapbooks Bodies of Water and Insomniac's Lullabye, Lindsay has authored two books in the Grove Press Poetry Series: Primate Behavior and Mount Clutter...

, "Tell the Bees"
Appeared in: Poetry

Thomas Lux

Thomas Lux

-Biography:Thomas Lux was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, son of a milkman and a Sears & Roebuck switchboard operator, neither of whom graduated from high school. Lux was raised in Massachusetts on a dairy farm. He was, according to those who knew him in high school, very good at baseball,...

, "The Happy Majority"
Appeared in: American Poetry Review

Joanie Mackowski

Joanie Mackowski

-Life:She grew up in Connecticut.She graduated from Wesleyan University, the University of Washington, was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, and from University of Missouri with a Ph.D.She taught at University of Cincinnati...

, "Boarding: Hamaris thysbe"
Appeared in: The American Scholar

Christine Marshall, "Sweat"
Appeared in: Cimarron Review

Cleopatra Mathis

Cleopatra Mathis

Cleopatra Mathis is an American poet who since 1982 has been the Frederick Sessions Beebe Professor in the English department at Dartmouth College, where she is also director of the Creative Writing Program...

, "Canis"
Appeared in: Provincetown Arts

J.D. McClatchy

J.D. McClatchy

J. D. "Sandy" McClatchy is an American poet and literary critic. He is editor of the Yale Review and president of The American Academy of Arts and Letters.-Life:...

, "Lingering Doubts"
Appeared in: Parnassus

W. S. Merwin

W. S. Merwin

William Stanley Merwin is an American poet, credited with over 30 books of poetry, translation and prose. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, Merwin's writing influence derived from...

, "The Silence of the Mine Canaries"
Appeared in: Alaska Quarterly Review

Jude Nutter, "The Insect Collector's Demise"
Appeared in: The Missouri Review

Sharon Olds

Sharon Olds

-Life:Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco. She was raised as a “hellfire Calvinist”, as she describes it. She says she was by nature "a pagan and a pantheist" and notes "I was in a church where there was both great literary art and bad literary art, the great art being psalms and the bad...

, "Self-Exam"
Appeared in: The New Yorker

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver is an American poet who has won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times described her as "far and away, this country's [America's] best-selling poet".-Early life:...

, "Red"
Appeared in: Five Points

Linda Pastan

Linda Pastan

Linda Pastan is an American poet of Jewish background. From 1991–1995 she was Poet Laureate of Maryland. She is known for writing short poems that address topics like family life, domesticity, motherhood, the female experience, aging, death, loss and the fear of loss, as well as the...

, "Insomnia"
Appeared in: The Virginia Quarterly Review

Kevin Prufer

Kevin Prufer

Kevin D. Prufer is an American poet, academic, editor, and essayist. His most recent books are In A Beautiful Country and National Anthem...

, "On Mercy"
Appeared in: Field

Susan Blackwell Ramsey, "Pickled Heads: St. Petersburg"
Appeared in: Prairie Schooner

Keith Ratzlaff, "Turn"
Appeared in: The Journal

Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Cecile Rich is an American poet, essayist and feminist. She has been called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century."-Early life:...

, "Tonight No Poetry Will Serve"
Appeared in: The Nation

James Richardson

James Richardson (poet)

-Career & Education:James Richardson an American poet and critic. He is Professor of English & Creative Writing at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1980. He grew up in Garden City, New York and attended Princeton University, graduating summa cum laude in 1971. He earned his Ph.D...

, "Subject, Verb, Object"
Appeared in: The New Yorker

Pattiann Rogers

Pattiann Rogers

Pattiann Rogers is an American poet who has published 11 books and received numerous awards, grants and fellowships.She was born in Joplin, Missouri, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor's degree from the University of Missouri in 1961...

, "A Blind Astronomer in the Age of Stars"
Appeared in: Alaska Quarterly Review

Gibbons Ruark

Gibbons Ruark

Gibbons Ruark is a contemporary American poet. Known for his deeply personal often elegiac lyrics about his native North Carolina and beloved Ireland, Ruark has had poetry in such publications as The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Poetry...

, "John Clare's Finches"
Appeared in: The New Republic

John Rybicki, "This Tape Measure Made of Light"
Appeared in: Third Coast

Betsy Sholl

Betsy Sholl

Elizabeth "Betsy" Sholl is an American poet and a former poet laureate of Maine. She was appointed by Governor John Baldacci to the position in 2006 and held it until 2011. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently, Rough Cradle...

, "Gravity and Grace"
Appeared in: Image

Martha Silano, "Love"
Appeared in: The Cincinnati Review

Mitch Sisskind, "Like a Monkey"
Appeared in: Jacket

Tom Sleigh

Tom Sleigh

Tom Sleigh is an American poet, dramatist, essayist and academic, who currently lives in New York City. He has published seven books of original poetry, one full-length translation of Euripides' Herakles and a book of essays. At least five of his plays have been produced...

, "At the Pool"
Appeared in: AGNI

Vincent Stanley, "At the New York Public Library, I heard Derek Walcott dismiss the prose poem"
Appeared in: Fulcrum

Pamela Sutton, "Forty"
Appeared in: American Poetry Review

Alexandra Teague, "Heartlines"
Appeared in: New England Review

Craig Morgan Teicher, "Ultimately Justice Directs Them"
Appeared in: No Tell Motel

Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey is an American poet who won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her 2006 collection, Native Guard.Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. She earned the A.B. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in poetry from Hollins University, and an M.F.A. in poetry from...

, "Liturgy"
Appeared in: The Virginia Quarterly Review

Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott

Derek Alton Walcott, OBE OCC is a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, writer and visual artist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2011 for White Egrets. His works include the Homeric epic Omeros...

, "A Sea-Change"
Appeared in: Harper's

Jeanne Murray Walker

Jeanne Murray Walker

Jeanne Murray Walker is an American poet.-Life:Jeanne Murray Walker was born Jeanne Murray in Parkers Prairie, Minnesota, the daughter of John Gerald and Erna Murray. In 1965, she won the Atlantic Monthly Award for both fiction and Poetry and was named the Atlantic Monthly Scholar at Bread Loaf...

, "Holding Action"
Appeared in: The Hudson Review

Ronald Wallace

Ronald Wallace

Ronald Wallace was Professor of Biblical Theology at Columbia Theological Seminary-Career Overview:* Brora, Minister without Charge* 1940 Minister, Pollock Church, Glasgow* Church of Scotland's Huts and Canteens...

, "No Pegasus"
Appeared in: Margie

Charles Harper Webb

Charles Harper Webb

Charles Harper Webb is an American poet, professor, psychotherapist and former singer and guitarist. His most recent poetry collection is Shadow Ball . His honors include a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Pushcart Prize and inclusion in The Best American...

, "Her Last Conflagration"
Appeared in: Salt Hill

Lisa Williams

Lisa Williams

Lisa Williams is a claimed psychic and healer who has starred in two shows on Lifetime TV: Lisa Williams: Life Among the Dead and Lisa Williams: Voices From the Other Side ....

, "Leaving Saint Peter's Basilica"
Appeared in: Measure

Carolyne Wright

Carolyne Wright

-Life:She studied at Seattle University, New York University, and graduated from Syracuse University with master's and doctoral degrees.She has held visiting creative writing posts at Radcliffe College, Sweet Briar College, Emory University, University of Wyoming, University of Miami, Oklahoma...

, "This dream the world is having about itself . . ."
Appeared in: Iowa Review

Debbie Yee, "Cinderella's Last Will & Testament"
Appeared in: OCHO

Kevin Young

Kevin Young (poet)

Kevin Young is an American poet and teacher of poetry. Young graduated from Harvard College in 1992, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University , and received his MFA from Brown University. While in Boston and Providence, he was part of the African-American poetry group, The Dark Room Collective...

, "I shall be released"
Appeared in: The Kenyon Review

Matthew Zapruder

Matthew Zapruder

Matthew Zapruder is an American poet, editor, translator, and professor. His second poetry collection, The Pajamaist , won the 2007 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was chosen by Library Journal as one of the top ten poetry volumes of 2006...

, "Never to Return"
Appeared in: The Paris Review

External links

• http://bestamericanpoetry.com/archive/?id=23 Web page for the book