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A review by raynerayne
The Best American Poetry 2014 by Terrance Hayes, David Lehman
3.0
3.5 stars.
As I review the collections in this series, I think I'm just going to be putting in notes. This time, gifs are included (under spoiler tags for formatting reasons). Oh yeah, I've become that kind of Goodreads member. Oh yeah, baby. Buckle up, 'cause we're going for a ride! (It's not that kind of ride, though. It's going to be very tame.)
~ In "With Birds," Erin Belieu writes: "the exact shade of an aubade". As soon as I read that I was like:
...then I looked the definition up and was like:
...gorl
~ CAConrad's "wondering about our demise while driving to Disneyland with abandon." Was just. So. Confusing.
~ Anne Carson's "A Fragment of Ibykos Translated 6 Ways" o...kay?
~ Adam Hammer's "As Like" Literally contained the phrase "in times of the most extreme potatoes"... like, wtf?? why?? *~art~* or whatever, I guess.
Anyway, moving on to poems I did like. There were (and I was pleasantly surprised by this) many I liked in this anthology.
~ "To Survive the Revolution" by Traci Brimhall -- no idea WTF it was about, to be honest. But it did sound purty.
~ "Host" by Jericho Brown -- this one was so effing good. I am not a gay black man, but man did Jericho Brown paint a picture for me. In the "Contributors' Notes and Comments" section, Jericho Brown describes the appeal of this poem in a way more eloquent than I could ever put into words: "I am ever fascinated by all the people who like 'Host' but have never met a man via jack'd, grindr, or adam4adam.com. I'm hoping this poem's appearance here lends power to my conviction that there is very little universal about poetry other than the marvelous music it makes in the mind and the mouth. And I trust this poem speaks for itself in its attempt to investigate desire, sexuality, and masculinity." Click here to read this really good fucking poem.
~ Philip Dacey's "Julliard Cento Sonnet"
~ Sean Thomas Dougherty's "The Blues Is a Verb"
~ "All wisdom is afterthought, a sort of helpless relief."- Rita Dove, The Spring Cricket Repudiates His Parable of Negritude
~ So many poems in this collection were "eh"-not good, not bad. But Cornelius Eady's "Overturned" was both until it wasn't: it became fun because of its word-mincing, ie "pickle wince".
~ Major Jackson's "OK Cupid" was fun. It was just fun. It's a good poem to read out loud, too.
~ Amaud Jamaul Johnson's "L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates Dead at 83" - I love poems about history because they always have a more personal, human element to them when they're narrated in poem form and in this poem you can really feel the pain of the people who lived in L.A. in the 80s and 90s around the time of the L.A. riots.
~ Patricia Lockwood's "Rape Joke" - went into the collection having heard a lot of things said about this piece (mostly positive) so I was naturally a little wary of it. Ended up liking it.
As I review the collections in this series, I think I'm just going to be putting in notes. This time, gifs are included (under spoiler tags for formatting reasons). Oh yeah, I've become that kind of Goodreads member. Oh yeah, baby. Buckle up, 'cause we're going for a ride! (It's not that kind of ride, though. It's going to be very tame.)
~ In "With Birds," Erin Belieu writes: "the exact shade of an aubade". As soon as I read that I was like:
Spoiler
...then I looked the definition up and was like:
Spoiler
...gorl
Spoiler
~ CAConrad's "wondering about our demise while driving to Disneyland with abandon." Was just. So. Confusing.
~ Anne Carson's "A Fragment of Ibykos Translated 6 Ways" o...kay?
~ Adam Hammer's "As Like" Literally contained the phrase "in times of the most extreme potatoes"... like, wtf?? why?? *~art~* or whatever, I guess.
Anyway, moving on to poems I did like. There were (and I was pleasantly surprised by this) many I liked in this anthology.
~ "To Survive the Revolution" by Traci Brimhall -- no idea WTF it was about, to be honest. But it did sound purty.
~ "Host" by Jericho Brown -- this one was so effing good. I am not a gay black man, but man did Jericho Brown paint a picture for me. In the "Contributors' Notes and Comments" section, Jericho Brown describes the appeal of this poem in a way more eloquent than I could ever put into words: "I am ever fascinated by all the people who like 'Host' but have never met a man via jack'd, grindr, or adam4adam.com. I'm hoping this poem's appearance here lends power to my conviction that there is very little universal about poetry other than the marvelous music it makes in the mind and the mouth. And I trust this poem speaks for itself in its attempt to investigate desire, sexuality, and masculinity." Click here to read this really good fucking poem.
~ Philip Dacey's "Julliard Cento Sonnet"
~ Sean Thomas Dougherty's "The Blues Is a Verb"
~ "All wisdom is afterthought, a sort of helpless relief."- Rita Dove, The Spring Cricket Repudiates His Parable of Negritude
~ So many poems in this collection were "eh"-not good, not bad. But Cornelius Eady's "Overturned" was both until it wasn't: it became fun because of its word-mincing, ie "pickle wince".
~ Major Jackson's "OK Cupid" was fun. It was just fun. It's a good poem to read out loud, too.
~ Amaud Jamaul Johnson's "L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates Dead at 83" - I love poems about history because they always have a more personal, human element to them when they're narrated in poem form and in this poem you can really feel the pain of the people who lived in L.A. in the 80s and 90s around the time of the L.A. riots.
~ Patricia Lockwood's "Rape Joke" - went into the collection having heard a lot of things said about this piece (mostly positive) so I was naturally a little wary of it. Ended up liking it.