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The Best American Poetry 1996 Paperback – September 16, 1996

by David Lehman (Editor), Adrienne Rich (Contributor)
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 10 ratings
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Now in its ninth year, The Best American Poetry is universally acclaimed as the best anthology in the field. The compilation includes a diverse abundance of poems published in 1995 in more than 40 publications ranging from The New Yorker to The Paris Review to Bamboo Ridge.
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  1. Print length
    320 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Scribner
  4. Publication date
    September 16, 1996
  5. Dimensions
    5.5 x 0.8 x 8.44 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    068481451X
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0684814513
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Adrienne Rich proves to be the most inclusive editor thus far in the Best American Poetry series, drawing from a number of writers and journals whose work had not been represented in earlier installments. Of course, established poets such as Alicia Ostriker and W.S. Merwin are present, alongside newcomers like Ray A. Young Bear and Latif Asad Abdullah. The poems range from the funny (Beth Ann Fennelly's unrhymed sonnet), to the sexy (Deborah Stein's steamy contribution), to the poignant (a posthumous inclusion from Jane Kenyon).

From Publishers Weekly

Rich has amassed a far-flung group to represent her view of America. These poets were born in Jamaica, China, Mexico, South Africa, Canada, Hawaii and the mainland. There are professors and prisoners, a medical student and a jazz critic. Rich embraces both the bilingual and the long poem, but what is truly startling is how little these poets say of joy and how much of suffering. It is a heavy read. Alicia Ostriker writes of the Holocaust, Wang Ping of the deaths of Chinese stowaways, Gary Soto of the destitute. There are three poets born after 1975, testing human experience and response: Deborah Stein, Quentin Rowan and Natasha Le Bel ("my born body new and/ gravid with musical sensuality"). And four poets who passed away last year haunt the anthology with meditations on death: William Dickey, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill and Jean Starr ("I have felt each living link begin to wither"). David Lehman is the series editor.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scribner; Original ed. edition (September 16, 1996)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 068481451X
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0684814513
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.44 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 10 ratings

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  1. David Lehman

    David Lehman

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  2. Adrienne Rich

    Adrienne Rich

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    Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) is an American poet, writer, feminist thinker, and activist in progressive causes. In a career spanning seven decades she wrote and published two dozen volumes of poetry and over a half-dozen of prose. Rich's poetry includes the collections Diving Into the Wreck, The Dream of a Common Language, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, An Atlas of the Difficult World, The School Among the Ruins, and Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth. Her prose work includes the collections On Lies, Secrets, & Silence; Blood, Bread, & Poetry; an influential essay, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," and Of Woman Born, a scholarly examination of motherhood as a socio-historic construct. She received the National Book Award for poetry in 1974 for Diving Into the Wreck, and was a finalist an additional three times, in 1956, 1967, and 1991. Other honors include a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant in 1994, the Academy of American Poets' Wallace Stevens Award, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation, the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry's Lifetime Recognition Award, and the Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In 1997 she turned down the National Medal for the Arts to protest the growing concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands, writing to the NEA that "anyone familiar with my work from the early Sixties on knows that I believe in art's social presence—as breaker of official silences, as voice for those whose voices are disregarded, and as a human birthright."

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Mya Coursey
    5.0 out of 5 stars Must-have survey of contemporary poetry
    Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2013
    Verified Purchase
    Recommended to me by a poet, this volume was (controversially) curated by Adrienne Rich whose introduction is worth the price of admission and clearly lays out her criteria. A colorful, savory stew of images from the end of the 20th Century.
    4 people found this helpful
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  • Alain
    5.0 out of 5 stars all good
    Reviewed in the United States on February 3, 2013
    Verified Purchase
    the product arrived in perfect conditions. it took the necessary time to get to my address. there was no need to contact the sender. i am really satisfied with this purchase.
    One person found this helpful
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  • 50 years old
    5.0 out of 5 stars influenced by the cultural wars of the 80s and 90s
    Reviewed in the United States on March 30, 2013
    This book contains poems, among others, by Alicia Ostriker, Diane Wakoski, Kimiko Hahn, Jane Kenyon, Stanley Kunitz and W.S. Merwin. These are all poets who write competent verse that deserve the "best" designation. I don't understand why two years later Harold Bloom excluded any of these poets from his polemical "Best of the Best" series. (Complete with a hysterical diatribe against this volume.) It really turned me off on Harold Bloom, even though anyone interested in literature has to be familiar with his work. One thing this book does is bring to attention poets and poetry who perhaps were more known in the regions they lived in than perhaps on a national level. I read criticisms on other sites (I think "The Boston Review") as saying this collection is too "politically correct". I don't see it. One thing art does is show the artistic state at a certain point in time to future artists. If all these poets were asking for is sympathy I don't think they would have been selected. (To put it crudely: if the "form" of a poem is less than perfect many times the meeting of the "form" with the "subject" makes up for that.) At the very least The Best American Poetry of 1996 makes me want to read more Diane Wakoski.
    2 people found this helpful
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  • macheney@cisunix.unh.edu
    5.0 out of 5 stars Best of the Bests
    Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 1998
    Adrienne Rich has put together a book of living poems. She believes that poetry lives in spaces beyond the walls of university literature courses, lives in the moments beyond the vainly personal, lives in the words of people who haven't always been listened to. Always, she believes that poetry lives.
    There are beautiful poems here, and this is a beautiful book -- but it is a ragged book, and for every perfect note it hits, a wrong one slips in someplace. But that's okay. This is a human book, one that admits all the failures and wrong notes of the everyday. Rich set out to prove that there is good poetry, great poetry, Best American poetry in places where people haven't looked before, and that effort makes this the most valuable book in the Best American Poetry series. It's a book full of 75 surprises, but every reader will be surprised in a different way.
    Of course, the title is problematic. The title is always problematic, and most of the editors of the series have said in their introductions that these poems aren't necessarily the absolute best of the year, but are the poems which struck the editor as the most interesting. That has given a nice variety to the series, but Rich notes that the variety has been limited because the past editors, for the most part, share aesthetic criteria and cultural biases which have confined the possible range(s) of the series. American poetry is hardly homogenous, and the great strength of American poetry is that it comes from all over the place from all sorts of different voices.
    Harold Bloom recently edited a Best of the Best American Poetry volume and didn't include ANY of the poems Rich selected, because he thought she edited the volume to conform to her political agenda (as if Bloom didn't edit from a political agenda), and he says that the poetry is bad, is embarrassing. He and I read different books.
    The poetry in this anthology certainly varies in quality, and probably no-one other than Rich will like all of the poems. That's the nature of an anthology, and that (though Bloom can not fathom such a concept) is the nature of poetry. But there are wonders here, and to pass them up because you fear voices that don't sound like your own is to miss the chorus of America, the chorus of poetry.
    I've read most of the Best American Poetry volumes, and I own three of them. Rich's anthology is the one I return to most frequently, for nourishment and awakening, for music and noise, for life.
    3 people found this helpful
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  • M. H. Boroson
    1.0 out of 5 stars Wish I could give it less than 1 star....
    Reviewed in the United States on June 3, 2000
    Fundamentally, this is the dullest, least interesting collection of poetry I've ever seen. And it's deeply hypocritical of Rich as well; her own poetry reveals a woman who is aware not only of feminist and multicultural criticism, but who is also well-versed in the strengths and mysteries poetry can offer. ..................... There isn't a single piece worth reading in the entire book.
    4 people found this helpful
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  • dgoet@aol.com
    2.0 out of 5 stars Adrienne Rich has gone soft
    Reviewed in the United States on January 26, 1998
    Rich has gone soft! She cares more for causes, race and gender of the authors than she does for quality. There are about 3 and a half strong poems in the collection, which is the worst edition of Best American Poetry by far.
    9 people found this helpful
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  • LAVILA
    4.0 out of 5 stars The best of this series
    Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2007
    I read all of the Best of ... Poetry until about 2000 when I found the quality had really deteriorated. The series was uneven at best, but the 1996 edition was full of wonderful poetry. I might not find Adrienne Rich's politics or poetry particularly agreeable but her critical sense is impeccable.
    2 people found this helpful
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