The Best American Poetry 2003, a volume in The Best American Poetry series, was edited by David Lehman and by guest editor Yusef Komunyakaa.
Ron Smith, reviewing the book in The Richmond Times-Dispatch, wrote that Galway Kinnell's When the Towers Fell is "often moving, even if it doesn't manage the fusion of Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot it aims for." Another poem in the volume focusing on the effects of terrorism is Susan Dickman's Skin. Smith thought the better poems in this edition were by Marilyn Nelson, Rodney Jones, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Tony Hoagland, and Ted Kooser.[1]
| Poet | Poem | Publication(s) where poem previously appeared |
| "The End of Out of the Past" | The London Review of Books | |
| from "A Locked Room" | Poetry Project Newsletter | |
| "Dedicated to the One I Love" | Gargoyle | |
| "Some Further Words" | American Poetry Review | |
| "Curse" | The Threepenny Review | |
| "Rambling on My Mind" | Bomb | |
| "Art Tatum" | The Paris Review | |
| from "1000 Lines" | TriQuarterly | |
| "Perfect Attendance: Short Subjects Made from the Staring Photos of Strangers" | The Progressive | |
| "Aeon Flux:June" | Ploughshares | |
| "Litany" | Poetry | |
| "Six Sketches: When a Soul Breaks" | Callaloo | |
| "World History" | Poetry | |
| "Skin" | Rhino | |
| "Fox Trot Fridays" | Callaloo | |
| "Open Door Blues" | Brilliant Corners | |
| "Journal" | Tin House | |
| "The Vagrant Hours" | Mississippi Review | |
| "Ponderosa" | Boston Review | |
| "An Offer Received in This Morning's Mail:" | American Poetry Review | |
| "Landscape" | The Threepenny Review | |
| "Report on Human Beings" | Ontario Review | |
| "Max Jacob's Shoes" | New American Writing | |
| "Beauty" | The New Yorker | |
| "The Opaque" | Colorado Review | |
| "Rhythmic Arrangements (on prosody)" | LUNA | |
| "Sad Little Breathing Machine" | Verse | |
| "Villanelle" | 88 | |
| "The Desire Manuscripts" | The Paris Review | |
| "Summer Night" | 88 | |
| "Success" | The New Yorker | |
| "Ten Sighs from a Sabbatical" | Five Points | |
| "Some Rain" | Pleiades | |
| "The Dragon" | New England Review | |
| "When the Towers Fell" | The New Yorker | |
| "After Horace" | Poetry | |
| "Love Blooms at Chimsbury After the War" | FIELD | |
| "Proverb" | The New York Review of Books | |
| "Y2K (1933)" | Poetry | |
| "In the Hall of Bones" | Third Coast | |
| "The Music of Time" | Rattle | |
| "Jihad" | Poetry | |
| "To Zbigniew Herbert's Bicycle" | The New Yorker | |
| "A History of Color" | American Poetry Review | |
| "Dear Alter Ego" | Croonenbergh's Fly | |
| "The Loaf" | The New York Review of Books | |
| "Four Deaths That Happened Daily" | Spoon River Poetry Review | |
| "Asparagus" | Rattapallax | |
| "Poem for the Novelist Whom I Forced to Write a Poem" | Spinning Jenny | |
| "What Happened to Everybody" | LUNA | |
| "Queen Min Bi" | Barrow Street | |
| "Anniversary" | The Washington Post Magazine | |
| "What the Paymaster Said" | Witness | |
| "Sequoia sempervirens" | Callaloo | |
| "The Disappearances" | The New Yorker | |
| "For Nazim Hikmet in the Old Prison, Now a Four Seasons Hotel" | Rattapallax | |
| "Sleet" | Third Coast | |
| "Song with a Child's Pacifier in It" | Boston Review | |
| "There's Trouble Everywhere" | Poetry | |
| "Translating" | Mid-American Review | |
| "Lines" | PMS | |
| "The Restaurant Business" | New American Writing | |
| "The Lost Boy" | LUNA | |
| "After Your Death" | New England Review | |
| "On Being Asked to Discuss Poetic Theory" | 88 | |
| "In a Rut" | Poetry Northwest | |
| "Premonition" | The World | |
| "In Sky" | Boston Review | |
| "Man Running" | The New Yorker | |
| "The World" | The New Yorker | |
| "My Work" | New American Writing | |
| "Scrabble with Matthews" | Poetry | |
| "Clemency" | The Kenyon Review | |
| "After the Opening, 1932" | The Threepenny Review | |
| "Reading the Bones: a Blackjack Moses nightmare" | American Poetry Review | |