The Best American Poetry 2005, a volume in The Best American Poetry series, was edited by David Lehman and by guest editor Paul Muldoon.
The volume is "one of the series' best books in years", according to Maureen N. McLane, reviewing the book in The Chicago Tribune. "None of these poets is hermetic, but many are willing to challenge you as well as to entertain you. Poetry appears here as an art for grownups - not self-serious adults, but actually mature people who treasure serious play and complex comedy as much as filigreed melancholy." The selections clearly have not been chosen simply because the writer is well-known or in order to represent a certain style or group, she wrote. McLane mentioned particularly good selections by Cecilia Woloch, Catherine Bowman, Elaine Equi, Beth Ann Fennelly, Matthea Harvey, Donald Justice, Marilyn Hacker, and A. R. Ammons, as well as Stacey Harwood, whose poem parodies the extensive contributors notes section in the back of the book.[1] Harwood is the wife of the series editor, David Lehman.[2]
| Poet | Poem | Publication(s) where poem previously appeared | ||||
| "In View of the Fact" | Epoch | |||||
| "In Dearest, Deepest Winter" | Crazyhorse | |||||
| "The Catholic Encyclopedia" | The Cincinnati Review | |||||
| "I Want to Be Your Shoebox" | Open City | |||||
| "Roommates: Noblesse Oblige, Sprezzatura, and Gin Lane" | POOL | |||||
| "The Beats" | New York Quarterly | |||||
| "Irregular Masks" | The Los Angeles Review | |||||
| "Seven Changs" | Michigan Quarterly Review | |||||
| "To Jaques Pepin" | Gastronomica | |||||
| "The Poets March on Washington" | Jacket | |||||
| "Urban Myth" | Sentence | |||||
| "Five Roses in the Morning" | Iowa Review | |||||
| "Everything I Needed to Know" | Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Daily | |||||
| "The Revolution" | Slate | |||||
| "Pre-Raphaelite Pinups" | The New Yorker | |||||
| "The Magical Sadness of Omar Caceres" | FENCE | |||||
| "19--: An Elegy" | Michigan Quarterly Review | |||||
| "I Need to Be More French. Or Japanese." | Ploughshares | |||||
| "In Praise of My Prostate" | Hanging Loose | |||||
| "Adam and Eve's Dog" | Notre Dame Review | |||||
| "Watch" | Sycamore Review | |||||
| "Blue on Her Hands" | American Poetry Review | |||||
| "Advice for a Stegosaurus" | The Antioch Review | |||||
| "The Searchers" | Court Green | |||||
| "The Turn of the Screw" | American Letters & Commentary | |||||
| "For Kateb Yacine (Algerian playwright, novelist, poet, and activist, 1929-89)" | New England Review, PN Review | |||||
| "I May After Leaving You Walk Quickly or Even Run" | 88 | |||||
| "Contributors' Notes" | LIT | |||||
| "Variations on Two Black Cinema Treasures" | CROWD | |||||
| "Seesaws" | The Atlantic Monthly | |||||
| "Motes A mote it is to trouble the mind's eye." | The New Yorker | |||||
| "The Propagation of the Species" | In Posse Review | |||||
| "from The Fatalist" | Bomb | |||||
| "Remorse After a Panic Attack in a Wisconsin Field, 1975" | New Letters | |||||
| "Burlap Sack" | Runes | |||||
| "In a Quiet Town by the Sea" | The Cincinnati Review | |||||
| "Ants" | Mudfish | |||||
| "A Chapter in the Life of Mr. Kehoe, Fisherman" | The New Criterion | |||||
| "A Blessing from My Sixteen Years' Son" | The New Yorker | |||||
| "Hell and Love" | Image | |||||
| "The Wolf" | 32 poems | |||||
| "Shelley" | The New Yorker | |||||
| "In the Graveyard of Fallen Monuments" | Denver Quarterly, Poetry Daily | |||||
| "Hell" | Conduit | |||||
| "Ill-Made Almighty" | 32 poems, Verse Daily | |||||
| "Space Marriage" | Fence | |||||
| "Song: I Love You. Who are You?" | Gulf Coast | |||||
| "Dear Owl" | jubilat | |||||
| "Death Is Intended" | Shenandoah | |||||
| "Dislocations: Seven Scenarios" | Boston Review | |||||
| "All the Ghosts" | The Paris Review | |||||
| "How I Became Impossible" | Court Green | |||||
| "Home to Roost" | Poetry | - | "Media Effects" | Insurance Magazine | ||
| "Costanza Bonarelli" | The American Scholar | |||||
| "The Grilled Cheese Sandwich An Elusive Essential to Social Success" | Barrow Street, Good Foot | |||||
| "Moscow" | Shankpainter | |||||
| "Hate Poem" | Pleiades | |||||
| "Sunlight" | New England Review | |||||
| "An Impasse" | The Hudson Review | |||||
| "For Hughes Cuenod - in his 100th year." | The New Criterion, Early Music America | |||||
| "Waiting for a Ride" | The New Yorker | |||||
| "Twenty Questions" | POOL | |||||
| "End of the Day on Second" | The Antioch Review | |||||
| "The Swing" | New American Writing | |||||
| "Marijuana" | The Yale Review | |||||
| "For a Man Who Wrote CUNT on a Motel Bathroom Mirror" | Hanging Loose | |||||
| "From the Notebooks of Anne Verveine, VII" | The New Yorker, Pleine Marge | |||||
| "Ballad of the Subcontractor" | Notre Dame Review | |||||
| "from The Maud Project" | Salt | |||||
| "Some Words Inside of Words (for children and others)" | The Atlantic Monthly | |||||
| "Bareback Pantoum" | New Letters | |||||
| "A Short History of My Life" | The New Yorker | |||||
| "A Big Ball of Foil in a Small New York Apartment" | New York Quarterly | |||||
| "Black Cat Blues" | The Virginia Quarterly Review |