The Best American Poetry 2007, a volume in The Best American Poetry series, was edited by poet Heather McHugh, guest editor, who made the final selections, and David Lehman, the general editor for the series.
This book is the 20th volume in the most popular annual poetry anthology in the United States. Along with popular poets who have often appeared in previous editions, such as Billy Collins, Louise Gluck and Galway Kinnell, the book includes poets of "off-center traditions" such as Rae Armantrout and Christian Bok. Some of McHugh's selections from newer poets "tend toward the experimental," according to a review in Publishers Weekly, which pointed to poems from Ben Lerner and Danielle Pafunda as evidence of this. Publishers Weekly called it a "riskier than usual volume."[1]
Richard Wakefield, reviewing the volume in The Seattle Times, wrote that McHugh's selections were "as eccentric, sometimes as unabashedly goofy, as any in the series' two decades," but among them were a couple of dozen "very fine" poems. Wakefield in particular praised the poems by Carmine Starnino and Brad Leithauser, but called the Nicky Beer selection merely "clever prose arranged as questions and answers," and that poem's inclusion probably due to a common "weakness" among poets for wordplay. McHugh's essay introducing the volume was briefer than those of most of her predecessors, according to Wakefield, but was itself almost worth the cost of the book and contains some phrasing "as good as anything in the volume."[2]
In her review of the book for The Tampa Tribune, Karen Haymon wrote that the poems by established poets generally outshone the work of the lesser-known writers, with plenty of poems "good and worth reading" by established names such as Billy Collins, Donald Hall, and Robert Hass. However, Haymon called a poem by Brian Turner, an Iraq veteran, a pleasant discovery.[3]
Listed in alphabetical order by author's name:
| Poet | Poem | Publication where poem previously appeared | |
| "The Art of Breathing" | Barrow Street | ||
| Jeannette Allee | "Crimble of Staines" | Field | |
| "Scumble" | American Poet | ||
| "The Opening" | Verse | ||
| Nicky Beer | "Still Life with Half-Turned Woman and Questions" | Beloit Poetry Journal | |
| "The Method" | Crazyhorse | ||
| "Vowels" | New American Writing | ||
| Louis E. Bourgeois | "A Voice from the City" | Sentence | |
| "Flesh of John Brown's Flesh: Dec. 2, 1859" | Subtropics | ||
| Matthew Byrne | "Let Me Count the Ways" | Poet Lore | |
| Macgregor Card | "Duties of an English Foreign Secretary" | Fence | |
| "marriage" | POOL | ||
| "Common Flicker" | TriQuarterly | ||
| "The News Today" | Bookforum | ||
| "Valentine for You" | Crazyhorse | ||
| "Continuous Bullets over Flattened Earth and A Super-Clean Country" | New American Writing | ||
| "Dead Critics Society" | Atlanta Review | ||
| "Tea Lay" | New American Writing | ||
| "Language Police Report" | Sentence | ||
| "Where He Found Himself" | Iowa Review | ||
| "See Jack" | Sentence | ||
| "Etudes" | the tiny | ||
| "Lemon Tree" | American Poetry Review | ||
| "Yinglish Strophes IX" | Barrow Street | ||
| Helen Ransom Forman | "Daily" | Michigan Quarterly Review | |
| "Archaic Fragment" | Poetry | ||
| "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" | New Letters | ||
| "The Master" | American Poetry Review | ||
| "Best Am Po" | POOL | ||
| "Initiation" | American Poetry Review | ||
| "From The Future of Terror/Terror of the Future Series" | Bomb | ||
| "Bush's War" | American Poetry Review | ||
| "Critique of Pure Reason" | Ploughshares | ||
| Daniel Johnson | "Do Unto Others" | Barrow Street | |
| "Auguries" | Southwest Review | ||
| "Comma of God" | Sentence | ||
| "Hide-and-Seek, 1933" | Beloit Poetry Journal | ||
| "Ode to the Personals" | Five Points | ||
| Julie Larios | "What Bee Did" | The Cortland Review | |
| "A Good List" | The New Criterion | ||
| "From Angle of Yaw" | Beloit Poetry Journal | ||
| "When I was a dinosaur" | POOL | ||
| "By Accident" | The Antioch Review | ||
| Sabrina Orah Mark | "The 10 Stages of Beatrice" | Conduit | |
| "Ode to the Plantar Fascia" | POOL | ||
| "On Leonardo's Drawings" | The Kenyon Review | ||
| "Etymology" | Literary Imagination | ||
| "Peep Show" | The Kenyon Review | ||
| "Voltaire at Cirey, 1736" | Barrow Street | ||
| "From Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved" | RATTLE | ||
| "Dear Pearce & Pearce, Inc." | Denver Quarterly | ||
| Chad Parmenter | "A Tech's Ode to Genome Computer" | The Kenyon Review | |
| Susan Parr | "Swooping Actuarial Fauna and Ecstatic Cling" | Alaska Quarterly Review | |
| Peter Pereira | "Nursmaid's Elbow" | New England Review | |
| "Stupid Meditation on Peace" | The New Yorker | ||
| "Louie Louie" | American Poetry Review | ||
| "The Rev. Larry Love is Dead" | TriQuarterly | ||
| Marya Rosenberg | "If I Tell You You're Beautiful, Will You Report Me?: A West Point Haiku Series" | Hanging Loose | |
| "F" | Beloit Poetry Journal | ||
| "The Death of the Sha" | Raritan Quarterly Review | ||
| "Country Western Singer" | The Virginia Quarterly Review | ||
| "Drawing Jesus" | Gulf Coast | ||
| "Money" | New American Writing | ||
| "What Every Soldier Should Know" | American Poet | ||
| "The Family" | Colorado Review | ||
| "Coulrophobia" | Tarpaulin Sky | ||
| Kary Wayson | "Flu Song in Spanish" | Alaska Quarterly Review | |
| "Big" | Michigan Quarterly Review | ||
| "The Home of the Brave" | Sacramento News & Review | ||
| "From Opposites and More Opposites" | American Poet | ||
| "At Dusk, the Catbird" | The Vocabula Review | ||
| Theodor Worozbyt | "An Experiment" | Crazyhorse | |
| "Remiss Rebut" | Colorado Review |
The book is published by Scribner.
224 pages
Hardcover:
Paperback: