Featured in the 2003 volume of Best American Poetry, is Daniel Nester’s “Poem for the Novelist Whom I Forced to Write a Poem”  which first appeared in the literary magazine, Spinning Jenny .  Nester makes use of his voice (which has been praised in his other works including in his novel, Shader), as well as…

Kathryn Starbuck is far from your average poet. She was born in Iowa in 1939, but currently resides in Alabama. Originally, she was employed as a political journalist and commentator. However, she was not far from her later roots when she worked as an editor of the Milford Cabinet newspaper in New Hampshire. She was married…

A Tech’s Ode to the Genome Computer by Chad Parmenter, was published in January 2006 and appeared in the 2007 version of The Best American Poetry. I believe the poem’s main message is to metaphorically connect with the reader by showing how advanced computers really are (especially from a “tech’s” perspective) and how much more appreciated/understood…

Sherman Alexie’s “Terminal Nostalgia” was originally published in the Spring 2011 issue of the Green Mountains Review. It was then reprinted in the 2012 volume of Best American Poetry. Alexie was born in 1966 and grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. His most recent work is in the poetry collection Face. His poem “Terminal…

Published in the 2004 Atlantic Monthly, Seesaws by Samuel Hazo, symbolizes the difference in conflict between balances and the irony of them. Hazo, founder and director of the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburg and McAnulty Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Duquesne University, has written a countless number of poetry books, such as A Flight…

  Originally published in the New England Review, Laura Kasischke’s poem about the love between a mother and son, “At Gettysburg,” was featured in the 2006 edition of Best American Poetry. As the mother of a nine-year-old son with a determined fascination for the Civil War, Kasischke describes her son’s intrigue as being  “bloody creek”…

Seeing people achieve things like winning American Idol or people having “perfect” lives grows jealousy in those who don’t achieve outstanding accomplishments. Reading Stephanie Brown’s  “Roommates: Noblesse Oblige, Sprezzatura, and Gin Lane” grew that idea into a reality. Inside the 2005 edition of The Best American Poetry, “Roommates: Noblesse Oblige, Sprezzatura, and Gin Lane” is…

Joshua Beckman’s “Untitled” was first published in Let the People Die, a series which approximates a sonnet cycle, and I found it in my edition of Best American Poetry 2008. He wrote this poem while traveling on the Staten Island Ferry. The poem does have a title: it is literally called “Untitled.” I’m not sure whether Beckman intended this to convey…

Originally appearing in American Letters and Commentary in 2000, Sarah Manguso’s “The Rider” made its way into The Best American Poetry 2001. Based on ideas of religion clashing with science, the poem focuses on a narrator describing the probabilities that could lead to the end of the Earth, creating an Apocalypse, before combining them, and stating…

James Richardson’s “Vectors: Forty-five Aphorisms and Ten-second Essays” was first published in Ploughshares in the Spring of 2000. Richardson grew up in the nearby Garden City, and attended/now teaches creative writing at Princeton. Of course I did not know this at the time I chose the poem, but anything written by a professor at the most…