The Best American Poetry

The Best American Poetry series consists of annual poetry anthologies, each containing seventy-five poems.Each year, this series presents essential American verse and the poets. The best American poetry has appeared in this venerable collection for over twenty-five years."Best American Poetry remains one of the most popular and best-selling poetry books published each year^[1]."

The series, begun by David Lehman^[2] in 1988,^[3] has a different guest editor every year. Lehman, each year contributes a foreword focusing on the state of contemporary poetry. The book titles in the series always follow the format of the first, changing only the year.

A compendium for the first decade of the series has also been published, The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–1997. It has seventy-five best poems from the previous ten anthologies. In 2013,It published "The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition (2013)" which have 100 poems from the series' history.

In 1988,the rules for the selection of the poems were laid down by Lehman.

• Lehman would select a guest editor each year. Guest editor would make the final selection of poems
• Each year's anthology would have poems from the previous year
• There would be seventy-five poems in each annual anthology maximum three poems by an individual poet
• Foreign poets residing in the United States, "especially in cases where the poet has come to seem a vital presence in a particular American community", would be eligible to appear, and so John Ash, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott all made it into the 1988 edition.