A. E. Stallings on BAP 2024

Echolocations: Reflections on Poems by A.E Stallings (Issue 3)

'The Best American Poetry 2024', edited by Mary Jo Salter and David Lehman (series editor).

13 December 2025

 

In this new series, A.E. Stallings, Oxford’s Professor of Poetry, will explore a contemporary poem from a new book or anthology or journal and explain what she admires about it. You can subscribe to the newsletter to receive each issue in your inbox. This issue explores The Best American Poetry 2024. 

Begun in 1988 with a volume guest-edited by John Ashbery, The Best American Poetry (BAP) series has been running for a startling 36 years and counting, including intercalary volumes such as a Best of The Best of American Poetry (edited by Harold Bloom in 1997), and a 25^th anniversary edition (edited by Robert Pinsky). The list of editors is a who’s who of US poetry elites. And behind it all, the poet David Lehman, the series editor, has labored quietly and diligently ensuring its continuity and continued relevance.

As with any annual publication, not to mention one where the volume editor changes each year, the series is inevitably uneven, although the guiding hand of Lehman ensures a certain base-level of quality. Every year will have its new-discovered gems, its duds, its stars, and, often enough, its brief but vitriolic controversies played out across social media. You might think such a long-running series would have played out its initial energies, but I think I can say with some confidence that Mary Jo Salter’s 2024 volume is the best volume in a decade, and arguably the best BAP volume ever produced. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out I am also included in this volume; I have been lucky enough to have appeared in BAP many times over the years, beginning with the class of 1994.)

Salter’s volume fizzes with the potential of debut poets, the sprezzatura of journeyman accomplishment, and the depth of old masters. Intriguingly, Salter singles out a number of longer poems for inclusion, I think putting her finger on a recent trend. As the series initially intended, we get a generous survey of what is happening in American poetry today, and a sense of whence (journals) and by whom (poets) the best work is coming. Unlike some prominent American poetry magazines, we also have a sense of the editor’s (Salter’s) idiosyncratic taste and aesthetic, which is wide ranging, but focused on craft rather than, say, identity or political orthodoxy.

OK, I’m not entirely sure what qualifies a poem as being “American” as far as the series is concerned—a couple of the entries are by Canadian poets (the terrific Karen Solie, for instance) and at least one featured publication is UK-based (Bad Lilies). US Poets Laureate are represented (including the current one, Ada Limón), but so is a former UK Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. A couple of the poets here—Mark Strand and Louise Glück—already lie buried on the slopes of Parnassus. But the book is all the stronger for its broad church. Behind its variety and scope lie Salter’s crackling intelligence and contagious enthusiasm. (I nearly burst out into audible agreement when I read, “It has always felt like Christmas to me when Gjertrud Schnackenberg, for instance, has new work to show.” Indeed!)

I could pick almost any poem at random here to admire—and I might come back to look at more poems from this volume over the next months—but I am going to pick one of its excellent sonnets, Ange Mlinko’s “The Open C”:

The Open C

You stare into it for days, all your life
as if waiting for a curtain to rise. As if
were pending in the ocean’s void,
the amphitheater of the asteroid.
There’s only shocked quartz below.
Where sky and sea never parted—
there the mass extinction started.

Now resurface, to the serene
compact of our opening scene:
one blue mirror reflects a poreless face,
dazzling evening’s investigators.
The other, darker, on the case
shows, in close-up, the craters.

One of the pleasures of the series is that it includes brief write-ups of the poems by the poets themselves, and before I say anything about “The Open C,” it is worth seeing whether Mlinko’s hasn’t already beat me to it. (Mlinko is not only one of her generation’s best poets, she is one of its smartest critics.) Of the poem, which appeared in the excellent on-line journal Bad Lilies, Mlinko writes, with typical succinctness:

The Open C was written on St. George Island, on the Florida Gulf Coast. It’s impossible not to gaze at the horizon of the sea without thinking of the Chicxulub Crater. The sonnet plays on the letter C, sea, and what you can and can’t see, including your own face. ‘Compact’ may mean agreement, density, or the little compact with two mirrors. The extinction that awaits may be someone else’s, or may be your own.

Now, if I did not have this information, would I be thinking of the Chicxulub Crater, with its clicking of c’s as well as crashing of seas? Possibly not right away, although “the amphitheater of the asteroid” offers it up, confirmed by the line “There the mass extinction started.” My image was initially of looking at the sea under a moon, with its face, reflections, and craters, a moon that also might sometimes look like a C as it hangs over the sea. “The Open C” intrigues as a title, since it brings the multivalent pun very much to our attention. A cross-section of a crater might, I suppose, look like a C, there is the bowl of the sea, and just maybe there is a C-is-for-cookie-with-a-bite-out-of-it moon.

For the rest of this essay, pleaase click here.

Comments

[David Schloss]

Thanks for this exegesis of Mlinko, as perhaps only Stallings can provide. (Please restore line 3 of the sonnet).

[Bill Wadsworth]

A brilliant inspection of a brilliant poem, by one of my longstanding favorite poets. Stallings' compound eye leaves no facet unturned, and I applaud her "compact" of clarity and mystery.

Please do restore the missing line.

Thanks, as ever, to DL, editor and poet extraordinaire!