Review by Booklist Review
David Lehman, general editor of the annual Best American Poetry, codirects a poetry reading series with photographer-poet Star Black. The venue is a second-floor Manhattan bar in which one can be heard without using a mike. Despite offering no honorarium, the series has been a big hit. Lehman and Black present one poem each by 75 readers from the first three seasons. Each poem is prefaced by a little biography and frequently postfaced by its author's most unforgettable poetry-reading experience. Reader 76, coeditor Black, indulges herself to the tune of six poems and provides in-performance photos. If the contents include no masterpieces, the range of the contributors, from icons like John Ashbery to Sarah Arvio, who has yet to publish a collection, is most impressive. Many better poems are in editor Prufer's roundup of work by 40 poets less than 40 years old. Usually, there are three to five poems per poet, enough to whet a reader's appetite for more. The sole famous name here is Sherman Alexie, and that is because of his well-received novels. Alexie is typical of many contributors in that he belongs to an ethnic or cultural minority, in his case, American Indian. Black, Latino, Asian, and gay voices resound throughout the book, and Filipino American Nick Carbo, African American Alison Joseph, and Japanese American Rick Noguchi are just three whose work is especially striking. Exceptional, too, are white ethnic Julia Kasdorf's poems piquantly reflecting her heritage as an old order Mennonite. Although there are very few regularly metered and rhymed poems on view, there are so many good poems here, sometimes extracted from less-than-wonderful first or second books, that the future of American poetry looks bright, indeed. In introducing their gay and lesbian anthology, Lassell and Georgiou paraphrase author Joan Nestle to the effect that "as a group, we gay and lesbian people are responsible for having written desire into history." Certainly desire is a concern of a great many poems in the book, and that desire is often enough worked out in the perennial gay contexts of bars, dancing, cruising, etc. At times it seems that this gay and lesbian "next wave," as the book's subtitle calls it, is just another wave of the confessional poetry of the 1950s. Much is adroitly enough written, though, so that the book fittingly complements the KGB Bar and new poets collections in giving a big, though definitely incomplete, sampling of American poetry at the twenty-first century's dawning. --Ray Olson
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
