Shortlist from the Pushcart Book of Poetry (Part II)

What follows is part two of my pillaging The Pushcart Book of Poetry for new favorite poets, presses, and poems:

PoetPoemPress
Marilyn Nelson“Sequence”New Virginia Review
Li-Young Lee“Furious Versions”Ironwood
Mary Karr“Post-Larkin Triste”Triquarterly
Henri Cole“Ascension on Fire Island”Antaeus
Gibbons Ruark“A Vacant Lot”Yarrow
Donald W. Baker“Dying in Massachusetts”Barnwood Press
Jean Valentine“Seeing You”American Poetry Review
Larry Levis“To a Wren on Calvary”The Missouri Review
William Matthews“My Father’s Body”The Gettysburg Review
Stanley Plumly“Reading with the Poets”Antaeus
Hayden Carruth“Ray”American Poetry Review
William Matthews“Note I Left for Gerald Stern in an Office I
Borrowed, and He Would Next, at a Summer Writers’ Conference”
New England Review
Philip Levine“The Old Testament”Hudson Review
Tony Hoagland“In the Land of the Lotus Eaters”The Georgia Review
Ralph Angel“Twice Removed”Volt
Linda Gregerson“Salt”Colorado Review
Brigit Pegeen Kelly“Song”The Southern Review
Stephen Dunn“Something Like Happiness”Antaeus
Lynn Emanuel“Film Noir: Train Trip out of Metropolis”Antioch Review
Grace Schulman“The Button Box”Western Humanities Review
Billy Collins“Japan”The Georgia Review
Kim Addonizio“Aliens”Alaska Quarterly Review
Richard Jackson“No Turn on Red”Marlboro Review
Brigit Pegeen Kelly“Blacklegs”Tamaqua
Marvin Bell“The Book of the Dead Man #87”Poetry
Cathy Hong“All the Aphrodisiacs”Mudfish
David Kirby“My Dead Dad”The Southern Review
Charles Harper Webb“Biblical Also-Rans”University of Wisconsin Press
James Tate“The Workforce”Harvard Review
Lucille Clifton“Jasper, Texas, 1998”Kestrel and Ploughshares
Kwame Dawes“Inheritance”The Caribbean Writer
Steve Kowitt“Beetles”Heyday Books
Jane Hirshfield“Red Berries”The Yale Review
Rebecca Seiferle“Autochthonic Song”Copper Canyon Press
Brigit Pegeen Kelly“The Dragon”New England Review
Michael Waters“Commerce”The Gettysburg Review
Lance Larsen“Landscape with Hungry Gulls”Grand Street
Robert Wrigley“Horseflies”The Idaho Review
Benjamin Scott Grossberg“Beetle Orgy”Western Humanities Review

Again, many good poems in Antaeus, Poetry, and Ironwood, and also some poets with repeat hits for me such as Brigit Pegeen Kelly, William Matthews, Jane Hirshfield, and Stephen Dunn.

This exercise has put a different spin on the concept of reading like a writer. In addition to reading closely within a poem, noticing what I like on a macroscopic level helps me get in touch with new work uniquely nutritious to my writerly self, so that I may nourish my sensibilities in a more conscious way.