My favorite poems from each issue along with the first runner up. Plus, my favorite line or lines from each issue.

Jan:
Rae Armantrout : Just Saying
David Harsent : Moppet

Feb:
Thomas Lynch : He Posits Certain Mysteries
Alicia Ostriker : Song

Mar:
Paul Hoover : The Watchman of Ephraim
Kabir (tr. by A.K. Mehrotra) : Brother, I’ve seen some

Apr:
Atsuro Riley : Sunder
Averill Curdy : Ovid in America

May:
Malachi Black : from Quarantine
Sophia Cabot Black : The One Turn That Makes the New World

Jun:
Edith Sodergran (tr. by Brooklyn Copeland) : The Portrait
Labid (tr. by Ange Mlinko) : Lament

July/Aug:
David St. John : In the High Country
David Ferry : The Crippled Girl, The Rose

Sept:
Reginald Dwayne Betts : “For you: anthophilous, lover of flowers”
Mary Ruefle : Shalimar

Oct:
D. A. Powell : Boonies
Rae Armantrout : Spent

Nov:
Olivia Clare : Enoch’s Blocks
John Rybicki : If

Dec:
Dan Beachy-Quick : In a Station of the Metro
Dick Allen : With Drizzled Warm Butter, Intensely Rendered

Favorite line(s):

Jan:
So do not strike me, Heart.
I am, too, tinder.
-Jill Alexander Essbaum

Feb:
I know what you mean said the tulip
about epiphanies
-Alicia Ostriker

May:
When bones and flesh have finished their business together
-Sarah Lindsay

Apr:
No midnight is so private as the sea’s
-Averill Curdy

May:
Ceaseless blue lightning, this
love passing through me
-Franz Wright

Jun:
three years spun a novel
we abandoned
-Hsia Yu (tr. by Karen An-hwei Lee)

July/Aug:
on the scales of the ocean
the child’s head outweighs the sun.
-Valzhyna Mort

Sept:
To love the children, so full of neurons and consciousness. What a joy to clean up and put a shine on their mess.
-Peter Gizzi

Oct:
the moon’s neck wobbled on the Charles
-Spencer Reece

Nov:
a man is a sum
off what women he knows
-Olivia Clare

Dec:
Giddy with sacrament and the impure
gluttony of blood and air and skin
-David Yezzi

Best Poems from Poetry Magazine 2010 (+ 2009 & 2008 : scroll down)

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