The 2020 edition of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Paisley Rekdal, the award-winning poet and author of Nightingale, proving that this is "a 'best' anthology that really lives up to its title" (Chicago Tribune). Since 1988, The Best American Poetry anthology series has been "one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world" (Academy of American Poets). Each volume in the series presents some of the year's most remarkable poems and poets. Now, the 2020 edition is guest edited by Utah's Poet Laureate Paisely Rekdal, called "a poet of observation and history...[who] revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries" by the Los Angeles Times. In The Best American Poetry 2020, she has selected a fascinating array of work that speaks eloquently to the "contraries" of our present moment in time.

How do we properly define cultural appropriation and is it always wrong? If we can write in the voice of another, should we? And if so, what questions do we need to consider first? In Appropriate, creative writing professor Paisley Rekdal addresses a young writer to delineate how the idea of cultural appropriation has evolved-and perhaps calcified-in our political climate. Rekdal examines the debate between appropriation and imagination, exploring the ethical stakes of writing from the position of a person unlike ourselves. What follows is a penetrating exploration of fluctuating literary power and authorial privilege, about whiteness and what we really mean by the term "empathy". Rekdal offers a study of techniques, both successful and unsuccessful, that writers from William Styron to Peter Ho Davies to Jeanine Cummins have employed to create characters outside their own identities. Lucid, reflective and astute, Appropriate presents a generous new framework for one of the most controversial subjects in contemporary literature.

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Asian American Studies. Native American Studies. INTIMATE is a hybrid memoir and "photo album" that blends personal essay, historical documentary, and poetry to examine the tense relationship between self, society, and familial legacy in contemporary America. Typographically innovative, INTIMATE creates parallel streams, narrating the stories of Rekdal's Norwegian-American father and his mixed-race marriage, the photographer Edward S. Curtis, and Curtis's murdered Apsaroke guide, Alexander Upshaw. The result is panoramic, a completely original literary encounter with intimacy, identity, family relations, and race.

When you come from a mixed race background as Paisley Rekdal does — her mother is Chinese American and her father is Norwegian– thorny issues of identity politics, and interracial desire are never far from the surface. Here in this hypnotic blend of personal essay and travelogue, Rekdal journeys throughout Asia to explore her place in a world where one’s “appearance is the deciding factor of one’s ethnicity.”

In her soul-searching voyage, she teaches English in South Korea where her native colleagues call her a “hermaphrodite,” and is dismissed by her host family in Japan as an American despite her assertion of being half-Chinese. A visit to Taipei with her mother, who doesn’t know the dialect, leads to the bitter realization that they are only tourists, which makes her further question her identity. Written with remarkable insight and clarity, Rekdal a poet whose fierce lyricism is apparent on every page, demonstrates that the shifting frames of identity can be as tricky as they are exhilarating.

Paisley Rekdal's quiet virtuosity with rhyme and cadence, her syntactic fidelity to thought and sensation, her analytical intelligence that keeps homing in and in, her ambitious sentences and larger formal structures that try to embody with absolute accuracy the difference between what we ought to feel and what we really do feel-all these make her unique in her generation: no one sounds like she does, and her concern about the 'post' in postconfessional is as much a sign of her earnest desire to honor every aspect of her art, as it is an anxiety that spurs her restless investigations of family, selfhood, racial identity, and erotic life.-Tom Sleigh

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Asian American Studies. Native American Studies. INTIMATE is a hybrid memoir and "photo album" that blends personal essay, historical documentary, and poetry to examine the tense relationship between self, society, and familial legacy in contemporary America. Typographically innovative, INTIMATE creates parallel streams, narrating the stories of Rekdal's Norwegian-American father and his mixed-race marriage, the photographer Edward S. Curtis, and Curtis's murdered Apsaroke guide, Alexander Upshaw. The result is panoramic, a completely original literary encounter with intimacy, identity, family relations, and race.

The Broken Country uses a violent incident that took place in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2012 as a springboard for examining the long-term cultural and psychological effects of the Vietnam War. To make sense of the shocking and baffling incident - in which a young homeless man born in Vietnam stabbed a number of white men purportedly in retribution for the war - Paisley Rekdal draws on a remarkable range of material and fashions it into a compelling account of the dislocations suffered by the Vietnamese and also by American-born veterans over the past decades. She interweaves a narrative about the crime with information collected in interviews, historical examination of the arrival of Vietnamese immigrants in the 1970s, a critique of portrayals of Vietnam in American popular culture, and discussions of the psychological consequences of trauma. This work allows us to better understand transgenerational and cultural trauma and advances our still complicated struggle to comprehend the war.

One story more about your hair, my love, my ghost: once in 1931, fresh from Hong Kong, you posed for the camera in a silk dress, still as if stuffed, aware and not aware the foreign shores were home. Your bobbed locks, I once wrote, impossibly black, a tar waterfall marcelled as if to death - this was the hair we always saw on you, not the white, hood-like boy's cap we later cut and pasted to your skull. This was your brooding patina, your blood's (or our blood's) insistent reminder of itself. Tonight, I walk with the dogs out through the snow newly fallen, the crescent moon drawn up dawn-bright in the dark sky, and think - not of the you, but of the all of you. The now dull glances of your eyes, your hands on my hands, my own hands clutching back. What have you done to me? someone whispers, as another image of you slips past and I turn - Though in truth what have I not done to you, and what would I not do again to keep you with me? The you who were everything and nothing to me both, gone but for the details now, the sentimental. Remember?