So welcome, readers, to a plurality of poets, a cornucopia of tropes, and a range of interests.

– From Billy Collins’s introduction

The Best American Poetry series offers a distinguished poet’s selection of poems published in the course of a year. The guest editor for 2006 is Billy Collins, one of our most beloved poets, who has chosen poems of wit, humor, imagination, and surprise, in an array of styles and forms. The result is a celebration of the pleasures of poetry – from Laura Cronk’s marvelous Sestina for the Newly Married to the elegant limericks of R. S. Gwynn and from Reb Livingston on butter to Mark Halliday’s Refusal to Notice Beautiful Women.

In his charming and candid introduction Collins explains how he chose seventy-five poems from among the thousands he considered. With insightful comments from the poets illuminating their work, and series editor David Lehman’s thought-provoking foreword, The Best American Poetry 2006 is a brilliant addition to a series that links the most noteworthy verse and prose poems of our time to a readership as discerning as it is devoted to the art of poetry.