The Best American Poetry 2002, a volume in The Best American Poetry series, was edited by David Lehman, with poems chosen by guest editor Robert Creeley.
The first print run for the book was 30,000.[1]
Amy Bracken Sparks, reviewing the book in The Plain Dealer, wrote that Creeley's choices "are not poems accessible to all; they are innovative in both concept and structure, and therefore risk losing the reader. [...] Yes, it's a bit of work when not everything is explained. Pretension lurks about, but there's always Diane Di Prima keeping everything earthbound and Sharon Olds writing yet again about her father."[2]
Carmela Ciuraru, writing in The San Diego Union-Tribune, called Creeley's selection "bold and unconventional. Even his selections of more 'established' names prove to be those who have defied people's expectations - poets such as John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Alice Notley and John Yau." Ciuraru found Juliana Spahr's prose poem "frustratingly tedius" but called the poem by Donald Hall "beautiful".[3]
| Poet | Poem | Where poem previously appeared |
| "Up to Speed" | Chicago Review | |
| "The Pearl Fishers" | Verse | |
| "The Golgotha Local" | Skanky Possum | |
| "12²" | Slope | |
| from "Zero Star Hotel" | Bombay Gin | |
| "Injunction" | Ploughshares | |
| "The Body" | Seneca Review | |
| "Ballad of the Comely Woman" | Beloit Poetry Journal | |
| "What I Threw into the Grave" | jubilat | |
| "Opposed Glimpse of Alice James, Garth James, Henry James, Robertson James and William James" | The Threepenny Review | |
| "On the Screened Porch" | Poetry | |
| "Lullaby for Cuckoo" | Skanky Possum | |
| "Corpus Delicti" | Pleiades | |
| "Traced Red Dot" | New American Writing | |
| "Long after (Mallarmé)" | 3rd Bed | |
| "Midsummer" | Barrow Street | |
| "Moon Cornering" | Chicago Review | |
| "O Patriarchy" | Skanky Possum | |
| "Animals out of the Snow" | Skanky Possum | |
| "Drones and Chants" | Hambone | |
| "To a Student Who Reads 'The Second Coming' as Sexual Autobiography" | New England Review | |
| "Independence Day" | Can We Have Our Ball Back? | |
| "Surreal Love Life" | Hambone | |
| "Carried Across" | The Kenyon Review | |
| "Beginning with a Phrase from Simone Weil" | Boston Review | |
| "Reunion" | Slate | |
| "The Gold Star" | The Antioch Review | |
| "Affirmation" | The New Yorker | |
| "TCAT serenade: 4 4 98 (New Haven)" | Harvard Review | |
| "you: should be shoo be" | Crux | |
| "9/11/2001" | Can We Have Our Ball Back? | |
| "Poem" ("across dark stream") | Hambone | |
| "Flying" | Connecticut Review | |
| "Great" | Boondoggle | |
| "Broken World" (For James Assatly)" | Colorado Review | |
| "Felix Culpa" | Ploughshares | |
| "Trail" | jubilat | |
| "And Even You Elephants? (Stein 139/Titles 35)" | Deluxe Rubber Chicken | |
| "On Antiphon Island" | jubilat | |
| "Perfect Front Door" | The Hat | |
| "Address to Winnie in Paris" | jubilat | |
| "Butter & Eggs" | Boston Review | |
| "The quarry (1-13)" | Hambone | |
| "To My Father's Houses" | The New York Review of Books | |
| "Ashberries: Letters" | New England Review | |
| "Behind the Orbits" | Pressed Wafer | |
| "Sympathy" | American Poetry Review | |
| "Sunday Night" | The Hat | |
| "Sonnet" | Boston Review | |
| "Haunt" | Pharos | |
| "Snapshot from Niagara" | Barrow Street | |
| "Frontis Nulla Fides" | Ploughshares | |
| "Twenty-six Fragments" | Facture | |
| "Starred Together" | Hambone | |
| "Fretwork" | The Threepenny Review | |
| "'A roof is no guarantee...'" | Chicago Review | |
| "Ends of the Earth" | American Poetry Review | |
| "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" | Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics | |
| "Tenets of Roots and Trouble" | Hambone | |
| "Self-Portrait with Critic" | AGNI | |
| "I Do Not Know Myself" | Poetry | |
| "You Also, Nightingale" | New England Review | |
| "For Larry Eigner, Silent" | Facture | |
| "Poem after Haniel Long" | Mungo vs. Ranger | |
| "In Way of Introduction" | Hambone | |
| "Some of We and the Land That Was Never Ours" | Chicago Review | |
| "Call" | The Café Review | |
| from "Raton Rex, Part I" | Boston Review | |
| "Do flies remember us" | Colorado Review | |
| "Eye Contact" | The Hat | |
| "Return to Saint Odilienberg, Easter 2000" | Witness | |
| "In Charge" | Hanging Loose | |
| "Illumined with the Light of Fitfully Burning Censers" | Volt | |
| "Nostalgia II" | Ploughshares | |
| "A Sheath of Pleasant Voices" | Verse | |