Any anthology that claims to be the “Best American” anything should give a reader pause. By what criteria does the editor judge and rank the sea of poems published in a given year? Is it even likely the editor has read every poem published in that year, and if not, then what are we to make of the classification “best” when all of the contenders for the title have not been given full consideration?

Is “The Best American Poetry 2014” meant to be the last word in contemporary American poetics, or should we just relax and approach it as a casual ramble through the year that was? The more we parse the title, the deeper the quagmire presented by these collections.

I do not envy the task of local poet Terrance Hayes, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for poetry and recent recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, as the guest editor of this entry in the series.

As Mr. Hayes writes in his introduction, under the possibly too-clever guise of one Dr. Charles Kinbote interviewing Mr. Hayes himself, “the poets of every edition of “The Best American Poetry” anthology represent a “unity of contradictions,” a gathering of styles proving, one after the other, year after year, just how resistant a contemporary American poem and contemporary American poet can be to any homogenous notion of American poetry.”

So what we have here is, in a way, an expression of the inexpressible; a brave attempt at herding cats. The endless variety of voices and techniques at play in our national poetry which makes the very act of anthologizing so difficult for a mindful editor such as Mr. Hayes, rather than, say, an egotistical canonizer such as Harold Bloom, is really the best argument the art form is healthy and robust.

A random flip through these pages is just as likely to land a reader in a age-old form (Philp Dacey’s “Juilliard Cento Sonnet” or Afaa Michael Weaver’s “Passing Through Indian Territory,” as it is to deliver the reader into more idiosyncratic and freer forms (Kathleen Graber’s “The River Twice” or Eileen Myles’ “Paint Me a Penis”).

Perhaps the most notable inclusion is Patricia Lockwood’s “Rape Joke.” Commenting on Ms. Lockwood and her provocative poem, Viv Groskop wrote in The Guardian, “She has casually reawakened a generation’s interest in poetry.”

The poem went viral upon its publication in The Awl and received 10,000 “likes” on Facebook within hours. It is a poem that walks the almost invisible line between heart-wrenching and hilarious, pairing lines such as “OK, the rape joke is that he worshiped The Rock. / Like the dude was completely in love with The Rock. He thought it was so great what he could do with his eyebrow” with “The rape joke is that of course there was blood, which in human beings is so close to the surface.”

Only in an anthology such as this could a poem that is so visceral and (sadly) of its moment as “Rape Joke” co-exist with a poem as flat and fusty as John Ashbery’s “Breezeway” (“Someone said we needed a breezeway / to bark down remnants of super storm Elias jugularly.”).

As problematic as I find “The Best American Poetry” anthologies in general, Mr. Hayes has curated a continually interesting collection of poems which should inspire a good deal of debate. And perhaps, really, that is the best way to understand this series, as a prompt to serious discussions concerning poetry, which as an art form has too often allowed itself to be cloistered away from the national conversation.

Kristofer Collins is the book editor at Pittsburgh Magazine.

First Published: November 30, 2014, 5:00 a.m.