A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker 1925 – 2025

I have been lugging around the 960-page A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker 1925 – 2025, edited by Kevin Young. Even though I am not a poetry reader and I don’t understand most of the poems, I find reading poems relaxing.

Most of the time, I just read words. I even made Xuân and Vương dropped their iPad to read a few poems with me. They didn’t like to read and they didn’t understand what they read either, but their reading had improved. Whenever I came across a poem that I liked, I posted it on my blog so I can reread them later.

In the introduction, Kevin Young reveals that The New Yorker has 13,500 poems in the database. He also points out the lack of diversity, “Imagine my surprise when I pulled down the 1969 edition from my Zoom-ready bookshelf and found that in its 900 poems and 835 pages, no people of color appear.” In this 2025 edition, which has about 1,000 poems, and yet I only came across three poems from three Vietnamese-American poets: Hải-Đang Phan, Paul Trần, and Ocean Vương. I am sure Young could have included more than just 3 out of 13,500 poems.