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]