Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2017 i The American Poetry Review

Hypnosis at the Bird Factory (there is) A parade of accidents. A war is over so a smokestack chokes (indicating presence of) an unstable reservoir of pressure (that) forces relief: a release of manufactured birds (upon release) dark density flies (these releases are also outbreaks; released, they become) winged epidemics (which when slightly magnified, are revealed to be, on this magnified scale) festivals of beaks (easily connected to) synchronized hungers (that) feed little avian shops of horrors (that) feed little avian shops of delight (shifting the gaze to other angles available from the observer’s location, it is possible to notice) a similar address of leaf storm feathers (part of which is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ short story, “Leaf Storm,” as the title of the novella is usually translated in English, yet…

Southern Exposure Bring me your silent lake in the woods and your field of harvested grain with some rich man’s horse pastured nearby, its eyes pearlescent, its tangled mane. Bring your late November rain, your hurricane plywood and muscle car the sounds of lovemaking under the bridge, your troublesome blurry stars. Her hair’s in your mouth, her breath a soft whistle, a baby bird here and then gone, the roses planted next to the porch slowly turning black in the dawn. Nothing tastes better than grits and eggs, eating French toast and watching new snow dusting the crepe myrtle branches, frozen magnolia leaves clattering below. It’s a winter Sunday in the pine-tar South and the gray sky like distant satin covers the roads and the smoky woods where mash whiskey…

A Poem for My Son You’re dead. No. Sorry. This is difficult. When the poem begins I’m dead. I’m dead and you’re still alive and I come back. I come back to see you. I come back to tell you something? I came back to do something but now that I’m here I’m mourning my lost body because it is with my body that I’d touch you. Pitiful ghost. Ghost who came here to tell you to forget the body, the skin. Please. But here you are. No. Here I am, crying in the corner, not your ghost, —a ghost for you to practice putting your fingers through. Nudes If you came in here right now, I would take off your shirt. I promise: I’ll take off the shirt of…

COLETTE LABOUFF You had a new and selected poems published this year. In the “Note to the Reader” that begins The Nerve of It, you assert, “Collections of new and selected poems are often arranged chronologically. This one is not.” You add, “a book of new and selected poems deserves its own distinctive shape. Chronology is predictable.” What was it like to take on this kind of approach to a book that takes into consideration four previous (and very different) volumes of poems? LYNN EMMANUEL At first, I had some doubts about the project of a new and selected. I imagined I would be taking the principle, most fitting poems (and how does one decide that?) from each book and sealing them in the coffin of a single volume. It…

Carolina The mother drifts around the courtyard pretending it’s not true the yellow places where she begged for coins the child’s mouth on her left breast the mother drifts and in her hands she unlocks courtyards from her childhood that she knows by heart she replays the obscure cancer that has set up home inside her bones and grows now against mercy against life her son’s eyes are pinned to her left breast two scraps of sweetness that don’t fit again the mother drifts around the courtyard pretending that she’s hiding and no one will find her Milagros Milagros doesn’t move a muscle watching her mother’s back bent over the sink The women form a chorus adding and subtracting woes Milagros finds this game an odd one she watches how…

How to Keep Alive Think of where you’ll bury them the potatoes have the fat look of some starving people I try to watch what I say I see it crawling among the cabbage worms just above the water table the threat outlasts the emergency the wolf has been long extinct is the main ingredient in some cultures the belief that lettuces grow by moonlight by feel by the bird’s vibration a city under its wing in a crouch how they rarely collide that ought to be reward enough How to Rise Up like New Bread It is hard not to be impatient at our slowness and how much breath we require sometimes more than a lung’s space when I was sick I looked most like myself it’s surprising you’d…

Because we can’t touch or taste ghosts but we sense them. Because abstract or not: adoration, sacrifice—many someones are surely intimately inside them now. Because signifiers, even though amorphous. Because amorphous can be solace to the single. Believe me. Because alone, low, lowing. The teacher says, “We all communicate with abstractions at times . . .” (and I picture fourth graders working up steam, trying to address courage or deceit) . . . but “abstract nouns can’t convey things we experience with our senses.” Wrong! Say fear and my stomach plummets. On cue, a tangible raccoon ambles toward the open bulkhead and I convey displeasure, loudly. Let’s say I become a banshee. O the outside inside. O peripheral vision. He wants to move in, to paw specific jars of tomato…

JOSEPHINE MILES (1911–1985) WAS BORN in Chicago, but lived most of her life in California. She was the daughter of an insurance agent who hadn’t finished high school and a schoolteacher. Her father’s ancestors had met on the Mayflower, her mother’s had been German coppersmiths. Though Miles’s maternal grandparents, living in Chicago, had discouraged their children from learning English, and though her own father made jokes about academia, Miles spent her life teaching literature at UC- Berkeley. She was the first woman tenured in the English Department. Miles, it should be noted, had rheumatoid arthritis from childhood, and as an adult got around in a wheelchair. Thom Gunn put it this way: “The unavoidable first fact about Josephine Miles was physical. As a young child she contracted a form of…

After Turner I would have waited alone a thousand years for the coming of angels, blinding bright as the spring sun to arrive, to abandon this world for another. Stunned by their flashing lights aflame across the bow of their space craft—landing lights for that world. Herds of animals: horses, humans, and fish fixed. The angels approached. Come angels! Come beasts! Men and women cried out to each other; the angels cried; some were lost between their earthly life and paradise and what is paradise, anyway? Few imagined being bound to this world; blue halo of emerald mountains; extraordinary, ordinary—they rose, a crucifixion yardarm flying away. RUBEN QUESADA serves an editor for The Rumpus and Queen Mob’s Teahouse. He has received fellowships and residencies from the Red Lodge Clay Center,…

P. L. 1. What Is It About Our Lives I’m not in a war zone, and I don’t have even a cold much less a condition requiring tubes, requiring knives, and words like “litigation,” “overdose,” “foreclosure” aren’t a part of my day . . . why can’t we ever find a pleasure in this, the real pleasure of everything that could have happened but none of it happened, what is it about our lives that leaves us always seeking Something and unaware of the benediction of Nothing? 2. The Hum To the snooty horticulturalist whose hobby is breeding competition roses, the thorns are nothing—are beneath consideration. The florist snips them. But as Phil Levine says in one of his final poems, “thorns / too need to live.” They’re as remarkable…

My translational intent has nothing to do with personal growth, intellectual exercise, or cultural exchange, which implies an equal standing of some sort. South Korea and the U.S. are not equal. I am not transnationally equal. My intent is to expose what a neocolony is, what it does to its own, what it eats and shits. Kim Hyesoon’s poetry reveals all this, and this is why I translate her work. — Don Mee Choi, Freely Frayed, =q, & Race=Nation (Wave Books, 2014) 1 Thinking about the US reception of translated Chilean poems of historical horror, a useful starting place is the following book review on the Amazon.com website for Jack Schmitt’s translation of Raul Zurita’s Anteparaiso. The review is written by the US poet David Kirby and it was first…

A Card from Me to Me The pilgrimage of the body from infancy to dust and nothingness, and the oasis, some believe, of a heaven afterward, every nationality on their knees, sipping, taking turns, even the reverent sharing with folks like me. At the very least cake and candle celebrations along the way, a few people happy for your next next, others not as jealous as they might be, the movement (if we’re lucky) from ignorance to astonishment, allowing for a thousand dumb days in between. And seeds becoming tomatoes and redwoods, ants becoming armies, language allowing us to disguise what we mean, sky one syllable for all that complexity, and starfish making their homes in the sea, I praise on my 75th birthday the strangeness, the immensity, of what…

You must know how to lose and draw near to touch the Medusa jellyfish with a sure hand to touch like a fruit the curve of the pain the floral taciturn measure of the defeat in the collective basket of bread and defeats where there is room for the hand the grapes the almonds TATIANA OROÑO is a professor of literature and a well-known art and literary critic. She is the author of eight books, including Estuario (Estuario, Montevideo, Uruguay, 2014), La Piedra Nada Sabe (Estuario, Montevideo, 2008), Morada Móvil (Ed. Artefato, Montevideo, 2004); and Tout fut ce qui ne fut pas / Todo tuvo la forma que no tuvo (Écrits des Forges, France, 2002). She has been a strong advocate for women writers and artists and was the organizer…

Inside His Empty Beautiful Solitude What’s the difference Between Leonard Cohen At the 7-11 At Midnight Cradling 2 bags of Cheetos In his arms And my buddy Alex At the local AM/PM Hauling a carton Of Mountain Dew In his left hand A crate of Combos In his right I don’t think There’s any difference Except for the guy Who snaps a photo Of Mr. Hallelujah Posts it on Instafuck So everyone can like Comment Call Combine While Alex goes Out into the parking lot To his beat up Honda Prelude Hurls his loot Into the filthy backseat All scratched out lottery tickets Styrofoam coffee cups With the cute Brown stains at the bottom And wonders How he got to be so old And beautiful All at once Then turns…

Owl in the Gloaming Although real birders frown on it, I play back songs of birds trying to lure them out of the wood: “scree-chee-chee” of song sparrow, mashing notes of catbird, “what-cheer, what-cheer, what-cheer” of cardinal. This irritates the birds. They fly reconnaissance over my head. Catbird looping furtive patterns above me, crossing the path from tree to tree. Sparrow chasing catbird, thinking he’s got too close, although the interloper was me in the unquiet afternoon sloughing into evening. Now, a monotonous trill, tremulous horse-whinny of the screech owl— unmistakable, hideous laughter. Then, overhead, something large, gray, all wing beat and bodily hum. All other birds go silent, in the owl’s shadow. Hidden in the trees, his scaly, bark-like feathers, can’t be made out in the gloaming. Now there’s…

The University of the Arts’ Visiting Writers Series is sponsored by the Creative Writing program and features acclaimed contemporary writers who will visit campus each year. These distinguished poets, novelists, short story writers and screenwriters will give readings—all of which are free and open to the public—and meet with students in the Creative Writing major to discuss issues of craft and the writing life. KEVIN MOFFETT Monday, Feb. 13, 2017, 6:30 p.m. Location to be determined Kevin Moffett is the author of two story collections and a collaborative novel, The Silent History, which was first released as an app for mobile devices and is currently in development at AMC. He is a frequent contributor to McSweeney’s and his stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, The…

ARACELIS GIRMAY’S INTERCONNECTED POEMS IN HER THIRD collection, The Black Maria, make for a moving suite of poems that relate to police brutality. The book begins with poems about Eritrean history that relay the violence that has haunted the country’s history, but the book eventually turns to violence in America with a series of numbered poems that address the growing epidemic of police brutality. The flow and associations that she makes between police brutality and how it threatens home and motherhood for the poet herself is written in her distinct voice, and evades a level of didacticism that people expect in political poems. The timeliness and the emotional chords that Girmay strikes picks up the tradition of poets like Audre Lorde and June Jordan (even as Girmay quotes Jordan’s “Sunflower…

Dilate I. Placed on my chest warm fragile as the skin of nightfall she was heavier than imagined her eyes untied from northern poles from hard unseen winter months she arrived safely mid-spring she scrunched her brow an up-look to her father. There’s a turning as pupils dilate as black vernal suns slip into equinox. This was we never forget her first act. II. All is experienced throu g h the body somebody told me. III. Though I did not feel it when the midwife invited when he cut the tie the clean umbilical sever when I smiled I did not feel it as they took her to wash and weigh when I said you should go with her. Both of them gone father and baby in a supple empty…

Collecting the Evidence when I am lost, which is always in this gray country, this violent foster home —Franny Choi So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us. —Gaston Bachelard ~ My childhood happened in black and white, and like noir films was oneric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel. My early poems allude to noir for the same reason my students write about their lived experience through films, video, music. Noirs were popular culture. They were also documentary. The mood, occurrences, even the famous visual signatures of noir, were not only a style, they were actual. They were archival. ~ In Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, in 1961, Leroi Jones asks wearily, “When is the end of the Second World War?” My…

The New World (I) Compass wet metal head askance the conquistador on the beach (a ribbon of sand bound round a pinochle of thought) his thought is This is going to end badly though not the forest’s thought, which is bright with blue screams and green with heat that bubbles— come inside Ledge narrow— ship burnt sea gloaming— home drowned. In the dream he’d swallowed sand Waiting, he builds a cairn against going anywhere he must know himself Yes, badly, but here’s this thin beige shroud. In there the earth’s thighs To love the sun without compensation is intolerable The bottomless sea a throat— Better go Futures Markets I want to trade what I can touch— pork bellies by the ton, cattle live and dressed My report says, “Slaughter holds…

I. Do you have poetic authority? Where did you get your poetic authority? Did someone give you poetic authority? Is it possible to be born with it? What the hell is poetic authority? What gives you the right to write? What gives what you write importance, significance? Is it what you write or how you write it? What should you write? Why and how should you write it? When do you become a writer? Does obtaining an M.F.A. finally mean you are a writer? Does publishing in a journal? Is it after you get your first book taken? Is it after you win a given prize? Is it after you “find your voice” and subject matter? Does it arrive only after you’re dead? Is it possible to name the world…

Karakul Romania/2015 In summer the storks nest on telephone poles. Their fledglings peep over the round rims of straw, And sometimes spill to the blacktop below Where feral cats make quick work of their bones. The nests remain empty all winter, until Those storks return to the same nests once more. This winter ISIS has been all over the news, Dragging blades across journalists’ throats, Kindling gas-soaked soldiers in cages, Flinging gay students off rooftops of mosques. Hammering to rubble the ancient sites— Better to begin again with cruelty So the world might be purged of its past. Here as in many parts of the East Every man of a certain age Wears a wool karakul through winter. The best hats are sewn from the pelts Of lamb fetuses slit…

in the ward, it is deceptively quiet: a last gasp, discoloration, a hand that travels the valley between the bed and the body. I lose the page, turn the book over, the wound again opening in the water to swallow him. I wait for something to happen. Siri, do your lungs fill up with water when you go under? No. It’s the larynx trying to protect itself that kills you, closes up. He does nothing but lie there, fed by a highway of tubes, a cloverleaf interchange, tangled rivers, all of it running into him, the silver vein drawing up his arm to the point of the lance. I want back in the world I know. I want to stop hating him, his weakness unmasks my weakness I’ve no power…

erase the railroad that brought the trains here. erase the trains & their antique machinery. erase the saloons & the syphilis. erase the families that settled this stretch of desert & called it uninhabited. erase the conquered families, cities, & civilizations. erase the conquerors & erase their horses. erase the documentary exploring the history of this region on my computer. erase my computer & all the lives it lets me visit but not die in. erase the website where i can follow the satellite’s many eyed lens into my family’s gray yard & see only pixels. erase the amateur video of the couple fucking in another tab & especially erase the moment where one whispers something unintelligible into the other’s dark ear & the body shudders. erase the video still…