Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2017 i The American Poetry Review

Ode on Anger, the Dalai Lama, and Elliot’s Red Boots I get this story second hand since I’m not speaking to my brother, who can be charming until he isn’t which always happens, and his main beef against me seems to be that I’m older, which I can’t see any way of changing except by sorcery or a rift in the time-space continuum, but my sister calls me with an report every time he checks in and the latest is that he finds a photo of the Dalai Lama as a boy, which he places by his bed, only he doesn’t know that it’s the Dalai Lama, who comes to him in a dream and tells my brother that he has to let go of his anger, to which he…

ESSENTIAL TO APPRECIATING THE Complexity and nuances of meaning in a Dickinson poem is an understanding of her use of music to lead the reader, to persuade the reader through undertones, meter and rhyme, and through shifts from harmony to dissonance and back again. Much has been written about Dickinson’s hymn-like meter, and indeed both structurally and thematically church music is often the undercurrent her poems ride on. But there’s also a technical mastery, ways of using sound to shore up or undermine what she is saying, ways in which she draws us into a poem, rhythmically or tonally, only then to yank us out of our comfort zone “I prayed at first, a little Girl” (546, Franklin) is a familiar Dickinson poem that deepens considerably when its musical details…

The Aeneid Virgil Translated by David Ferry “Ferry’s rendition of The Aeneid has allowed me to look at this epic with fresh eyes…. At age 82, when most literary and academic careers are winding down, Ferry has done his very best and most ambitious work.”—Open Letters Monthly Cloth $35.00 Who Reads Poetry 50 Views from Poetry Magazine Edited by Fred Sasaki and Don Share A cast of stellar contributors—including Roxane Gay, Roger Ebert, Neko Case, Alex Ross, Pankaj Mishra, and more—offer personal accounts of why they read poetry and the role it plays in their lives. Cloth $24.00 Unlikely Designs Katie Willingham “I like Willingham’s adventurous, meaningful mix of different kinds of images, ideas, and language. Here is a book of poetry about important matters that is also fun to…

WE’RE ON A JUNE JORDAN READER edited by Christoph Keller & Jan Heller Levi, introduction by Rachel Eliza Griffiths Available September $24.95 | paperback 978-1-938584-35-0 eBook Available CALLING A WOLF A WOLF by Kaveh Akbar Available September $16.95 | paperback 978-1-938584-67-1 eBook Available SOME SAY THE LARK by Jennifer Chang Available October $15.95 | paperback 978-1-938584-66-4 eBook Available PRAY ME STAY EAGER by Ellen Doré Watson Available January $15.95 | paperback 978-1-938584-68-8 eBook Available 114 Prescott Street | Farmington, ME | 04938 www.alicejamesbooks.org An Affiliate of the University of Maine at Farmington…

Choi i admit—my name sounds foreign even to me. for the record, koreans say it like chwe almost, but really more like guevara, the o just a touch, barely haunting the vowel. in old papers it’s sometimes choe or ch’oe, but in any case no one at home rhymes with toy, boing, soy, and certainly not the chow that some try out, connecting the wrong dots, and never that bizarre coolie accent a few throw on it like the fake stuff at kroger. i try going to the korean place and remember even that’s a lie—after all, korea was corea until japan considered alphabetical order and before that it was just joseon, or chosoŏn, or an empire of its own, with its own slaves—and sometime before that it was just…

SYRIAN POET AND SHORT-STORY WRITER Osama Alomar came to this country in 2008, not intending to live here for good, but his brothers and mother were in America, he was against the regime and those sentiments were clear in his writing, and he thought perhaps he could travel back and forth between Damascus and Chicago. He left behind an apartment full of books and manuscripts, which has since been destroyed, and the war has made it impossible for him to travel back home. Instead, he works twelve to fifteen hours a day as a suburban Chicago taxi driver, snatching time between fares to read and to write a little. His translator, C. J. Collins, works with him over the phone, and came to Chicago once for a visit, during which…

I’m transcribing a second grade creative writing exercise when I realize I have been misspelling penguin my whole life. Bands are said to be selling out when a song appears in a commercial, but don’t the Pixies get a pass for that song Gigantic? Don’t they deserve a little icing off the cake they built? Crap—that’s a mixed metaphor, and it doesn’t even make sense. Sense is overrated says the dance therapist in my brain. Watch out for your bruised ribs says the mother in my solar plexus. I’ll only see the nurse if you get me more Xanax says my mother in real life. Twenty-one years ago, I met a French girl in a gigantic nightclub in Prague. She was plopped on stage, chin propped on hands. If you…

The children across the street are playing with chalk and they take turns outlining their bodies on the ground. They write their names in pink, yellow, orange, green, tagging themselves. Two boys are sitting on the steps with a platoon of action figures. They have a stick of red chalk and color red clouds around these toys designed to resemble men with endless permanent strength. There are red-winged blackbirds everywhere and they talk all day into the silence, and since it’s only April, you can see their bodies exposed in the trees who are taking their time for the next cycle. A few days ago there was an armed man at large camped out in the woods behind my son’s school and the FBI set up a command center to…

In the beginning, the ending was beautiful. Early spring everywhere, the trees furred pink and white, lawns the sharp green that meant new. The sky so blue it looked manufactured. Robins. We’d heard the cherry blossoms wouldn’t blossom this year, but what was one epic blooming when even the desert was an explosion of verbena? When bobcats slinked through primroses. When coyotes slept deep in orange poppies. One New Year’s Day we woke to daffodils, wisteria, onion grass wafting through the open windows. Near the end, we were eyeletted. We were cottoned. We were sundressed and barefoot. At least it’s starting gentle, we said. An absurd comfort, we knew, a placebo. But we were built like that. Built to say at least. Built to reach for the heat of skin…

The radio clicks on—it’s poor swollen America, Up already and busy selling the exhausting obligation Of happiness while intermittently debating whether or not A man who kills fifty people in five minutes With an automatic weapon he has bought for the purpose Is mentally ill. Or a terrorist. Or if terrorists Are mentally ill. Because if killing large numbers of people With sophisticated weapons is a sign of sickness— You might want to begin with fire, our early ancestors Drawn to the warmth of it—from lightning, Must have been, the great booming flashes of it From the sky, the tree shriveled and sizzling, Must have been, an awful power, the odor Of ozone a god’s breath; or grass fires, The wind whipping them, the animals stampeding, Furious, driving hard on…

Dear Reader, We are grateful for the support that you, a Friend of APR, have shown the magazine. We hope you will join us again now, in our 46th year, to keep The American Poetry Review going strong during this difficult time for literature and all of the arts. In 2017 we continued uninterrupted publication of APR with six outstanding issues representing the work of 120 writers, including Terrance Hayes, Sasha Pimentel, Ada Limon, Kaveh Akbar, Clint Smith, Marie Howe, Kazim Ali, Spencer Reece, and many others. We published the 20th volume in the APR/ Honickman First Book series: River Hymns by Tyree Daye, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and we awarded the 8th Annual Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize to Ruth Madievsky. Madievsky’s winning poem, “Wormhole,” appears on the feature page…

The American Poetry Review is happy to announce that Tyree Daye has been awarded the 2017 APR/ Honickman First Book Prize for his manuscript River Hymns, chosen by this year’s guest judge, Gabrielle Calvo coressi. The book will be published in September 2017 and will be distributed by Copper Canyon Press through Consortium. TYREE DAYE is from Youngsville, North Carolina. His poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, Nashville Review, Four Way Review and Ploughshares. He was awarded the Amy Clampitt Residency for 2018 and The Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award in the Fall 2015 issue. He is a Cave Canem fellow.…

Boys’ Bodies in Flight (are also a kind of text) Boys don’t read. —the experts These kids run their sloppy fly routes right to left in a crabgrass park They are counting by the thousands They read the defense and cheat the rush or jump the snap One of them eats a nice blindside hit from a slightly older bigger kid and buckles for half a second then jumps to his feet You might not notice the big kid brush the shorter one’s shoulders before he shoves the littler guy good and hard and hustles toward the huddle When I was their age there were days no one for nine blocks could come out to play So I used to ride my bike to Grace Street and sit alone in…

I saw it when I was seven looking directly past the bay window into the backyard: a gold shirt cut from the neck down cherry & cornelia rushing up through the slits Hard to tell whether silk or cotton or how it came as two halves to my suburb to our pines & it seemed to be earthless or not of human use—that by smelling it I would instantly die or remove my own clothes & leave them beneath the trees walk into the grass with a gilded blindness For weeks I avoided going outdoors I know what you came for, I chanted we made green beans with sliced almonds and after dinner I took up watch I loved nothing more A native Pittsburgher, KELLY FORSYTHE is the author of…

Dinner Observations Dangling from the ceiling, a filigreed white birdcage. Stuffed doves with real feathers cling outside, looking in, as if the dainty cell meant safety. A candle burns on its floor, orange and soft. Who created these inversions? Who will let birds back in, stanch wounds in the night? Which Is It? Is it a “necessary eruption”? My Sikh friend says it might be, and he knows eruptions well enough. We live in uncertain times, claims the TV lector. The ogre’s hurling blame, accusation, omens, like a prisoner flinging feces in his cell. Didi from Lebanon scrubbed my legs today, rubbed away calluses with a metal grater. It might have been torment but gave pleasure. How often I ponder the line between lover and torturer, both seeking the tenderest…

Gabriel Ojeda-Sague, Oil and Candle Oakland, CA: Timeless, Infinite Light 74 pages, paperback, 2016 ISBN 978-1-937421-17-5 GABRIEL OJEDA-SAGUE’S OIL AND CANDLE is a short book of rituals, their failures and fallibility but also their power as vessels. Most striking is the persistent presence of a personal voice amid intellectual ideas about poets, race, performativity, and blood. We are introduced to or reminded of specific totems, but not from an arch poetic voice nor a condescending academic one. Ojeda-Sague writes, “they said I really / should just put it / in the trash which / felt weird to say / the least but I did.” Here, he’s called the botanica to ask how to dispose of his candle nub, having burned it for seven days in his dorm room. He admits…

title after Lorca A straw slices through a telephone pole like truth in a long marriage. Once the house was blown onto its side. We used a ladder to climb up and drop ourselves down in the front door. The roof was lifted off and landed just a centimeter over, the way we wake up sometimes and sense everything has changed. The drapes were sucked to the outside of the house; to draw them, you hung yourself out the window. As silent as the answering machine still in place, the house around it gone, the tiny tape sucked out. Afterward, you opened the front door and every window blew out. A tree stripped bare, a chicken plucked clean. Then, our bodies touched even in sleep, even below the mattress that…

FOR YEARS, I HAVE TRIED TO RECONCILE my belief in poetry with what I think of poets as people. It wasn’t always this way. Like many young adults, I replaced faith in God and religion with a faith in poems and poetry. This, I know now, set myself up for a series of colossal disappointments. How would I have known that poets could be just as corrupt as the Pharisees in front pews? How would I have known about poets’ delusions of being unacknowledged legislators of the world, prophets, god-substitutes? How would I have known that all poets are, to a certain degree, sociopaths, and that, to hijack Rilke’s famous line, every poet is terrifying? “No artist has ethical sympathies,” Oscar Wilde writes. “An ethical sympathy in an artist is…

What if I was my sympathy becoming and the sum total of your tatters plus unwoven reeds were nothing what if nothing could possibly gather us back to the many- parted parted-ways of so long a time unshorn what if I was my burning internal my fast-slipped-away beloved and the something short inside me I tried to give you surfaced as an incomplete rendering what if inside what I knew to say its limitation were its gift and I’d not seen it not stood sideways in wind after which no leaves after which winter and the counting of months since/months-after what if brown and browning every bit’s my preparation for another thing coming rocks through windows nights of lights burning what if your chalk’s white where your clouds rise and…

One Saturday (Saturday! When my time comes, among my last thoughts will be that I did not fully appreciate Saturdays!), my Aunt Anne, who died this month, took me to my first Broadway show: Fiddler on the Roof. She took me and five cousins on an early morning bus from the Albany Trailways station to Port Authority. She treated us to lunch and then to a matinee. I ate fried chicken for lunch (a food I now abhor for reasons of taste and ethics, neither of my willed doing but products of the passage of time and consciousness; then, I was beguiled by the red plastic basket where the golden chicken rested) and had an orange drink and Junior Mints in the theater. Of the show I remember “Matchmaker, Matchmaker”…

birthright is a jester sans serif and comic its gesturing arms track marks traveling like a shuddering train covered in snow arteries shooting up spits of smoke a man is an utterance of his father never one but two having a son is the same as breaking into a house that you own I implore you to bite the robbing hand leave the clock’s second arm stuck press control + shift on the piano’s back dark painted nails dug into ivory skin a baby grand in a boarded up jazz club holding down the fort of a body off key hold me down come winter when the salt starts talking white on the pavement’s black matter clean cut issues burning the tires’ indented heads grooves of wounds worn and now…

PATRICK ROSAL, IN 2009, WAS VISITing the Philippines on a Fulbright when the archipelago was struck by one of the season’s worst typhoons: “the whole city’s a flash flood / with brawn enough to flush trucks / sideways down the capital’s widest drives: / the crushed tonnage bobs around a bit / at the foot of some Spanish bastard’s statue / before it stalls and pools on white church steps. / Brute pilgrims. Face it, paddling dogs won’t / make it, so children got no shot.” With an embodied poetics, Rosal grounds himself in personal experience yet always seems to sense the undertows of histories that surround him. And with a brave gaze, he confronts the vio lence committed by colonialism and climate change, as they become increasingly intertwined. His…

Some mornings now I roll right out of bed and into my boots and find myself halfway up the hill, sky growing lighter with each step, before I see that in the dream all the lights were turned out and so far he did not know behind which door we hid. Some years I’ve said lament, as if the word was a box whose lid I’d lift, or a letter I’d slit open letting what it felt like fly away—a box because the house was a box, a letter because there were no letters because everyone pretended not to know. Sometimes I think of the man whose job it was to tell the deaf they could not hear. He saw the sky filling with angels even as he kept gesturing,…

You don’t exist anymore, black-and-white, matronly cow. I used to bring you back from the field to the barn on summer vacations. Pot-bellied, you stood and still stand by the trees and the stream, ill-chained and robust, hidden from the burning heat, swatting away gadflies. Your thirst could drain a well. Remember that summer evening? The road between pastures, the fields of rye and oat, the narrow asphalt lane filled with holes, then the pathway down to the stream strewn with animal dung. You lapped the water, mooing, lifting your tail, pissing powerfully, your tongue over your nostrils, you stared at the world at large. At last you moved, having been lazily touched with a willow switch, your hooves dragging roadside gravel under the battered sun. Enormous, rocking frame! Enormous…

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. ALEX ROSS PERRY Thursday, November 16, 2017, 6:30 p.m., Connelly Auditorium Terra Hall, 211 S. Broad Street, Philadelphia Alex Ross Perry is the writer and director of the independent films Impolex (2009), The Color Wheel (2011), Listen Up Philip (2014), Queen of Earth (2015), and most recently Golden Exits, featuring Chloë Sevigny, Mary-Louise Parker, and Jason Schwartzman. He attended the Tisch School of the Arts…

Chemistry Don’t fuse, at least. Don’t beaker. Don’t measurement or Bunsen burner. Don’t escalate or eat at liver. The liver will grow back. Don’t dinner with a starter. Ask for me or meet my father. Don’t mix chemicals or bring me flowers. Don’t expect electrons to migrate rings. Don’t sing or seem to bother. Don’t adamant or collar. Don’t let adolescence barter with what you want or what you need. Don’t burn to see its color, pattern inner models, flame to show a hover, Darwin anything but lean. Don’t mix to see what bubbles up or hex to see what tremors south or water to see what implodes suddenly or catalyst to maximize or aim. Don’t find a groove. The elements would disapprove. Their very numbers, their very ooze. Things…

Stanley Plumly Against Sunset, W.W. Norton & Co., 2017 Orphan Hours, W.W. Norton & Co., 2012 Old Heart, W.W. Norton & Co., 2007 STANLEY PLUMLY EMERGES IN THE THREE BOOKS OF PANoramic poetry he published in the last ten years as a chronicler of lives. “Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man’s life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible,” writes Leo Tolstoy. The man we see in Stanley Plumly’s new poems is by turns sauntering and sensitive. He is obsessive, sanguine, vehement, and resilient. He is an archetypal rememberer, a delirious mourner, part realist, part dreamer. An alderman’s leisurely pace comes through first of all in the splendid variety of Plumly’s sentences,…