Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2018 i The American Poetry Review

FIVE $10,000 PRIZES AND BOOK PUBLICATION PARTICIPATING PUBLISHERS: BEACON PRESS, ECCO, MILKWEED EDITIONS, PENGUIN BOOKS, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS NOW SUBMIT ONLINE ENTRY PERIOD: January 1, 2019 through March 1, 2019 ENTRY REQUIREMENTS: Previously unpublished book-length manuscripts of poetry accompanied by a $30.00 entrance fee. Entrants must reside in the United States or be American citizens, and winners will be responsible for compliance with Internal Revenue Service guidelines. SUBMITTING: http://thenationalpoetryseries.submittable.com/submit (and/or review and follow the guidelines on our website: www.nationalpoetryseries.org) The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to ensure the publication of five books of poetry each year. Winning manuscripts are selected through this annual open competition judged by five distinguished poets. Each winning poet receives a $10,000 cash award in addition to having his or her manuscript published by…

in the hospital atrium after the wreck I read his decision to wear camo to the hospital as meaningful rushes and reedscross the body bend and breakartificial topiaries catch his thin cotton sheethis lone tab of blue thread, his far edgeoutside, the wind blows and the leaves, but the trouble staysbetween elevations hushlook up at the canopy of green shoots, even heresmall green notations slumped into soft white wicker outdoor furnitureall the people like rough stones, sit out and the light hovers over themif the weather is nice almost anybody can be revivedwhen everything passes through a condition of floradon’t pick the flora, letgo, what pain is there room for, amongthe poppies? they have dwarfed meheat dipping each little neckI see a man on the same corridor, who I also…

Dream of the 21st Century I dreamt I witnessed something(a child being humiliated in some way)& then recounted the event for someone.I dreamt the scene, watched the scene,Even retold the scene & yetI can’t remember it.As soon as I woke, it was forgotten.In the dream I cried as I watched.Where was I? Who were those people?I have such a strong sense they do exist. Dearest Yellow, Dearest Brown, Take me in your summer gown.You who knew fervor, of its foreverOf its endless arch towards another’s fevered need.I hold a flashlight to your organs.Let it matter what we call a thing.That black string was grief …It was her job to take that string & put it somewhere.To take a leaf & sew it back onto a tree.Think of a needle, dropped…

AP2 Books Ada Limón, The Carrying: Poems Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions Hardcover, 120 pages, August 2018 The world asks for transcription. That has been my experience, that if I recount any small terror, I will be asked for the proof of what has happened. What was said to me, exactly? Will I be told how implausible the violence I’ve experienced is to my auditor? To be believed requires an acetic preservation of evidence, to withhold the personal account. Ada Limón’s The Carrying rejects this practice. Limón’s fifth collection emphasizes a speaker who will not be coerced into carrying language that doesn’t love her. In The Carrying, Limón’s speaker cannot avoid confrontation. Others speak to her. Words fall out of the mouths we don’t know. But Limón doesn’t prioritize the act…

at first, trying to reach the accused, i swallowed burnt matchsticks, her hair a tar tumbleweedin the room’s south-facing corner. i did this to pray & i did thisto feel. & then i swallowed my old chant—his name, his name—like i’m not madeof my oppressor’s undoing. & then i swallowed theory. i swallowedplantation politics, tried prying plantains from my lips, plump from sittingon a velvet couch & touching them dry to my wrists while readingabout her body—strung up for slaughter, called names in the oppressor’slanguage, covered in silt. & then i swallowed puddles. & then i swallowed sandalwood& tried to cloak & cover & render her erotic, for the oppressor sometimes savesthe objects of his desire. & then i swallowed desire. i held the smolderingcow dung patty at my core.…

Mausoleum H Our house in the 100-year flood plainflooded. They say thatfor another 800 years a hurricanelike this will not come. My internetis down and my smart phone hurts my thumbsarthritic. I’m running out of data.All my books are in boxes. Please referto my short poem, the one no one readsabout the dead icon, written when he was alive.Technical difficulties aren’t our only betrayal,my friend. Beyond gesture of stylehe was a poet of praise, muchmore so than one of pleasure’ssheer virtuosity. Over the arc, plenty of the latterdecoupled from our addictionto meaning, our methods of extraction,drilling exegetical, fracking logical, historicalwhen all the world’s asleep.The case for nonsense was madeby Dr. Seuss and the mathematician who said any roadwill take you there. Razors and red herrings,the air of sui generis, and…

Vegging Out WhitmanLorcaPopeye Hermes TrismegistusL. Frank Baum Teach me your green-bloodedanthems. Find me a jobin an oxygen factory convertingplanks of light. Green Tara’smantra is circulating. The Green Man is lost in the valleyof the Jolly Green Giant. The Green Lantern is hanging outalong Green Dolphin Street. The Green Lion sleepson the uncut hair of graves. There, There The machineshave been dreaming us again. Smooth, life-like, transparent. The machines(can we really still call them that?) won’t need their own bodies—carapace, casing, keyboard. They’ll have us to monitor. Our vital human music to soothetheir dystopian nightmares. We will not need the old languagethey took and ground to numeric sand. We will understand each otherperfectly. We Don’t Need Another Psychic To tell us we’re fucked. Who would buy a record of every stupid…

Common Octopus I heard a scientist speak about new discoveries on multitasking.Apparently, it is beneficial to multitask only when doing repetitive things that are meniallike dishwashing, cooking, cleaning, and taking care of babies,and not while doing something cerebral, like reading a book or writing a poem.He said that when you write a poem you shouldn’t be thinking about chewingroasted almonds or swallowing hot or cold liquids,or even what your next word will be. Every day I walk by this parked school bus, and it drives me crazythat the doors have been left wide open.Any type of creature could get in and make a home,gnaw the seats, leave deposits.I went inside the bus to see what was going on, and so far nothing,but tomorrow, I will go back to check again…

We keep waiting to wake up & know what we’re doing;we’ve learned to be gratefulfor any colored shard of glass not shaped like a bullet. We are driving in a blizzard (not a metaphor,we could die, I have a lot of responsibilityhere) & our daughter is telling us a ghost story, we’re listeningfor any clues to the riddlethat is her mind at 15—her life has ceased to revolvearound us. There are so manybullets, we’ve learnednot to take these small moments for granted. In this story, the fatherof the children of her Sims charactercame to visit, refused to leave.She built a tiny room, lured him in, deleted the door. Thirty game-days later, he died.The story takes a long time to tell,our son keeps interruptingto sing “We Got the Beat”& talk about…

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 47th year, to keep The American Poetry Review going strong. In 2018, we published six outstanding issues representing the work of 120 writers, including Patrick Rosal, Deborah Landau, Khadijah Queen, Edward Hirsch, David Tomas Martinez, Diane Seuss, Li-Young Lee, and many others. We published the 21st volume in the APR/Honickman First Book series: Throwing the Crown by Jacob Saenz, selected by Gregory Pardlo, and we awarded the 9th Annual Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize to Mark McCloughan. McCloughan’s winning poem, “Devotion (Reflection),” appears on the feature page of the September/October issue. We also lost our editor and dear friend David Bonanno, who was…

Countrywide He threw the pale pink envelopes into the trashand smashed the Mickey Mouse phone hanging up. And when his wife asked you okay? he said okay,then took a twistoff to the back, screaming FUCK so loud he spooked the treefrogs and cicadas.He’d got canned for nothing, missed three payments, then let that cokehead Steve talk him into a “loan,”until this woman in a room in Oklahoma said Go on, holler all you want, babe,they come Sunday-next at noon. So he got high out in the hammock and watcheda blinking light streak past the Milky Way, headed, he said, to fucking Cancun or Jamaica.And for a week nobody noticed he was too calm, springing for movies and takeout,giving away whole packs of Marlboros. His wife said she wished the alienshad…

Duplicity Whenever I am in one conversationI am thinking about another.Whatever room I am in my heart is not.Before a mirror, which face is true:the one that moves or the one that is moved?I flip a coin and wish for the opposite.Life, friends, is whoring.A warning a man mistakes for intimacy.When I miss my madness, which I mostly don’t,I miss how totally I was inside it,the idea I could not get out. Nobody Called Me a Starfucker and now I can’t stop thinking about fuckingan actual astronomical body. Anatomybores me anyhow, the same predictablearms, legs, cock and balls—facesand the smalls of backs are the worst;even famous ones offer no real risk ofimmolation. Why should I get into bed for less?A sky crowded with stars is betterthan any earthly orgy. You…

North Walsham In a hotel in a small town in Norfolk I am listening to someonethrowing glass bottles into a metal bin: toss-shatter, toss-shatter.There are no other sounds; it’s a quiet afternoonbut the one tossing them has a sense of rhythm and I havea sense that this has been going on for some very long time,time being that medium through which we conveythe least knowledge of our circumstances to God, or one another,which the body registers dimly in its cathedral of cells,its telomeres, its intrinsically photosensitive retinal gangliathat register the long days and longer nights of the blind.There is pilgrimage and then there is direct action of the hand,what Simone Weil called the “iron” at whose touch“there must be a feeling of separation from God such as Christexperienced, otherwise it…

River I Dream About Moon river, swollen river, river of starholeand bright, harness river, lichen river,river we velvet with our filth.River of butter and river of witches, rivercracked open careful like egg, or burstapart, unleashing its violet load.River mouths, river beds, every backforty creek, every crick, made oftrickles, made of synth, river of soundas vibration, river where we all get free.River that curve down a backbone,river through which I particle heat,feathery and wet, lemony and loud,river that still smell skin, brownedaround a neck, softened with sweat,river you wear tight on your hips,given in private, or out in the open.River I dream about.River from the inside.River where we shouts the feeling.Septum river, bundle river, river of mercy,sometimes edging so far into nightthe moon goes (…) dark.Yes, all night river, burnt sugar…

AP2 Books Michael Collier, My Bishop and Other Poems Chicago: University of Chicago Press Paperback, 80 pages, August 2018 Michael Collier has always been difficult to pigeonhole. Although he has been writing poems steadily since 1986, beginning with The Clasp and Other Poems, published by Wesleyan University Press during a decade in which the series published books by Yusef Komunyakaa, Agha Shahid Ali, Heather McHugh, Jane Hirshfield, James Tate, Marianne Boruch, and Gregory Orr, he has remained something of a reserved outlier. His aesthetic is woefully out of fashion. Or, I might put it, gloriously out of fashion. Which makes him something of a dissident aesthete. Collier has been teaching in the creative writing program at the University of Maryland since the 1980s and recently stepped down after some two…

V.34 Mother, father, I’m handing you this child,little Erotion, the one I loved the most,so she won’t be too scared of Tartarus,his awful mouths, and all the shadow ghosts.She’d have been six in only six more days.Let her play with you there by her side, my old,experienced parents. Let her babble my name.Let no thick grass cover her tiny bones.And earth, don’t press too hard on her:she hardly pressed on you. V.58 You tell me, Postumus, you’ll live tomorrow.You always say tomorrow. Tell me this:when will this tomorrow of yours come?How long till that tomorrow, Postumus?Where is it? Where on earth will it be found?Is it hiding somewhere in the East?Tell me: how much does your tomorrow cost?It’s older than the kings of Troy and Greece.You’ll start to live tomorrow,…

Duplex A poem is a gesture toward home.It makes dark demands I call my own. Memory makes demands darker than my own:My last love drove a burgundy car. My first love drove a burgundy car.He was fast and awful, tall as my father. Steadfast and awful, my tall fatherHit hard as a hailstorm. He’d leave marks. Light rain hits easy but leaves its own markLike the sound of a mother weeping again. Like the sound of my mother weeping again,No sound beating ends where it began. None of the beaten end up how we began.A poem is a gesture toward home. Duplex The opposite of rape is understandingA field of flowers called paintbrushes— A field of flowers called paintbrushes,Though the spring be less than actual. Though the spring be less…

Cover That Shows Up and Gets You All Wrong Most think the smudge is supposed to beyour spiritbut it’s the purple underneath you inhabit. Eraser debris I blow off the pageor swipe away with the back of my hand: contact is rarely a choice made from this side. Say you were told the life you’re inwas terminal like this one— twice a year day & nightwould send friendship lanyardsof equivalent length. I’d stay awake againto greet and throw them out. And you? Take this cover embody iton the discarded side. We Are Often in Danger of Departing At first you were fluid and the fluidwas safe. It heldgrowing. A napkin folded around desire like a nutrient.Old and imminent,the spots of the guest within me. As if two people togethercould fill…

A Conversation August, 2018 SUSAN STEWART As I read your books, including If You Have to Go, I am struck, as I’m sure any reader would be, by their existential immediacy. You write in time as you undergo time, taking up especially the unfolding of events under great forces of nature or state power. Your poems often emerge at the intersection of individual and collective suffering, including the suffering in your own life. To read your books in sequence is to engage, in myriad contexts, with issues of theodicy. I would like to know more about your sense of poetry as, at times, almost a ritual solace, a kind of lighting of a candle or gift of structure, and, at other times, as a plagued song—a practice with its own…

Lucid Interval Like a river, I can livebetween the shiver and the skinthat holds my shadow. This is where memory begins:the strand of what must belifts from the braid of what has been—and restsinside the presentas a hinge. My brother flinches, gone, or gone againinto a schizophrenic rift,and he totters like a blade of grass swept by the strangeApril wind, no more tetheredto the past than to the bed on which he sits. He runshis palm against the lanternof his head: a shadow falls, a shiver frightensoff the wall, and he dissolvesinto a tense between the shadow presenton the wall that I perceive,the static pastthe wall that he projects. Bloodlines Night circles like a dog aboveits bed. I whisper to the moon, a bent spoon bubbling like a cauldronin my…

In My Dream I worried about my daughter,so I was shaken awakebecause I have no daughter, and whateverknowing looks, whatever cakeswe could have baked together, whatever giftswe could grant one another, they wereslipping out of sight, the way parents do,to those who belong only to the worldof writing and thinking. There was no body there.Of course there’d have been bribes,chastisements, attention-getting manipulations:but whose would they be? There was a trampoline,maybe a carousel, a clumsy gesture….I was raising her up so she could see:it was a nightmare. A nightmare I tell you, a nightmare. Thelonious Monk of Weehawken There are no wrong notes—Thelonious Monk In the third setof Monk’s last gig, the same tuneshe played since 1950rocked a little something inside us. Had we been therewhen his fingers first stirred things…

It’s early and I’ve found what we loveis sometimes silenced by what we also love, not because the moon is the problembut because two moons are a galaxydazzling with fullness but you can’t keepa universe to yourself sometimes you have to returna gentle planet to its shelfnot because you were too greedy,but because tenderness is not for sale it’s early so I tiptoe through my sinsnot because I’m thoughtful of otherssleeping but because I wouldn’t mind living in a world with two moonsI wouldn’t mind slipping a few satellitesinto my pocket instead of a lifewith limited lunar events tenderness is wholesale and it wants meto pull it from the shelf tendernesshas a voicebox tenderness keepssaying Close your eyes close your eyestenderness will not turn off Kelli Russell Agodon is a…

For Jaimie Like the last celebrant of an almost forgotten goddessHeld together by worship, the woman I love loves Her dead grandmother. She annuls impermanenceWith a festival of loneliness. Of normalcy, The woman I love loves the trouble to get backTo what is impossible. She smiles, and whatever was Goes from the totem of what is still. LoveLike the language an immigrant child is told to forget, But senility brings back before death. ResurrectedIn the sugar for an imaginary tea. In the meridian Like a half-lit moon, where she watches the shadowIn ecstasy across the altar of bright migration. When her empty table is anointed with tangerines.For some are summoned in sweet offerings. Christian Teresi’s poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming from Blackbird, Crab Orchard Review, The Kenyon…

* Of course the President of Peru’s daughterlives in a flower-glutted casonain the Barranco District,hands down the most romantic in Lima.Of course she speaks four languagesand has 50K followers. *Sometimes, after Special Forces murdera few dozen Shining Path rebelsin a remote jungle outpost,she’ll tweet some pretty extreme views likeThey should’ve eradicated three generations, the swine!and the number will decrease,but mostly it’s on the increase. *The PPD’s fiancé is a minimalist painter.They met last year at an organic spain Patagonia. With the compressionof a dream, I conjure the May morningof their first meeting; how snow,like the thick bodies of moths,pummeled the steamed glassof the sulfur bath. *Contrast is a curious creaturewith teeth like tiny bowie knives.Alone in my Wisconsin kitchenI felt transparent with adolescentloneliness. There was no oneto dissect, so I…

A woman made wary by misfortune, writes Stendhal,will not experience this soul-shaking upheaval. Soulshakingupheaval means something like what heelsewhere calls the curse of passionate love, althoughmy sense is that love here is better understood aseither arousal or torpor, and that distinctions in suchmatters are, while necessary and true, ultimatelymythological. Stendhal’s own argument alsoentails a critique of terminology: of thunderbolts,he says, That ridiculous word ought to be changed—but nevertheless the thing “love at first sight” does exist. When I first copied down those sentences fromStendhal, I wrote instead of upheaval the nonwordunheaval, which I now think of as upheaval’suncompromised sibling. On the ceiling of mygynecologist’s exam room is a watercolor of alurid hummingbird with a few centimeters ofbeak inside a flower. A hummingbird’s beak isunderstood to be a sheath for the…