Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2019 i The American Poetry Review

from On the Overnight from Agadir Don’t go to discover your roots, Ladybug says. If you want to look for roots, go and look at a tree.Another day at a cafe, avoiding. Pretending to— Why did you come here Tell me whyIf you want to die go ahead and die do it quicklyIf you want to be dead You can be dead But the days are long and always the same.But the nights are long and always the same.I feel that time has me, in a way. Do you know? A tree. But do you see the roots when you look at a tree? The syringa from the cover of that playbook in high school haunted me for weeks, its net of empty branches …See, that’s the problem. That right…

Gilgamesh The Life of a Poem Michael Schmidt “Michael Schmidt’s unparalleled love for poetry, ancient and modern, brings to life the continuing vitality and importance of the world’s earliest surviving poem, with fascinating new insights on every page. A real treasure.” — Ruth Padel, author of Darwin: A Life in Poems Cloth $24.95 Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli Translated by Taije Silverman with Marina Della Putta Johnston “This exquisitely crafted bilingual volume is a gift to all who cherish the renewal of perception and understanding of our shared humanity, which only the great poets, like Pascoli, can provide.” —Rebecca West, University of Chicago Paper $19.95 | Cloth $55.00 The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation Before Our Eyes New and Selected Poems, 1975–2017 Eleanor Wilner “There are poems in this…

The Unclaimed In every city there’s a room lined with boxes ofthe unclaimed, each the size of half a loaf of goodbread. My friend collects these boxes, which he thenbrings home & opens & empties the ash into a bucket tomix with a medium to make another painting. One box is smaller, only as big as a few sticksof butter, five days old typed out on the label. My frienddoes not even open this box, he cannot, it is heavier than youmight imagine. Stardust, he simply places it in the center ofa large white canvas. Unghosted I’ve tried to dream this lakeinto existence for years & here it is,ta-da, illuminated briefly beneath ourflare. You show me the birds that liveunderground—oilbirds— if you don’t know howto walk, you whisper, you could…

Poem Written with a Pinecone in My Hand Here in my hand a cone from the beautiful eastern white pine sitsan offering from the tree planted thirty years ago after earth softened upcome spring enough to dig a hole roughly twice the size of the burlapball around the root of it. The cone measures six inches in length minus the short stem; the stem extends into the axis around which whorlforty-two wood-like scales. Under each scale a pair of seeds with bluntsingle wings like aged paper once hid until the cone in its secondyear flared open and released them into the paws of a ground squirrel. Turn the pinecone to the left if you can hear me from the ConnecticutTurnpike of your afterlife. I’ll stroke with focus my left thumb…

Twelve years ago, I adopted a young baby in Vietnam and made myself a firm but vague promise not to “raise him white.” But what did that mean? To figure it out, I started to educate myself about race, trying to see how I, a white mother, might not mess up raising a brown boy. I assumed he would face racism (I didn’t yet grasp that he would also face my own racism1). Then, when he was around 3, I started trying to write poems about whiteness. For a long time I did not see the two efforts—the poems and the parenting project—as connected. One task was turning over a problem in my mind, trying different ways to make language catch fire, as I always do as a poet. The…

Throwing the Crown by Jacob Saenz, winner of the 2018 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, is available in APR’s online store at www.aprweb.org and at other outlets. Throwing the Crown was chosen by guest judge Gregory Pardlo. JACOB SAENZ is a CantoMundo fellow whose work has appeared in Pinwheel, Poetry, Tammy, Tri-Quarterly and other journals. He has been the recipient of a Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship as well as a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. He serves as an associate editor for RHINO.…

10 The countdown to you begyns with me, deere Starman, when I wander, dumbly, deep into a space hospittable to Hunger. Now, all’s desert. No milk in syte. Just pitifull sand, what shushes as it slydes through your hande to rejoin itself. I’d join myself with a stellar human who, as you do, dons white suits & travells lyte, is able to drive all seasons w/ the top down & tell me terrible jokes. If you kin keep yr posture in the face of bad demands, I promise to objectively vivify you, insofar as the dead can keep a promise. As for me, the last thing I sawe wasn’t Earth, but a domed desert, littered with fyres I could read. Its sands emulated the colore of the dead center of…

For the past ten months, I have lived in San Francisco. I work in Silicon Valley. Capitalism swirls around me: Long work weeks, robotic men and women with their faces in the blue glow of their screens on the train, rampant homelessness among the wealth. If I believe what most people say, I am living in the future. If I believe what most people say, as goes San Francisco, so goes the world. But a bigger question is: If this is the future, will we all stand for it? When I first moved to San Francisco, I began to read Halle Butler’s The New Me. Although the protagonist of The New Me does not live in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, her life is wrapped up in her work. She…

MOON and its dark star of calamity.MOON like moths: twilight- and night-flying white moths.MOON with half-suicidal/half-sexual affect. Unimpressed, Islamic nations won’t standardize a lunar calendar.Should we bother to name it soon? A Copernican principle insiststhere is nothing at all special about Earth’s little corner of universe— moon stars sunshine everything else … Yet in our orbit, Neil Armstrong claims he heard the Adhan—the callto prayer—thus converting. First man bowing from Moon toward Mecca.Did he think to recheck his horoscope? Astrology is anthropocentric: So, constellations appear entirely different anywhere other than Earth—Pick any moon; Planet that is a diamond; Planet of inaudible hum.Tethered to this planet of escalating nonsense, I prefer homemade prophecy: I browse Bibles, pushing pins in random verses, turning scripture into policy.Call it insurance against a god who…

This dresser’s wood has held some air in it—a dresser of air—and the air holdssomething about what it was to be alive sixty years ago:the kitchen brighter than its garbage,the hanging kitchen ornaments almost sarcastically still againstthe strength of the oncoming weekand how one usually looked at others in profileover a jar of mayonnaise— I am over you as you try to fall asleep in your pack and play, little Franny,but it is hard for you because of your loose armspicking up handfuls of damp sleep sackand then dropping them, which wakes you up again.The way a dresser holds things that are “precious” but not exactly something you want to keep—things that must be kept—I am a repository of your head smell,some crumpled stickers,an accumulated mass of scraps I can…

Wesley Before One before I was one I heard every soundas a sound that had never been heard,before I was one I saw every lightas a light separate from dark, colorhidden in a place I had not been.Before I was one I used feet to wakenin water, to pedal through air,hands a means to release the hunger in my heart.From there I came to the bed where I criedand called out sounds without tears.People did not exist, nothing beyondneed and the place of a voice. I could notask and I could not refuse, there wasonly light to reach to, stairs of limitlessheight to lie beside. These are not memoriesbut tracks left on my eyes, marks on my lungsand my continual turning towardthose arms of warmth where I know continuous warmth…

I am thinking terrible thoughts.Dozens dead again and I am thinkingabout what types of humans they were—the gunman and the fallen. YesterdayI was so happy to be greeting fall at last.You wore a sweater with holes in itand we had dinner with your auntwho told us the story of how her sonhad come to have half a heart. I wasa bad mother, she explained, I never wantedchildren. The truth is he had heatstrokeand an undiagnosed defect. Littlemurderous shadow, patient in the aortadarkness. I am amazed, still, to bebeside you listening. That more andmore seasons gather and wane whileI’m allowed to remain near you andnear your sadnesses, familial tragedies.Some days I wait for life to say Enoughand I practice the feeling of the worldnarrowing again, of my body coursingcold and my…

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, as we enter our 48th year, to keep The American Poetry Review going strong. So far in 2019, we have published five outstanding issues representing the work of more than 100 authors including John Murillo, Sandra Simonds, Brenda Shaughnessy, TC Tolbert, Kelle Groom, Noor Hindi, Charif Shanahan, Alison C. Rollins, Rachel Zucker, and many others. We published the 22nd volume in the APR/Honickman First Book series: Vantage by Taneum Bambrick, selected by Sharon Olds, and we awarded the 10th Annual Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize to Maggie Queeney, whose poem “Glamour” appears on the feature page (back cover) of this issue. We believe that our…

River Hymns by Tyree Daye, winner of the 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, is available in APR’s online store at www.aprweb.org and at other outlets. River Hymns was chosen by guest judge Gabrielle Calvocoressi. 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.…

If cycles of taste in American poetry didn’t have their own propulsion and life span, neither to be appraised in eras, one would now express a prayer of thanks. But we may not be out of the period of poetry virtue signaling for years, because few of the social conditions that bred this era’s political traits have changed or seem ready to. Since the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014, the feeding on political language in the United States has become extreme, and the political arguments, coarse. As if to underscore these conditions, there’s been an amazing explosion of partisan poetry—never have there been so many political poets, so many poems vying for attention, so many books, so many inflated disputations, and so little sympathy for proportion.…

The look I am hunting: the onethat through color and cut glares the starer into a skull or a skeinof lightning, a switch stalled at dawn, or the gloamingalong an equator. What fascinates I shine like flame-blackened foil,a rhinestone snoring at lake bottom, a wreck’s brass-bound astrolabe,bright as hard tender, newly minted, mewling and naked underoil-slick pleather sieving light, prism-like, my limbs sing their sirensong, pull ribbons of pure note over the pack’s snarl and bark, teeth pop,dangling chain of saliva snaps— deep under, I stayseamless as a safe, a rust-sealed letter box, corroded pill case, my insidesscoured to looking glass by a tangle of wind trapped,a cyclone circling the space the size a doll’s eye makes,panting my small breath. Maggie Queeney is the author of settler, selected by Shane…

The hastily assembled angel climbedThe ladder God had many times proposedThe prophets build the prophets never built itThe ladder to the sky and Heaven in the skyThe prophets never built it knowing God Was testing them but also teasing themSince all God’s tests are two tests one for the FatherAnd one for the Son and nothing for the HolySpirit who broods over them like a meddlesomeNeighbor watching two young brothers play Switch on a stoop from the second floor acrossThe street whose mother never would have letHim he reminds himself take an expensivetoy like that outside if he had owned such toysEver as the Nintendo Switch and prophets The angel built the ladder first one rungAnd then another all the way to HeavenThen flew back down to the bottom since…

Would we trust other ghosts? —Dawn Lundy Martin I. I was so excited to hear that J. Michael Martinez and Sherwin Bitsui had poetry collections coming out in 2018. Martinez’s Museum of the Americas was selected as a winner in the 2017 National Poetry Series and arrived via Penguin Press in October, and Bitsui’s Dissolve was published by Copper Canyon Press, also in October. The books are the third collection for each poet, and both Martinez and Bitsui continue to push at the limitations of language(s), particularly challenging English to express cultural histories, concepts, and values that may not be accessible through the King’s English, trained as it has been by Anglo-European experiences and visions of the world. My excitement for these collections is warranted. Martinez and Bitsui again summon…

Big Boy Blue Big boy blue, when you were borndid you weigh ten pounds, or a dozen? And were youthe color of a summer skytill your big lungs took your firstFebruary first breath? The fire,this morning, looks like hair, growingfast motion and writhing. When you were a child,did you look at a mother with writhing snakes growingout of her head? You did not turnto stone, but to language, you turned to airand water with the wind’s writing on them.When we first met, you seemed like a wolf in wolf’sclothing of beauty, a man with the freshancient mouth of an early singer,a man who was ready for a woman friend.Above the pond, this morning, there are figures, bentforward, made of breath, going eastfrom west, as if on a long march.Wherever people…

Speaking of Sylvia Plathwith lit Turkish Royal unspoolingin the pits of our lungs I craved her. I wanted to livein the long, soft revolution of her mouth,to sleep and wake in the heat of its coup. I know no one of her stature.Her lipstick on the filter, the napkin,on the glass of beer bright as a candied clot of hemoglobin.Revlon four-forty, she explained,was Plath’s go-to. I tried to watch everything,to be aware of what survivedbehind each gesture—what fine raiment still hung in her closet, what voile slipor chiffon bandeau I might see. She began telling me somethingshe didn’t want me to know—again and again lifting the cigarette to the open forest of her face. I began wondering what existed.My cock knocking against the clothof my pants, clenching and unclenching like…

2015 • Alicia Jo Rabins, Divinity School selected by C. D. Wright ”Alicia Jo Rabins’ poems bring together the spiritual, the surrealist, and the erotic. Their wild imagination and fierce passion are aroused by hunger of the soul, and they use poetic intelligence as a desperate hammer to break through the ordinary self, to union, or reunion—with what? The Sufighazal, the Zen koan, and the Hassidic parable—those traditions are alive here with transcendental mirth, lots of duende, and lots of sobriety. This beautiful agonizing mess—these poems drag you right into the middle of it.” —Tony Hoagland 2014 • Katherine Bode-Lang, The Reformation selected by Stephen Dunn Katherine Bode-Lang’s fierce and lyrical poems undertake the reformation of family mythology, place, and loves that each life requires to become its own. “One…

Benediction The wind in swells through the wild rye rolls.The bright sky dulls. Over the hills,Their green backs ringed with blue-Bells sunset-rung, flaps a wingy shadow west-Ward. A jay. Poor bird that no netMet nor gin it didn’t love. Good luck,You luckless scrub, you.You dumb—, you doomedSucker. God bless. After the Diagnosis It’s not raining, how is that possible?& there’s a bird at the feeder. How can it be hungry?There are squirrels bickering in the plumtree?Why would someone be flying a kite?That there’s enough windTo make the wind-Chimes chime— What’s w/ the snoring dog? How is there sleep?How can anything breathe in this distant air?It cannot be the case the only thing to careIs my neighbor’s cat. &, of course, it’s not—She just wanted her supper.Ought not the lavenderIts ravish…

What have you done with my keys? I blame youthough it’s hard to hold a grudge these daysbecause I usually don’t rememberwhy I was angry in the first place.I look at a person sure she’s done me wrongthough the inciting incidents are lost. Former studentsseem familiar, but their names disperse like cigarette smokeblowing towards a stool where I once drank myself sick.Now I’m not even sure what city that bar was in,the welcoming pink neon letters, another cloud,as though I am looking at tiny printwithout my reading glasses. I was on a pink cloudwhen I first stopped drinking. In fact, I once looked upat the moon, weeping in gratitude. So there,I do recall something! I was walking acrossthe Brooklyn Bridge in an ex’s sweatpantsthough I’m not sure anymore of his…

Rose McGowan in all the ancient boyfriendsof my trending disregardtrove nuance the revolution will not be mansplained & it willn’treside in sorrowfor werelease this sorrow-marrow,these adjectives enclosure as venus heldstarlight wetend Mabel Normand as in the meat-drop retinue were haltedas we dreamt Tatum O’Neal what shining eyes we had, nomercy in the remembrance keepunaltered home of fugue Jenny Lumet the girls with the hunky sweaterdresses & the metallicflats from the cover of the new issue of seventeenwhich arrived in the mailbox yesterday becauseit is november, 1981, diana has conceived william, reagan hasappointed o’connor, whitney houston is oneof the girls, all the girls at school the next day Garbo (the hermit) in the alkaline notions/lend yourselfease//find small pastures of slowhabit/& care//gentle days littlelakes/tiny shores//of souls repose Loren (the high priestess) it…