Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2021 i The American Poetry Review

Beggars and Choosers “Ah Carl, while you are not safe, I am not safe.” —Ginsberg I admit that I don’t really know how the internet worksor the economy and when the newspaper saysthat the body of government is consolidating debtto make room for more credit, it sounds like a divorceor like when in-laws move in, this “making room,”the language of spatial necessity escaping me.I’m learning a lot about lungs in the pandemic:glass opacity, x-rays of snow, organs embracinglike adjacent continents in a bad winter. Mutual downfall.When I lived in Shanghai, I performed a ritual of waterto ward off a hoax or a curse or the dead of heart.I needed an amulet and bought an expensive piece of jadebecause I was in China and I was desperateand unimaginative. It was heavy,…

Paris Syndrome Paris Syndrome (n.) a psychological condition experiencedalmost exclusively by Japanese tourists and, to a lesser extent,Chinese tourists, who are disappointed when the city of lightsdoes not live up to their romantic expectations. The syndrome,considered an extreme case of culture shock, causes symptomssuch as an acute delusional state, hallucinations, anxiety,dizziness, and sweating. Single women travelers are mostafflicted by this disease. June was a parade of Chinese brides,their trains spilling into the gardens.Blooming gloom, purple sepals— sweat crowned their frowns, wet diademsof dread. Hems, rough hedges—their headsgroomed doll-like for their grooms to glower at. June smelled like perfumeand piss. Chewing stale breadon the bridges, I tossed my misgivingsinto the river. How I loved the marble women in the Tuileries, their inconsolableweight. To be a monument, stone-carved,to sorrow. I wandered in…

MARKERS OF SEGREGATION Previewing Tanella Boni’s Là où il fait si clair en moi / There where it’s so bright in me U.S. readers do not hear much from African poets, less so from African poets who do not write in English, and less again from African poets who are women. Irène Assiba d’Almeida writes in the introduction to the anthology she edited to help remediate these problems of access and representation, A Rain of Words: A Bilingual Anthology of Women’s Poetry in Francophone Africa (2009), that “the history of poetry published by women in francophone Africa is a very short one. Indeed, the beginning of francophone African women’s poetry can be assigned to a specific calendar year”—1965. More books have emerged but still they “have rarely been reprinted, their…

Transfigure Imitation is the highestForm of flattening. A woman on top isA woman in charge. Far be it from me, to stand inThe way of what a woman wants. She said she doesn’t wantNo middle man. Horizontal. Halfway betweenA horse and a copycat god I crossed over,Switched my ass from her Left-hand side to the right,In my palm, a token of Tokenism. It is unlike meTo turn into a coy boy When aroused.Ruler. Take measures. At great lengths, tell meThe size of my extremity. Within inches of life,I wait with bated breath. Even in silenceI am spoken for. Garden of the Gods As a matter of black,I will trade a mountainfor a river. What does that tell you about mymakeup? I once met acowboy. I said, let me hold your…

(1) Many years ago, at an arts residency set in the capacious grounds of a former country house in the north of Ireland, I attracted the ire of another poet. The poet was a senior poet from my country—someone whose work I admired. He seemed to ground his antagonism in what he inferred and imputed about my religious beliefs. The gist of his critique seemed to be that a religious person could not be an honest poet. The way he expressed this was in terms of self-censorship: you cannot, he told me, be an honest poet and an honest religious person at the same time, because your religion would be censoring your poetry, or vice versa. The implication seemed to be that either my poetry was dishonest or my faith…

My father and I sit at a sushi bar in my new citysampling three different kinds of salmon nigiri. He tells me about a great funeral speechhe recently heard a son give for his father. The speech was structured around regretseveryone assumed the father didn’t have, interspersed with hilarious stories involving boysdriving the family van and fishing mishaps. The ivory salmon is pale and impossibly soft.The sliver of steelhead, orange enough to pretend it’s salmon. How else to say it.I am my father’s only child, and he is my mother. We dip our chopsticks into a horseradish pastedyed green and called wasabi. I know his regrets. I could list them. But instead at his funeralI will talk if I can talk about nights like this, how good it felt just…

The American Poetry Review and The Honickman Foundation are happy to announce the winner of the NATASHA RAO Latitude The APR/Honickman First Book Prize is an award of $3,000 and publication of a volume of poetry. Natasha Rao’s Latitude, with an introduction by Ada Limón, will be published in September 2021, with distribution by Copper Canyon Press through Consortium. The prize is made possible by the partnership between The Honickman Foundation and The American Poetry Review.…

At the End of Our Marriage, in the Backyard We’ve let the lawn go to wild violetsand dandelions, to crabgrass, to clover bending under the weightof so many honeybees, our children can’t even run barefoot. We donothing, letting ivy snarl around the downspouts and air conditioner,letting milkweed grow and float its white feathers. We do nothingand call it something—as if this wilding were intentional.If there is honey, I tell myself, we are to thank. All summerthe children must wear shoes. We sit out back while they crouchin the clover, watching the bees, calling out when they see sunnycrumbs of pollen on their legs. Maybe no one will be stung.Late in the season, we sit ankle-deep in weeds and flowers.In weeds we call flowers. Small Blue Town I built a small…

The Walls Became the World All Around 18,000 years agomy ancestors burnedbones and hematitein the Lascaux caves.Equines and stags mid gallopon walls of calcite. I imagine them gatheringin their own blackness.As a boy I thoughtbrown and blackwere stalked by death. I try to imaginethe 17,000 yearsLascaux were leftalone in darkness.If you read about the caves,historians will saythey were discovered in 1940. 55 years later on my firstday of kindergarten,a girl said hi to meand I hid behind Mama.She’s black and fat I said. When I look upthe definition for black,I find fifteen entrieswith negative associations. Black holes burnat billionths of a Kelvin;astronomers say that makesthem ideal black bodiessince they are impossible to observe.Unfinished steel is said to be black. When I look in the mirrorI feel shame for my six…

Dear Reader, We’re so grateful for the support that our readers around the world have shown the magazine and the poets we publish. We hope you will join us again now, in our 49th year, to keep The American Poetry Review going strong. In 2020, we published six outstanding issues representing the work of 134 writers, including Keith S. Wilson, Carrie Fountain, Benjamin Garcia, Faylita Hicks, Jenny Browne, Ada Limon, and many more. We published the 23rd volume in the APR/Honickman First Book series: Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party by Chessy Normile, selected by Li-Young Lee, and we awarded the 11th Annual Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize to Joy Priest. Priest’s winning poem, “A Personal History of Breathing,” appears on the feature page of our September/October 2020 issue. We believe…

Benefactor Margot Berg and Robert Epstein Bruce Greenwald Jonathan Katz William Kistler Terri E. Moreland Jennifer H. Oliver Ethel Rackin Ava Seave Bank of America Patron John Carswell Werner Gundersheimer Carol Parssinen Peter Waldor and Jody Miller Sponsor Paul Cummins Adil N. Godrej Anne Marie Macari Judy Newman Alicia Ostriker Linda A. Richardson-Korman Kathryn Slott Supporter Anthony Albino Andrew Anway Anne Bagley Bridget Barnes Ellen Bass Robin Becker Kenneth Boockvar Dennis Brennan Ira Brind Marianne E. Brown Ed Bussa and Barbara Tomash Ann Butchart C. Fausto Cabrera Carmine F. Chickadel Michael Crippen Brian Cronwall Susan Davie Hal Davis Thomas Devaney Carolyn Dille Lynn Emanuel Ruth Fine Jennifer Flannigan Richard Getty Susan Grossman Bob Hanson Robert Hass Robert Hasselblad Ditta Baron Hoeber Jill Holmes Jack Israel Elizabeth Jacobson Jasper Johns Joann…

I. VALUES In Harold Bloom’s introduction to his selections for The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1988–1997, he claims that the 75 poems he’s chosen for inclusion pass what he calls his “personal test for the canonical: I have reread them with pleasure and with profit.” He notes that, of the ten volumes he was asked to select from, one is not represented at all; the 1996 Best of American Poetry, he says, had not a single poem worthy of inclusion. He writes: That 1996 anthology is one of the provocations for this essay, since it seems to me a monumental representation of the enemies of the aesthetic who are in the act of overwhelming us. It is of a badness not to be believed, because it follows the…

After many years, Gander recently rediscovered the original cassette tapes of this interview, which took place at his home with CD Wright in Rhode Island, June 11, 1995 FORREST GANDER You’ve lived all over the world and there are abundant references in your work to foreign geographies and names and towns. I wonder what you learned as a poet from living in Paris, Denmark, and Greece? Are there different things that you picked up in different places that became useful to you as a poet? JACK GILBERT I don’t think it’s so much the places as what happened to me in the places. FG One of the places that’s come up in the recent book that I know the least about is Denmark. When was that? There’s an affair you…

Haven’t yet been anywhere Iwant to scatter my ashes. This sea life,the tendency to believethat whatever kills usis stronger than we are. The middle barof the closet, then,and the exhaust pipe too, a knot thatwon’t release. Too much ofanything is poison, too little ofanything an ataxia, and thelight that scatters is defined bywhat it reflects. Amish Trivedi is the author of Sound/Chest (Coven), Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed (Shearsman), and FuturePanic, forthcoming from Co•Im•Press in the fall of 2021. He has an MFA from Brown and a PhD from Illinois State. He lives in Maryland.…

Bubble Inside now fifty-three daysthe everywhere child won’t listenmy head invented by water heaves uppours forward I shake out the sparksminnows hitting an edge growing up after some strifeboss and stop and No still ringingin the wake of slammed doors my mother leftto sit in the rusted Subaru never leavingits sealed cavity enough I’d checkfor the halo of yellow hair for the endof her cigarette a tiny star she breathed fromto still the crashing waters before she’d come back insidedefrost the chicken place the lettuce in a bowlus looking from the other roomus at the table eating what she’d madeoffering freely what we didn’t likeand she alone taking it 2020 In the past ten years, more CO2 was emitted than in all of human history up to the election of…

Unhoused from my own body, sickness comes,hollows me, leaves. Survival, they call lucky, weighsheavy as a gravestone with its asking for a newlanguage, but I go on borrowing tired and taxing wordage as a way to guard thisdisembodiment, hovering abovethe wilted wreath of being. Continuanceisn’t a tombstone but it carries a millstone: why alive when so many dead? Why breath, pulse,limbs mobile, speech at least sputtering when somany have shuttered, been shunted into the darkbed? Where is the lullaby to pack this wound, heal this hollow? I’m alive. You’redead. Where is the word for this despair? Simone Muench is the author of six full-length books including Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014). Her recent, Suture, was co-written with Dean Rader (BLP, 2017). She is an editor of They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology…

Let us be quick to claim. Gnaw gnaw like an orchardin the grip of an August thirst. What knowledgetook us this far, towards the intromission of tenancy.It clings to me like a crown. A legible devotion,the angles that bring into focus all our truest blames.You may run your hand over them if you like.Consider the lips of animals as one more checksigned by God, one more IOU. I present their warsto the assembly which falls silent for a brief periodbecause we have so many wars, why not feast.Early fruit of the season split and roasting on a firethe world obscures with its ragged hem.Strong muscles of the throat meant for wingsgoes one argument, not necessarily mine but howthe scars constrict when paraphrased, by oil or wine.This all takes some time…

Translated from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Pitas II The endless gesture some far-seeing eye might notice:asking for this lone object of desire.Black curl on the forehead, the night, the incessantparody of enthusiasm. Reducing it to three thingsfour things later forgetting the fluctuationthe nothing interesting the sad sad romance oftotal solitude. How to spread a net toward the invisibleto lengthen this fighting arm, to say please I don’t want to be a dog animal of the shadowsI no longer want to beg bare-facedfor night’s cover. Let forgetting enfold meUntil the next astonishmentUntil another heaven. III No, with my honest heart I do not ally myself.It is too pure …—Pier Paolo Pasolini He is too honest, he who tremblesand barely moves the water exploring somethingsimilar to oblivion. If…

Oh problems, I’ve neverbeen resilient anyway. The ropeseventually biodegrade aroundmy wrists. Phosphor is a prettypretty word, even as it modifiesrunoff. When I tell academicswe’ve entered a threshold withoutbugs, they laugh and say I shouldcome to the South and say that. It’s like thesenator who brought a snowball to Congress,together we walk into private conveniences.What we do is to spend it. I am not emptyof metaphor; I am tired of multitudes.The indelible crush of leaves. Grassupturned in battle for the ball. Gravel,gravel. Animals grow bigger at the endof their epoch. The wind soothes onlywhen we need confirmation. Closeyour eyes to breeze. I am not the promiseof forgetting. I merged regretfullyand I too missed the point. No tonnageno respirators. No Edenic twist.Oh chronic, heavenless now. Look—a scorch mark in California lumberresembles the…