Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2025 i The American Poetry Review

Over the gloved hand there is a hooded bird and either we have time traveled into extreme wealth or poverty or this is a demo at a nature center or public school. Education gave me a heads-up that societies get stuck in loops and we were due for a gilded age but my family and a popular culture based heavily on underdog stories encouraged an unresolved conflict in me between patriarchal lust to be revered as a beneficent provider and also a masked crusader who reveals crimes and apprehends miscreants. But who I cannot help myself being is a guy who talks a lot, often just going and going, making funny noises and setting myself up to be regarded as half-assing the patriarchal thing. The hood is lifted, and the…

Every variation features the last two people alive,poolside. In a kitchen pouring milk for a dogwith one eye. So much eros, memento mori, etc.in the small glass always brought to the womanby the man who thinks of her,only sometimes. A little, he might claim.Everyone is always coming out of some bodyof water, languid, and dangerous, and dumb,as water. The sea is always standing infor what cannot be done on earth. Alisha Dietzman is a PhD candidate in Divinity at the University of St Andrews, supported by a grant from the US-UK Fulbright Commission. She was awarded a 2020 U.K. Women Poets’ Prize by the Rebecca Swift Foundation. Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, and The Iowa Review.…

Into the ranks of my enemiesI’m sendingfewer instructions. Better bread.Smaller sensations.I’m sending this new poemI’d hoped to feeldifferently about, at least insofaras I understand itright now. I’m filing my report:It’s the endof a lazy summer we can’t afford.We live herein a word or two. I’m raisingmy boy,it seems possible, even now, earbudslike tinyboxing gloves in his ears.I’m sending thislist of things to fix. Small repair.A bus map.Woodsmoke. I’m sendingthe dog.I love that dog. Side Effects May Include Unusual brightness. A brother briefly.Missed songs one by onewhile the tape falters forward. You may feel as if you’re passing outfliers in the sun the whole time, in a body equally incomprehensible,blinking back at you coolly. Pain in the chest and legs.Unusual spackling. Forgotten swans. There might be stagehands for milessetting up the…

I’m five years old and on vacation with my mom for the first time. It’s summer, and we took the train from Odesa, my birthplace and the only city I know, to Karolina-Bugaz, a little seaside village a couple of hours away. We’re staying with a kind woman named Rosa, in her little house surrounded by flowers and lush greenery. The whole thing is so exciting I can’t contain myself and it always feels like I have to pee even when I don’t. I’m at the beach with my mom. She’s wearing her cheetah print one-piece and I’m ru nning around in my red polka-dot bottoms. I don’t know what I love more, swimming in the sea every day, or swimming in my mom’s love. I can’t believe she’s not…

No Rest Jason Koo Diode Editions, 2024 172 pp. $18.00 I had no intention of rewatching Sixteen Candles tonight, but here we are. In Jason Koo’s collection No Rest, there is a current of irreverence exemplified by the author’s nod to Long Duk Dong, a throwback Asian caricature with fobby flair. Koo has a good sense of humor. I wouldn’t dare drop a Sixteen Candles reference around my students, most of whom have yet to see the 1984 cult classic, but for this millennial reader, the joke still lands. After all, who could forget Gedde Watanabe’s portrayal of the bizarre exchange student who comes to live with protagonist Samantha, played by Molly Ringwald. In one scene, Samantha sulks on the bottom bunk, arms crossed in a quintessential pose of teen angst. Long…

God is real, I know,because you have to shoot down mistletoe —don’t believe me? Look it up — then look upto higher branches, drop in two twinshotgun shells — Holidays in Tennessee,& New Year’s Eve she & I sobourbon-blitzed at the neighbors’backyard fire we stumbledhome to strip our tree — then dragit back denuded — I hope you knowhow dry pine catches — the flame the heatthe straight up singe — what were wewhat we werewhat were we burning Reed Turchi is a poet and musician from Swannanoa, North Carolina. His writing has appeared in The Believer, Narrative Magazine, and Denver Quarterly, among others, and his music has been featured by Rolling Stone, NPR, PBS, and INDEX OF ADVERTISERS more. He currently resides in Brooklyn.…

Towards No Earthly Pole after an installation by Julian Charrière erraticmemory of sky when you’re standing on the ice cap punctured boulders wheremoss fires glow green you’re not standing you’re flying we chop frozen entropymilk fossils blue Minnows mist raven felted forest blonde mothcauldron heat ash casket + you chop zucchiniinto small moonsfrom balcony drink ina digital sunset + night glaze brittle starlet fox hoaxwooden grooms milk baths + I passed you a caneapple you made stonepie matching scarslook inside our heads + throat currency monster songs strawberry treephantom cockpits Odessa marquee + minnows speak in tonguestrack brightyou tend to obsidian woundswe sleep in circles + speckled fjords sage farmer ghost campbacon congee fizzle chores + divvy up the light Entries hello nightlighthello schemer I feel a shift under the…

Days, weeks, months, I stopped counting, unable to take a deep breath. The kind you don’t notice till it’s gone. The kind that says, yes, the next rung of air is there to step to. A breath like you’re thinking of what comes next, and it comes. * It’s not dangerous, I’m told, this not-quite-enoughness of air, lungs ballooning against what’s arrayed against them. I imagine tiny hands, fingers splayed, pressing the way I might press a sleeping bag to roll it tight. Or, better: lungs stretching and gently touching what’s above. Glancing. The way the eyes might glimpse a summit through trees, a summit they’ll reach if they stick to the trail. * Some days I lose the trail. I’ve left a pencil beside every chair in the house.…

Nightfall in Irhue after Adam Zagajewski It falls quiet and the last light of the daymimics the peace of this worldas the retreating light snake throughthe walls of old houses, turning this villageinto a study of beauty and the lines of old age. I have lived here once, in January,when the churches were held hostage by desert dust,said by the old catechist to be the sadness of angels. Exile binds the legs and open the eyes, and from the Midwest of America, alone in my room,I have imagined, in the forest reserve,a hunter letting go of his dog, allowing it to knowthe freedom of this world, before seeingthe surrender of a terrified rabbit. Is this the poetry of small wars or of hunger? I do not know, but the sun,…

Stephanie Burt: Welcome to Kristie and Stephanie’s Version: we tried interviewing each other about Invisible Strings last month but the audio failed, so we’re trying again. Invisible Strings, ICYMI, collects 113 poems by 113 poets responding to one song per poet (no duplicates) by the most successful pop songwriter of our era, throughout her own eras. It shimmers, it sparkles, it could become your mirror ball. It’s a collection of contemporary all-stars (Diane Seuss! Rae Armantrout! Yusef Komunyakaa! Mary Jo Bang!) and rising stars (Lisa Fay Coutley! Oluwaseun Olayiwola!). It’s a puzzle: can you match the poems to their songs? It’s a contest (the winner sees Taylor in Vancouver). And it’s a delight. It’s also Kristie Frederick Daugherty’s idea. Let’s see what she thinks. Kristie? Kristie Frederick Daugherty: Hi, Stephanie. Thanks…

Note: This essay will serve as the introduction to the anthology Breaking into Blossom: Poems with Extraordinary Endings, forthcoming from Texas Review Press in 2025. This anthology takes us to the end of the poem — and “out of the poem’s tunnel of words,” as Marianne Boruch puts it, where we might suddenly be “blinking slightly, released from some dark, eyes adjusting, what was ordinary seen differently now. Or not.”1 W. H. Auden famously said, paraphrasing Paul Valéry, “A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned.”2 This statement applies to more than simply the ending of the poem, of course, but it certainly evokes the questions of where and how to end a poem. In this anthology, we aim to present poems that enact remarkable answers to these questions.…

When my son is asleep, he looks just like my mother scowling in a one piece on a crowded beach, in that photo I stole a few years back, slipped beneath a family portrait. My mother always hated photos. I’m hideous, she’d say — hide me. We’d block her body, her daughters dutiful buoys surrounding her drowning head. We learned then to tread another’s shame. I’m enormous, she’d say. I’m a boat. I’m afraid of my son. He’s so small in his crib. He looks up at me like I’m the whole sky when I tuck him in. But every boy outgrows his baby clothes. His world is gonna grow with him, until I’m just a speck on his shore. Who knows who he’ll be. His father isn’t worried. We’re…

Following William Wordsworth’s sonnet “It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free” I don’t give a fuck.Let the rain governMe. My hands and feet in the mud or perchedAtop a pile as I fall off of me,I’m mulch. I see myself like I matter.I am a being quiet as a nun,How I seem seeming, how I seem oneWho knows the name of which wind fills his face.The broad sun sinks down to tranquility.The day ends. I put my bird to flower,And leave the grass its fevers, holding noForm, my gentleness is on the sea andAs I settle sightless into myself,I let nothing go. I am calm and free.Angry as the wind, I breathe out and in. Samuel Amadon is the author of Often, Common, Some, And Free (Omnidawn, 2021), Listener (Solid…

for Jane Whether you love a person, a country, a game of Scrabble,the world says you just keep flailing: I’ve got other work to do. Not true. The world says nothing. If there were a merry way,the world would go on it. The waitress didn’t hear your order. You might as well stop singing.Because when you were light and airy as angels, compliant and faith-bound, you could still be shot full of holesin the schoolyard. As for the little lies that crushed you, as if under the wheels of a car, those yelps,nobody hears your pleading, even if they’ve had their go at love: forget it, no big deal, it’s your own fault,wrong from the start. Or (under its breath), those who cross the border, let them drown..Let the trapped…

All in Red The sun is drifting away again, behind cloudsthat look most like the hairs well sprung from my temples. I can’t see the sun setting,but I know it is. So many things are like this: merely a sensation of truth. I can’t see my bodychanging, but I know it already is. Just as I know there’s a woman at the benches on BainbridgeStreet, though I am not there with her. She is thumbing through a stack of photosof her son, printed on copy paper, kept quarter-folded in her purse. I knowthat her son is adored, though I sense he does not. I know that my masculinityis a fragile and delicate thing. I refuse all glasses with stems. I’ve always been clumsywith a sense of strength that I may…

translated from the French by Nancy Naomi Carlson On the Whole… On the whole, I’m quite pleased with Africa.John Coltrane On the bus window framed by yellow jute curtains thatslide horizontally along a flexible rod and may be securedright and left, if need be, with a velcro strap of the same color, on this very same window, just above the line of baobabs, tangled like their short branches, but finer and moredelicate than eyelashes, the broken legs of a mosquito,its gaunt body still slightly clinging to thescorching window pane. En gros… On the whole, I’m quite pleased with Africa.John Coltrane Sur la vitre du car bordée de rideaux de jute jaune quicoulissent à l’horizontale sur un rail souple et qu’on serreraà droite et à gauche, si besoin est, par une…

Starter Marriage Everybody came to my first wedding.Smelly Neil from primary schoolplayed ‘Splat the Rat’ with the skinhead girlwho sold me fake ecstasy. The bodybuildersfrom dad’s porn films told jokes about potatoesto monochrome ancestors who’d perishedin the Great Famine. After dinner, the midwifepassed around the bloody forceps.The ‘absent friends’ toast got a bit confusingas they all kept piping up, ‘I’m here!’The line-up took hours, embracing everyhalf-remembered person: the manfrom the secret photos in mum’s dresser,my teenage babysitter who jumped off a cliffat Flamborough Head, etc. Some faceswere impossible to place. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said,finally, to one chap, ‘Who are you?’He looked at me, hurt. ‘I’m a BT operator,I kept you in a call queue for forty minutes in2007.’ ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Listen,’ he said,‘The band is playing our song!’…

Reading Rushdie in Lisbon to Robert Hass Who am I anyway and this book isn’t even Rushdie, it’s Cervantes or wait: Quichotte, key-shot, qui shot me? Can you do it, make languages just go together? Or is he just making new myths out of the past, i.e. Quichotte = Quixote, Satanic Verses = Paradise Lost, Golden House = Brothers K, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty Eight Nights = OK, OK, am I being too obvious here? After all, every angel is terrifying, or at least that’s what Rilke says, though I don’t know why. And what am I doing in Lisbon instead of Porto where at least if all I did was wander the streets and look at the sides of buildings it would be something beautiful to see.…

—Budapest, 2024 That I stood at the doorof the second century— That I crossedbeneath two giant highways to whereLegionnaires bathed-- The Great Baths— That above, the continuous roar,trucks and cars freshly 21st century god awful — That in such an underpass, neighbor to ancient,a harried woman at a window in the wallselling langos and fries tocommuters lined up, their hungera still life — That each moment passingpasses abruptly to ruins. *** But mystery. Sometimes it’s a party. Dis Pater called simply Dis, Roman god of the netherworld. His table —a marble table!Weirdly unburied. Up from dirt one day per century. Down againto the company of blind insects that bury their dead. How could such a god not be impatient? What is impatience but hope,however hopeless? I want to write on…

O you rakers of sand, come. I bow, slightly, to the stone ear. It is once againthe season of resemblances. Forfeit, my life, your life, lives livedin the company of doors. Come in, come in, the sound is moist with morning dew.It will perform to your bidding. The party guests are old men & women now,or dead. One thrust an awl through his childhood. The awl was language,he had heated it, it glowed reddish-orange. So much for the dead — you, rakers of sand,I am talking to you. I invite you in. You may blow out your candles & deposit them here, in this iron box. Archipelagoes circling the hotel at midnight, I watchedthrough dulled blinds. I breathed onto the cold porcelain as if it were glass,as if through it…