Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2025 i The American Poetry Review

THE STANLEY KUNITZ MEMORIAL PRIZE: A prize of $1,000 and publication of the winning poem in The American Poetry Review, awarded to a poet under 40 years of age in honor of the late Stanley Kunitz’s dedication to mentoring poets. See page 27. THE STERN PRIZE: An annual book prize in partnership with Copper Canyon Press, for poets age 50 & over at any stage in their career. THE APR/HONICKMAN FIRST BOOK PRIZE: In partnership with The Honickman Foundation, an annual prize for a first book of poetry, with an award of $3,000, an introduction by the judge, publication of the book, and distribution by Copper Canyon Press through Consortium. See page 35.…

Spring. The interior of molds. His chesta small mix of antiques & empty. A non-life.An invalid. Mother had always asked meto like an old room, find something one dayfor the past. Pleasure, so confusing. Used toverbalize fluid. In shock. The quiet was flyingon bereavement. Let go, realists. Facts lookedlike peanut butter. Town cornets in gloom.A wall against another wall as kitsch.This thick horn, raised on youth. A tombturned three books into a skylight.The outline of the city was mostly defeat.I heard the doorbell. I opened my door.You could call it reparation. Outside, another lamplight looked at me,then an odd past burned from within.A crab that had shed one shell found anotherold radio. An oboe concerto. The front pageof a homosexual letter claimed all reformswould simply take over a dog’s toenails.Mine,…

The Performance is a Ceremony: On LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs’ Village Coffee House Press, 2023 Motherhood has never been a simple matter, despite whatever societal messaging has tried to convince us through trends and lies. Extend that inherent complexity to childhood, particularly daughterhood, as well: our unspoken duties as children of women often amount to a heavy, life-long psychological burden. In LaTasha Diggs’ Village, poems relate the long-term impact of maternal shortcomings or limitations, fraught with shame, through experimentation with forms such as an artist’s statement, a last will & testament’s instructions for funeral arrangements, a proposal for a city monument, a performance script, map-making, and certainly more. Shame enters the room when someone we dearly love has disappointed us, sometimes over the course of decades, and it sits on our chest. Here,…

Disappearing A body of the feelingleavingMe behind Dearly we singWhere am I In the bleedingblind skyI don’t mind Because I felt you goIt was good to feel youfeel meLeaving, though Silent singing, youAre forever winningthough theSongs don’t know Through the willThe soul singsSay hello as eyes tellfarewellEverything Farewell everything, saysNo-one as I reach withinto singTo you You are everything, toMe, to no-one Too longToo trueI have gone Too true, my oneMy no-oneToo trueSo longMy everyone Thank you,my painFor comingagainWhen so oftenI turn awayOr complainAnd don’t saya word to youWho turnto me with timeAnd throughsuch lifeStay trueAnd remainOn my side When theyfall awayYou come throughMy painOf no otherWhen I myself am awayIn ideasOr DMsNotificationsDisappearedJust a nameIn a spaceWhere a selfWho could say “I am here!”“I am here”Would beWould feelWould breatheWould seeWould…

The Hotel Goldfish Would you like a goldfish? they askedat the hotel desk. A weekend pet?In my room, a globe of a bowl,one green frond, and a single fishwith diaphanous marigold fins. I went about my business on this globe,a widow at swim.Tired, I’d return to the tiny lifethat by day two was greeting me,swimming to the edge of the glass. I, too, come to the edge of my bowlwhen a light is turned on in my room.They wouldn’t even let me feed it —but what if housekeeping forgotits questing round black eyes, that made me think of lovers seeking —Pyramus and Thisbe speakingthrough chinks in a wall — althoughour wall was see-through, oneI fled my business to return to: a gold flicker in a roomdesigned in caramel and brownlike…

one of those silent men who hangs there as foghangs, the way you stood unmoving inside yourwaist-high rubber waders in the wide riverfor hours and hours staring at the bobber, which seemed to hangthere between the river bottom and heaven.knotty upper arms, knees’ scars alive like theglass jar full of worms; with wotan’s huge paunch; taught me to expertlypee in empty bottles, if need be, how to holdtwenty playing cards in one hand; but you swungup-down like weather. how much young water has taken the place ofthe old water since then; how many riversago did forests step forward from the darkness,listening, watching while somebody warmed his wet feet at the fire,unraveling two knots with stiffened fingers —as in the thermos-bottle-days, high morning,or in the deer-light, the wooden case always near…

Paris On Rue de Bretagne I stoodand I was a blond.I was alone that summerand many people and thingspassed through my mouth.Who are you? My therapistasked every Wednesday.I’m not sure Jonathan.I need a glass of rosé.A chain around my neck.To be hit even when I’ve beengood (and especially good).Who are you? I loved himfor saying it that way.He wanted to know more than I did.I put so many vodka-soaked olivesin me at Little Red Door.I told Luka I loved him.I told strangers moreof my life than I did my own family.How everything was falling apartthe way it does at the end of love.Which is a different griefthan death, my friend saidbut it’s lonely and not a streetyou want to live on for long.Whatever. I waved her off.I stood on Rue…

“in the criminal justice system, the people are representedby two separate yet equally important groups:the police who investigate crimeand the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders.these are their stories.”LAW & ORDER (1990–2010) police are not a groupwomen are not a groupchildren are a group11,000 13,000 childrenwho prosecute the offenders“it is not fair if you think of him as representative”“we do not think of him as representative”“we do not call him a ‘fucking creep’ because he is representative”every day, on and off the busonce a university made a mistakeuniversities are a groupsenators are a groupet tu, senators?in the criminal justice system the people are represented“we couldn’t have said it better ourselves”the university supports some military actionsthe university supports most military actionsmilitary actions are a groupthat the university supportsinvolving the bombingof other…

Walking through the woods, I did not expect to find a piano.The candles are battery-powered. They flick their fake lightat the stars who refuse to see them. The stone angel’scoating has peeled, her face an oil spill. Someone has lefta book inside the piano’s exposed hammers. The exposedhammers, mid-dance, type an invisible poem. I imaginethe sound of the piano is like a snail under a leaf.Begonias spring from the lid, thrusting their hot pinktoward filtered light. When you disappeared for three days,I was trapped in a song whose words I could not learn.Night a borrowed coat. The impending melody of your death,uncanny, inevitable. On the day you were born, I touchedmy two hands to your two cheeks. I must play this piano.I must play, over and over, the only chords…

On Generosity for Donald Revell The field recomposes itself, yellows and greens, the time it takesit takes, stems of black walnut fronds, thin as salmon-ribssoon-enough gone, I am writing this again, I thinkthe field is there, a slip of a finger, and it is thee,a siren creases the air, calls us to the emergencies — whenthis morning what I thought was gone, came through the airand paused before the veronica and sage, oh, there is hopein this field, as it composes into its moment of generosity,generous for memory, what steadily slips, the flowers that linethe path, what are they now, argue the composition of color,is it the hue, or is it the name we have for it, or fraying opticnerves, dulling, too much wine, or just the years of sun…

The Lighthouse I was lying on my side,shuffling the oceans with my feet. The same tropical weather crossed my back every few seconds,the same weather that has paintedall the wild tribes, the Canary coasts, and the equatorial zones on my bodywhile keeping their names… Where have you dragged the Arctic Ocean? A tuft of my hair is the black palm trees.My eyebrows, the path of the north wind.My hands are the sails in the Atlantic.My eyes, the lanterns.My lips, the trenches at the bottom of the sea… She – Wolf – Vulture – Tiger Do you see the snakes and chains on my shoulders?And had you seen the eagle’s nests in my two dark blind eyes?Have you seen the pigeons that have nested like a crown on my head?And the…

Each year “authenticity” ranks highOn the marketing trend forecastsIn a webinar, I am told that authenticityWill be more important than everIn the year of AI / Consumers will wantTo know we’re humanIn another webinar, we are taughtHow to integrate AI into our workflowThe featured speaker says,“I know a number of you will lose your jobs”In a sort of #sorrynotsorry wayIf our society were oriented toward careRather than exploitationIt would be fine for AI to take our jobs None of the webinars discuss the environmental cost of AIThis last Monday was the hottest day on record across the globeThe Washington Post headline reads, “AI is exhausting the power grid”Decommissioned nuclear reactors are coming back onlineThere are talks to reopen Three Mile IslandStates are beginning to scale back plans on clean energyAnd…

A day, a thousand days, and a hundred years The blue jay that flew through the open window, fluttered aboutthen vanished, leaving some wildness. She, too, wanted thatin her life and tried to find it in language. Sometimes we need to say words that make us feel,taste, or smell — corduroy, cinnamon, lilac. Sherecalls the smell of oregano in rain, an invisible mountain calling forth, and how the drifting stars seem unformedwords, or that there was always a hidden blank within each sentence that needed to be filled in? Sometimes it hurts, this listeningclose — the word No so filled with shadow,and Yes with its wide, slapping ocean. Time with its long-i-engine not wanting to run down. She knew it like the windor the haze of dust settling and resettling…

I stand on the bridge in Henley St & rehearse thewords.Back home, I take your hands in mine, comb the sadness that has rubbed off you, mine.Twilight, torn, dirty twinkling. I sit close to you on the bed, your naked bodyin the room’s crescent glow, a promise. I say: what in the world have I done to deserve you?I pick the tablets off my tongue & lay it at our feet. I have broken all the commandments. I havewalkedinto rooms searching the remnants of my vows. When the moon slouches outside our windowlike a camel at the edge of Sahara, I hear your face. I see your voice. I push against the air between us,its ghosts heavy with our breaths. I do not know how to be a good man,…

You remember dens leonis is Latinfor “lion’s tooth” after the weed’s serrated leaves, that the Britishcall the soft white ball they become dandelion clocks, that the Frenchcall them pissenlit for “piss in bed.” Your child names them sunshines.How does knowing this help? After days of rain, they reclaimthe lawn—first as the suns, later, as moons, & when they go toseed, as stars that catch on the dog’s haunches while shelopes around the yard chasing bees. How does this help?Your wife running after the dog, the dog chasing bees, they forman orrery around your daughter who holds a drooping bouquetof weeds. In a few more weeks, she will be able to erase theheads with her breath. Casey Thayer is the author of Rational Anthem, finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, and…

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that poetry is as much received as it is delivered by the poet. From the Oracle of Delphi to the shaman Maria Sabina, from Coleridge’s Aeolian Harp to Spicer’s radio, poets have been mediums as much as makers, and poems could be as much found as made. Why not think of ourselves as both rappers and DJ’s, throwing rhymes and mixing and remixing, making and remaking? The notion of “found poetry” certainly suffuses modern poetry, not least from Eliot’s cobbling together in “The Waste Land” — “these fragments I have shored against my ruins.” There’s so much language in the world that bends toward poetry. As William Stafford has said, “it is not quite prose that we speak.” Poetry is, at least in…

We’re always on the edges of the landscapes we belong to —fractured mint leaves and blackberry brambles turnover in their bounty on our roadsides.If on the way to the crumbling castle we smella fig tree’s honeyed drops fill with water, ease in their skin sacks,seeds expand to suck rocky soil’s moisture,we only know a part of their story. What would it taketo erase distance, merge for a moment into a fennel’s bloom,fragrance and resin clog our human mind enoughthat we slip out of its lineation?If on the way to the centuries old church in noon’s no shadow,we thirst for an olive tree’s pressure to pump fruit to form,if our hearts skip in our desiccation, what need have weto hold on to non-belief in the all-powerful outside of ourselves?Let sheep bells…

Those two quiet buffalo who stoodso close to the electric fence I couldalmost push my hand throughthe loose wires and touch them.How they refused to move or sawno point in moving, even as the trafficstreamed by on the interstateand the sun beat down on their heads.Chewing a tuft of alfalfa, bowed headto bowed head, flies crawling outof their ears. How easy it was to seebeauty in the dry fields beyond them.The way they possessed the circumferencecompletely, ignoring the Cesenasand cattle cars riddled with holes,the calico horse in the next field over.And how, in their large eyes fadedto lacquer, to something you paintover knots on a barn, I could seemy own face in the amber reflection,shiny and miniature, watching mewatching them watching me backthrough the audible hum of the line. Kai…