Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 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 23. 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 facing page.…

Imagine the seven years when Einsteinexamined patents. When Kafkahandled insurance.They once saw too deepinto the universe or humanity.Yet they were stuckin an office.Like me. Deliverables, as my manageremphasized it. Ownership, speed,other keywords AI generatedand he repeated. Which neuron cellsdo I have to store all that feedback?It hurts my human brainwith an impact. Still listening, looking outside,where people stand and pass by,minding their own business,in real-world motions. Yet I am stuck, here,discussing performance. All children in China once dreamt of becoming a scientist.All abacuses and pencils in Zhuazhou rituals.Not a single one of us dared our future selvesto “meet all expectations” by corporate metrics.Not a single one of us grabbed somethingthat people applauded fiercely, “This childis immeasurable! She will one day‘ perform at the next level’.” Note: Zhuazhou is a traditional…

Dear forehead opening to a peephole of thought, dearwarm palm on which the cube of ice does not melt. Dear hands criss-crossed by cuts of the paper-thin grassesyou have planted, dear sensation at the back of my neck,dear realization of equilibrium, dearirrational realization. Dear strata of elixirs whose properties contradicteach other and erasing one hundred perfect blistersfrom your lips, dear boxes of flooded books, dearweeping tree with furred red leaves. Dear neighbor who embellishes your surfaceswith scratchmarks, dear south veering west, dearmigrant sleeper, dear vestigial third set of teeth.Dear beloved of a maned and quixotic creature whoseprehensile paws guide your caresses. Dear deafnessbefore the sign of running water, dear benignbone islands, dear salve rubbed into the neck of a lover,dear arm of the Begin Anywhere tributary, dearimpervious to sedatives. Dear…

It Was Not Natural with June Jordan, after Alexis Pauline Gumbs Nothing was born like this. Nothing arose like this from the black dirt. Nothing was shaped like this by the hands of anyone who picked cotton, picked sunflowers, sowed the sweet sky. Nothing natural. We past all that, past that point on the forsaken map. We know what she bears. What scars of our natural, unnatural care. What not given by anything but us. This isn’t a story about the fall, no god in the rafters, nothing like that. Just we, what we made — She had been locked in. She had been alone for longer than she had been alive. She was red red red her head, if you could call it that, was bowed. Everything around her…

Today I dialed the number for the housewhere I grew up. I let it ring a long time though my parents won’t answer. They’vemoved. The ringing soothes me. Its rhythmic purring promises. A return. I have just stucka quarter into the slot of a payphone at the mall, heard the plink as it sinks to whereverit goes. Between my ear and shoulder I cradle the plastic receiver, still warm from the lastcaller’s ear. Girlfriends beside me wear tiny t-shirts, baggy pants, chokers. Chewgum madly as a skater flies illegally by on his board, a bird glides above ustoward the nest it’s built near the roof. A man on a ladderhunts it down. The ringing becomes the voice of my mother. HerHello, ready to go? back to the house where we’ll…

I am asleep when we hit the speed bump,south of Tulsa but north of Amarillo, waking to a polycarbonate marqueebehind a chain link fence: “JESUS SAID THIS BLOODS 4 U!”It is early winter. Asphalt cracks beneath our tires. It contractswith cold, exhaling the warmth of a summer we pretended would not end like this;on a long lonely road the shape of a fishhook. where a yellow line separates one journey fromanother so clearly that, even when it fades, you will stay in your laneand I will stay in mine. Jacqueline Goldfinger (she/they) is a poet, playwright and librettist. Their theatrical work has won the Yale Drama Prize, Smith Prize, Generations Award, and Opera America Discovery Award and produced internationally. Their poems have been published by Beyond Queer Words Poetry Anthology, The…

I. Shouldn’t have thrown away the boardwith a name scrawled across it in cursive,roughhewn against the wall of the walk-incloset. Should’ve saved the hand-madenails and the trim someone said, no matterhow much rot or lead paint covered them,all of it piled outside — the house besideitself — both will last through winter, we hope, one to burn and one to be buriedwithin. The genius of the house beneaththe southern-most point of land behindthe old barn marked only by its stonewall and the garbage that wasn’t truckedor burned away when the barn wood was:oil drum, standing screens, metal cartand one ski pole. I couldn’t say it to your face because you’d gone away(save for that time by the middayfire, but more on that later), so this houseand its need of repair…

1 I want to write poetry. 1 I want an audience to read my poetry. 2 The way that I write is grammatically erratic because it mimics the way that I think. Including sentence diagramming into my practice has transformed my writing into a clear path for the reader to follow. 3 I was recently advised that simplicity is sophistication. “It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works” (Pound). I fill pages with free-writing and from this work I will use one interesting sentence. 5 I do not know who my reader is, but I do know something about them. “Readers are smart. They want to participate and want the pleasure of putting two and two together themselves” (Moore, 186). As a poet…

1. There is, in Tess Gallagher’s latest book, Is, Is Not (2019) an epigraph from Russian poet Osip Mandelstam in which someone is said to have asked a poet what time it was. “What’s the time?” they asked him once. He answered, “Eternity.” To an ordinary question, the poet gives an extraordinary answer. Poetic answers, it seems, are neither predictable nor useful. It is true, a poem’s time is not five o’clock in the afternoon. A poem is not a waiting room. A poem’s time is not the time wherein one waits for a bus, a train, or a dental appointment. A poem’s time is eternity. But how would we who are eminently temporal, brief, transient, fleeting — how would we know? Many of us spend our lives as if…

Ode to My Burning You’re a campfire on the outskirts of Hell, the gas burneron Satan’s stove, the rigamarole of tinder and hatebursting from TV screens. O sister, what fire ragesin your furnace of tripe and gizzards, blood and ire?You’re singing in the choir of backseat drivers on the dirt roadto a juke joint in the woods, hopped up on red-eyewhiskey and Coke, looking for trouble, and guess who’s waitingfor you in his cheap suit, doffing a creased-brimmed hat,purring, “Hey, honey, wanna dance?” Oh, yeah, you’re crispas a deep-fried corn dog on the last day of the circuswhen the high flyers come down from the trapeze,and the clowns take off their noses, bury themin a dump by the radioactive lake, while you sleep with the lions,who have ditched their wigs…

We wish to express our gratitude to everyone who donated to the 2024-2025 Friends Campaign and our thanks to the following individuals for their particularl11 generous contributions. Benefactor Dana Asher Robin Becker * Margot Berg and Robert Epstein Estate of Helen Buttel Jonathan Katz William Kistler Terri E. Moreland Ethel Rackin Ava Seave Peter Waldor Bank of America Patron Veronica Abreu Helen W. Drutt English Judy Newman Alicia Ostriker Sponsor Linda Lee Alter Kenneth Boockvar David Grubin Werner Gundersheimer Elizabeth Jacobson Anne Marie Macari James McCorkle Timothy Schaffner Jeff Skinner William Stobb Supporter Andrew Anway Robert Ballard ** Bridget Barnes Ellen Bass Dennis Brennan Marianne E. Brown Deborah Burnham Ann Butchart Brian Cronwall Paul Cummins Hal Davis Carolyn Dille Jennifer Flannigan Bill Gothorpe Susan Grossman Jared Harel Hendrik and Nancy…

Life Lessons The animatronic theme-park dragoncaught itself on fire, and there’s probablya lesson in that somewhere. Like the fishwho promises you riches if you drop himback into his dark lake or the old manon the road who asks you what’s the one thingyou can put in his bucket to make it lighter?The rain doesn’t fall equally on every field.If yours is the house the tornado skips over,how do you look your neighbor in the eyewhen you pass him at the Waffle Housethe next morning? There has to be a rule.My mother taught me to store my rubber bootsupside down. She taught me how to lookat a tree and see every robin nestmissing from its branches. She triedto teach me to sit up straight, but Inever learned that one, or how…

How American At the end of the song, I’m alone.The silence succeeds along the lining of my waist. The room continues being crossed, spares methe need to dislodge any ounce of my nature. I’ve been here before. I’ll rinse the day to makeroom for more that profess to claim me. Who do I argue to be? I imagine the theorycould image itself into existence. The city licks the window closed.I sense the seasonal ache in my hands. Is it too late to admit I have given my life to desire?How American it is to die for something. I didn’t mean to be clumsy with my faith.Orchestra of nurses. Failed memory tests. The streets paved with the smell of rain.It’s all galloping back to me now. There was a spell the…

I’ve waked into the separatewilderness of age— Stanley Kunitz, Raccoon Journal Not many have done it—writing poems into old age. Thomas Hardy wrote well into his eighties. May Sarton published Coming into Eighty when she was 82 after recovering from a stroke, while Linda Pastan published her last collection at 90, the year before she died. Sophocles is said to have written his last play when he was ninety. But I don’t know of any poet quite like Stanley Kunitz, who published his Collected Poems at 95. When W.B. Yeats wrote “Why Should Not Old Men be Mad?” or called himself “a tattered coat upon a stick,” he was hardly old by today’s standards. He was just seventy-three when he died, an age when Kunitz was writing his most moving…

Sei Shōnagon lives in America. With her voice translated from classical Japanese into modern English, she sounds chummier and blunter; she is your gossipy next-door neighbor or a badass blogger: “A priest who gives a sermon should be handsome. After all, you’re most aware of the profundity of his teaching if you’re gazing at his face as he speaks”i (MM, 31). The familiarity of her voice is, of course, an illusion. There is a gap of over a thousand years between her time and ours, and we do not know her world, what ultimately shaped her views and opinions. When I make myself imagine what it is like to be one of those women who live at home, faithfully serving their husbands — women who have not a single exciting…

Tron becomes the Sun He runs through life and intoan early grave. Sure, it isn’tthe first time a Black boy,especially Black queer boy,especially Black being who cared lessabout sticking to a genderbranded on them by somebody elseleft us before 26. The Rapper WhoShall Not Be Named said We wasn’t sposed to make it past 25,so I should just clear my tearslike cache from browserswhen they malfunction, right? I will not martyr him since he can’task for that. I don’t remember himor anyone else who saw life as an endless stream,who slipped off a man-made cliff,ask to be a symbol. They prolly askedto smoke weed & be a 20-something seeingtheir struggles throughlike every pseudo-happy human.You know what I mean? If the Rapper Who Shall Not Be Namedrevised this lyric, it would…

I don’t want to answer the phone “What’s wrong?” but,I do. Every time. Everyone from workWas asking me about my work At the party, I told them,This is not inspired by the borscht beltLike my other work, this is more aboutWhat is missingWhat I didn’t imagineIt’s not easy to come up with examplesBecause Like Joan, I feel more capable doing “HitlerOn Ice” than taking on any of the anti-semitismI am feeling. Dollar tree sounds identical to idolatryThis is what my best friend’s mother-in-lawJudy is writing on FacebookHer friends are dyingSomeone might be googlingExactly what happened, like texting I really need Christmas this yearThe kind I heard about It’s a literal party next doorYou know what kind of family they are I told you but, you were doing your Hail MarysI…

Northampton, 2022 I lean on your shoulderthe evening light I lovefading from trunk to trunk * Almost fullmoon spillsacross your dreaming face * I close my eyesand there you area summer that isn’t ending * It’s all right you murmurand I believe youeven though you’re talking in your sleep Joy Ladin is the author of eleven poetry collections and three books of creative non-fiction, including recently published Family and Once Out of Nature: Selected Essays on the Transformation of Gender, National Jewish Book Award-winning The Book of Anna, and Lambda Literary Award finalists Transmigration, Impersonation, and The Soul of the Stranger. Her work is available at www.joyladin.com.…

Kickball Cowboy One day in third grade, I grew tired of being picked last for kickball, so I showed up to school in a pair of faux leather cowboy boots my grandfather rescued from a dumpster. It worked. I was picked first and on my first attempt, my pointy boot hit that red rubber ball dead center, doink, into the outfield, doink, into Trey’s face, doink, down the line. I scored six runs, leading to the annihilation of our opponents. If my teammates were strong enough, they would have carried me off the field. Alas, they, too, were only third graders, but they had their champion, and I had their love, at least until lunch, when my new-found fame would be usurped by the runny cheese of nacho day, but…