The Best American Poetry 2021 Read online

  Tran writes: “I thought suffering made me special. It doesn’t. I learned this writing ‘Copernicus’ forty-five minutes before the class for which I had to assemble a new poem weekly. All I assumed I knew fell away as I typed that opening question, as I realized how misinformed I’d been, my whole life, about my life. Negative capability, then, to me, was the ability to hold opposing truths at once. It became, because of this poem, the ability to annul myself, my received ideas and investments, to arrive at half-knowledge. A poem is a path to knowledge, even if the knowledge is that there’s none—none I can live with, none I can be certain about. And I’m grateful to my teachers, Carl Phillips and Mary Jo Bang, in whose class this poem was written, for the education that makes all my poems, and my life, possible.”

  PHUONG T. VUONG, born in Huế, Vietnam, in 1987, has been awarded fellowships from Tin House, VONA/Voices, and Kearny Street Workshop’s Interdisciplinary Writers Lab. She has publications in or forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Asian American Writers’ Workshop: The Margins. Her debut poetry collection The House I Inherit was released by Finishing Line Press in 2019. Hailing from Oakland, by way of Vietnam, Phuong is pursuing her PhD in literature at the University of California, San Diego, situated on unceded Kumeyaay land, where she researches Asian American feminism and communes with the Pacific, probably with tea on hand.

  Of “The Beginning of the Beginning,” Vuong writes: “This poem is for Valeria and Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and so many others who risk their lives simply to live.”

  JOHN SIBLEY WILLIAMS was born in Wilmington, Massachusetts, in 1978. He is the author of five collections, most recently As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize, forthcoming). John has won the Wabash Prize for poetry, Philip Booth Award, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He is the editor of The Inflectionist Review and founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series.

  Of “The Dead Just Need to Be Seen. Not Forgiven.,” Sibley writes: “The often-violent collision of family history, privilege, and how our ghosts continue to linger and influence us motivated me to write this narrative poem about the most basic form of acceptance: recognizing our impotence to change the past. I’ve long been haunted by Shakespeare’s line, ‘The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children.’ Is it true that burden, guilt, and responsibility migrate through blood lines? What should one do when encountering the spirit of a dead relative whose perspective and actions were aggressively different than one’s own? I have no answers here, only questions which lead to other questions.”

  L. ASH WILLIAMS was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1985. She was Host Committee Chair for the 2016 Women of the World Poetry Slam (WOWPs) and was a member of the 2013 louderARTS National Poetry Slam team. L. Ash has most recently been featured at Bowery Poetry, SupaDupaFresh, and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Her work has been published by the American Public Media (The Slowdown podcast, 2020).

  Of “Red Wine Spills,” Williams writes: “I wrote this poem because a typically benign experience became a stand-out moment in my day. Spills happen often, but there was something about this one—the ‘of course’ moment when I knocked the glass over; the wave of negative self-thought that rolled in once it happened; the utter relief I felt once the stain disappeared. My attachment to the moment was alarming. This piece helped me explore what I was feeling and gave me a way to move through it.”

  SHELLEY WONG was born in Long Beach, California, in 1980. Her debut full-length collection, As She Appears (YesYes Books, 2022), won the 2019 Pamet River Prize. She has received fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and the Vermont Studio Center. An affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts, she lives in San Francisco.

  Of “How to Live in Southern California,” Wong writes: “This braided poem was a departure and led me to write more poems about California as a place, environment, and space for meditating on my family’s history. Shout-out to my mother’s caution, my father’s love for Fleetwood Mac, my sister’s LA savvy, the off-price Givenchy sunglasses I wore during high school for an Audrey Hepburn glow. To Frank Ocean for being himself and born in Long Beach. In using a braided form, I wanted to resist detachment and America’s denial. In SoCal, you can become numb in that clear, blinding light, losing your sense of reality with so much visual distraction and a strange sense of seasonless time. And similarly, one often feels helpless against global warming and attempts to write about it.

  “As a result of anti-Asian immigration laws that endured until 1965, most Asian Americans of my generation are second generation, so it comes as a surprise to people that I am fourth generation. I reference this history to speak to the bravery and vulnerability of my eight great-grandparents who persevered through the Chinese Exclusion and Page Acts, and, to quote Ronald Takaki, insist on ‘a larger memory of America’s past.’ The poem took on greater resonance in 2020 with another president promoting anti-Asian hate and violence and the largest wildfire season in California history. As of January 2021, the National Drought Mitigation Center reports that 100 percent of California is abnormally dry, 95 percent is experiencing moderate drought, 74 percent severe drought, 34 percent extreme drought, and 1 percent exceptional drought.”

  JOHN YAU was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1950. His most recent books of poetry are Bijoux in the Dark (Letter Machine Editions, 2018) and Genghis Chan on Drums (Omnidawn, 2021). In 2020, MadHat published Foreign Sounds or Sounds Foreign, a selection of his reviews and essays. He is the 2018 recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize. A cofounder of the online magazine Hyperallergic Weekend, where his reviews appear regularly, he teaches at Mason Gross School of the Arts and lives in Manhattan.

  Yau writes: “I wrote ‘Overnight’ in memory of the poet Paul Violi. In his poems, Paul often worked in arcane forms as well as invented his own, including ones that mimicked a glossary, an index, and an errata sheet. The form I used is a pantoum, which is written in four-line stanzas, with each line in the stanza repeated twice in a strict order. In ‘Overnight,’ I divided the four-line stanza into two-line stanzas. I wanted to call further attention to the repetitions, as well as discover what happened as the lines changed position in the pairing. I felt that writing in this form, which is half-invented, honored Paul’s love of poetic forms, as well as got at his humor and my powerlessness to change the situation.”

  MONICA YOUN was born In Berkeley, California, in 1971, and was raised in Houston, Texas. She is the author of Blackacre (Graywolf Press, 2016), Ignatz (Four Way Books, 2010), and Barter (Graywolf Press, 2003).

  Of “Caution,” Youn writes: “This poem is part of a series titled ‘Deracinations: Seven Sonigrams.’ Many of the key words of the poems are ‘sonigrams’ of the word ‘deracinations’—that is, they contain the sounds or letters of the source word. I created the term ‘sonigram’ because I wanted a form that was more fluid than the anagram—more of a sonic landscape than a strict mathematical permutation. ‘Deracinations’ is a subtle-sounding word, Latinate, made up of commonplace sounds—for me, this mirrored the everyday effects of deracination, which are often barely perceptible but, nonetheless, omnipresent.”

  KEVIN YOUNG was born in 1970. He is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, including Stones (Knopf, 2021), where “Dog Tags” also appears. He is the editor of nine other collections, most recently African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America, 2020), named one of the best books of 2020 by The New York Times, Esquire, The Atlantic, The Chicago Tribune, Good Morning America, and O, The Oprah Magazine. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the American Society of Arts and Letters, Young was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2011. He was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020. He is the poetry editor of The New Yorker and the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American Histo
ry & Culture in Washington, D.C.

  Young writes: “ ‘Dog Tags’ is one of the chief reasons for Stones to exist. Visiting the two cemeteries in Louisiana that hold most of my dead is a ritual I had just undertaken when this poem took place. Visiting those centuries-old resting places meant seeing names familiar and lost, and trying to conjure up those who I knew and grew up with, including my cousin whose story underpins the poem. I was struck not only by the pain of her passing too young, but also its odd resemblance to myth—and the ways that poems try to make myth out of life. Or at least that’s the Black and blues approach that draws me again and again: naming pain, and plainly, in order to move artfully past it. Looking at it now, I think the poem was wise to give my mother the last words.”

  MAGAZINES WHERE THE POEMS WERE FIRST PUBLISHED

  The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, guest eds. Mahogany L. Browne, Dana Levin, January Gill O’Neil, Roger Reeves. www.poets.org

  Alaska Quarterly Review, ed. Ronald Spatz. www.aqreview.org

  The American Poetry Review, ed. Elizabeth Scanlon. www.aprweb.org

  American Poets, www.poets.org

  The American Scholar, poetry ed. Langdon Hammer. www.theamericanscholar.org

  The Art Section, editor-in-chief Deanna Sirlin. www.theartsection.com

  The Atlantic, poetry ed. David Barber. www.theatlantic.com

  The Believer, poetry ed. Jericho Brown. www.believermag.com

  Bennington Review, ed. Michael Dumanis. www.benningtonreview.org

  The Brooklyn Rail, poetry ed. Anselm Berrigan. www.brooklynrail.org

  The Common, poetry ed. John Hennessy. www.thecommononline.org

  Five Points, ed. Megan Sexton. www.fivepoints.gsu.edu

  Freeman’s, ed. John Freeman. www.freemansbiannual.com

  Green Mountains Review, poetry ed. Elizabeth A. I. Powell. www.greenmountainsreview.com

  Hambone, ed. Nathaniel Mackey. www.fromasecretlocation.com/hambone/

  The Kenyon Review, poetry ed. David Baker. www.kenyonreview.org

  Literary Hub, editor-in-chief Jonny Diamond. www.lithub.com

  The Nation, poetry ed. Kaveh Akbar. www.thenation.com

  New England Review, poetry ed. Rick Barot. www.nereview.com

  New Ohio Review, ed. David Wanczyk. www.newohioreview.org

  The New York Review of Books, executive ed. Jana Prikryl. www.nybooks.com

  The New York Times, www.nytimes.com

  The New Yorker, poetry ed. Kevin Young. www.newyorker.com

  Orion Magazine, poetry ed. Camille T. Dungy. www.orionmagazine.org

  The Paris Review, poetry ed. Vijay Seshadri. www.theparisreview.org

  Pigeon Pages, poetry ed. Madeleine Mori. www.pigeonpagesnyc.com

  Ploughshares, poetry ed. John Skoyles. www.pshares.org

  Poetry, eds. Fred Sasaki, Lindsay Garbutt, and Holly Amos. www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine

  The Southampton Review, poetry ed. Cornelius Eady. www.thesouthamptonreview.com

  Southern Indiana Review, poetry eds. Emily Skaja and Marcus Wicker. www.usi.edu/sir

  The Southern Review, poetry ed. Jessica Faust. www.thesouthernreview.org

  The Threepenny Review, ed. Wendy Lesser. www.threepennyreview.com

  World Literature Today, Black Voices feature ed. Mahtem Shiferraw. www.worldliteraturetoday.org

  The Yale Review, ed. Meghan O’Rourke. www.yalereview.yale.edu

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The series editor thanks Mark Bibbins for his invaluable assistance. Warm thanks go also to Angela Ball, Marc Cohen, Amy Gerstler, Stacey Harwood, Major Jackson, Jamie Katz, Mary Jo Salter, and Terence Winch; to Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu of Writers’ Representatives; and to Kathy Belden, David Stanford Burr, Daniel Cuddy, Erich Hobbing, and Rosie Mahorter at Scribner. The poetry editors of the magazines that were our sources deserve applause; they are the secret heroes of contemporary poetry.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made of the magazines in which these poems first appeared and the magazine editors who selected them. A sincere attempt has been made to locate all copyright holders. Unless otherwise noted, copyright to the poems is held by the individual poets.

  Rosa Alcalá, “The Pyramid Scheme” from Green Mountains Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Lauren K. Alleyne, “Divination” from Orion Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Jabari Asim, “Some Call It God” from Poem-a-Day. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Joshua Bennett, “Benediction” from Literary Hub. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Destiny O. Birdsong, “love poem that ends at popeyes” from Negotiations. © 2020 by Destiny O. Birdsong. Reprinted by permission of Tin House Books. Also appeared in The Kenyon Review.

  Susan Briante, “Further Exercises” from Defacing the Monument. © 2020 by Susan Briante. Reprinted by permission of Noemi Press. Also appeared in The Brooklyn Rail.

  Jericho Brown, “Work” from The Art Section. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Christopher Buckley, “After Tu Fu” from Five Points. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Victoria Chang, “Marfa, Texas” from New England Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Chen Chen, “The School of Eternities” from Ploughshares. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Su Cho, “Abecedarian for ESL in West Lafayette, Indiana” from New England Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Ama Codjoe, “After the Apocalypse” from The Yale Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Henri Cole, “Gross National Unhappiness” from Blizzard. © 2020 by Henri Cole. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Also appeared in The American Scholar.

  Billy Collins, “On the Deaths of Friends” from Whale Day. © 2020 by Billy Collins. Reprinted by permission of Random House. Also appeared in The Paris Review.

  Adam O. Davis, “Interstate Highway System” from The Believer. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Kwame Dawes, “Before the Riot” from World Literature Today. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Toi Derricotte, “The Great Beauty” from The New Yorker. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Jay Deshpande, “A Child’s Guide to Grasses” from New England Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Natalie Diaz, “lake-loop” from Poem-a-Day. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Alex Dimitrov, “Love” from Love and Other Poems. © 2021 by Alex Dimitrov. Reprinted by permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Copper Canyon Press. Also appeared in The American Poetry Review.

  Rita Dove, “Naji, 14. Philadelphia.” from The Paris Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Camille T. Dungy, “This’ll hurt me more” from Literary Hub. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Louise Erdrich, “Stone Love” from Freeman’s. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Kathy Fagan, “Conqueror” from The Kenyon Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Chanda Feldman, “They Ran and Flew from You” from The Southern Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Nikky Finney, “I Feel Good” from The Atlantic. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Louise Glück “Night School” from The Threepenny Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Nancy Miller Gomez, “Tilt-A-Whirl” from New Ohio Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Jorie Graham, “I Won’t Live Long” from Runaway. © 2020 by Jorie Graham. Reprinted by permission of Ecco/HarperCollins. Also appeared in The New Yorker.

  Rachel Eliza Griffiths, “Hunger” from Seeing the Body. © 2020 by Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Co. Also appeared in The Paris Review.

  francine j. harris, “Sonata in F Minor, K. 183: Allegro” from Here Is the Sweet Hand. © 2020 by francine j. harris. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Also appeared in The New York Review of Books. />
  Terrance Hayes, “George Floyd” from The New Yorker. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Edward Hirsch, “Waste Management” from Five Points. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Ishion Hutchinson, “David” from The New York Review of Books. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Didi Jackson, “Two Mule Deer” from The Kenyon Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Major Jackson, “Double Major” from The Yale Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Amaud Jamaul Johnson, “So Much for America” from The Southern Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Yusef Komunyakaa, “Wheelchair” from The Paris Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Dana Levin, “Immigrant Song” from The Nation. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Ada Limón, “The End of Poetry” from The New Yorker. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  James Longenbach, “In the Village” from Forever. © 2021 by James Longenbach. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Co. Also appeared in The American Poetry Review.

  Warren C. Longmire, “Meditations on a Photograph of Historic Rail Women” from The American Poetry Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Emily Lee Luan, “When My Sorrow Was Born” from New Ohio Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Dora Malech, “All the Stops” from The Southampton Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Sally Wen Mao, “Playing Dead” from The Kenyon Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Francisco Márquez, “Provincetown” from The Common. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

  Hannah Marshall, “This Is a Love Poem to Trees” from New Ohio Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.