by David Lehman
Of “So Much for America,” Johnson writes: “The last time I was handcuffed, I lived in Washington, DC. I was walking home from the post office, and a patrol car cut me off on the sidewalk. Someone had robbed a convenience store a few blocks away. One of the police officers almost jumped, Starsky and Hutch style, over the hood to approach me. I don’t remember being afraid, but I felt cold. This was routine. I felt absent from my body, like I was looking down at myself, or watching a film. They threw me in the back of a car, then in a lineup of ‘suspects’ on the street in front of a bank near Dupont Circle. I didn’t cry until the detective called me a liar. I had so many eyes on me. I just stood there waiting. I think I’m still waiting.”
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1947. His most recent collection, Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2021. He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2003. He recently retired from teaching in the creative writing program at New York University.
Komunyakaa writes: “ ‘Wheelchair’ is a poem that splits in halves. The first sentence divides into four tercets: After my stroke on January 7, 2018, for weeks I was wheeled to therapy sessions; then I began wheeling myself. For one who loved to walk great distances, to endure physical tasks, I was grateful for the wheelchair—but also ready to arm myself with a cane or walker. The second sentence was almost given to me. I remember my maternal grandmother, Mary Washington, telling me about her mother who had rheumatism so extreme that her legs curled under her, but she would sit in her wheelchair and work in her garden for hours. I never knew my great-grandma, but I can still hear Mama Mary telling me the details. Perhaps we must also be good listeners.”
DANA LEVIN was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1965 and grew up in the Mojave Desert. She is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Banana Palace (Copper Canyon Press, 2016) and Sky Burial (Copper Canyon, 2011), which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” Levin is a grateful recipient of many fellowships and awards, including those from the Rona Jaffe, Whiting, and Guggenheim Foundations. She serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in Saint Louis. Copper Canyon will publish her fifth book, Now Do You Know Where You Are, in 2022.
Of “Immigrant Song,” Levin writes: “More than fifteen years ago, the poem arrived as a foreigner. While it offered an origin story of sorts for my maternal grandparents, their children, and myself as strangers in America, I did not understand why the poem had come when it did: in terms of subject and style, it was unlike anything else I was working on. I put it aside and forgot about it. Then a few years ago, while trawling for material, I found it in a file called ‘The Abandoned’—and was surprised to find it had other poems, recent ones, to talk to: they spoke the same language, and circled the same subjects: inclusion, exclusion, prejudice, identity, choice. What is it to be an outsider, both in the nation and in the family, in the world and in the mind?”
ADA LIMÓN was born in 1976 in Sonoma, California. She is the author of five books of poetry, including The Carrying (Milkweed, 2018), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her fourth book, Bright Dead Things, was published by Milkweed in 2015.
Of “The End of Poetry” Limón writes: “When the pandemic began, there was so much silence and anxiety that I found myself unable to read and write. I was very aware of the way language fails us, how poetry fails us, even when it saves us, too. Poems and their subjects felt almost pointless against the great grief of the world. This poem came out of that surrender. I had given up on words and then, of course, they came and brought me back to life.”
JAMES LONGENBACH was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1959. A poet and literary critic, he is the author most recently of the poetry collections Forever (W. W. Norton, 2021) and Earthling (Norton, 2017). His books of criticism include The Lyric Now (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and How Poems Get Made (Norton, 2018). The recipient of awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation, he is Joseph Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester. He has also taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Oxford University, Princeton University, and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
Of “In the Village,” Longenbach writes: “As a teenager, I assembled a copy of a seventeenth-century Flemish harpsichord, the parts milled by Zuckermann Harpsichords in the seaside village of Stonington, Connecticut. I then read the poems of James Merrill, who lived in that village until his death in 1995. Recently, ‘In the Village’ came to me while my wife, Joanna Scott, and I were unexpectedly living for a few months in Merrill’s house in Stonington. We loved the dust of snow, which was fake, laid down for a movie being filmed there. We loved the people of the village, and every day we lived in James Merrill’s library: here were the books of our youth, frozen in time, as nothing else was. Assembling this poem about the village, I found myself thinking about its people and, perhaps most of all, about those books, about how thrilling it was to touch them again.”
WARREN C. LONGMIRE was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1982. He has released three chapbooks: Ripped Winters (Seventh Tangent, 2006), Do.Until.True. (Two Pens and Lint, 2012) and the Wyoming default (Moonstone Press, 2018). His first full-length collection is Hooptee (Radiator Press, 2021).
Of “Meditations on a Photograph of Historic Rail Women,” Longmire writes: “The original version of this poem was made within a writing workshop run by Sonia Sanchez during her reign as the first poet laureate of Philadelphia. It was the third day of the workshop, each feeling very loose and as exuberant as the poet herself. From a box she pulled a postcard with a blank back and a small caption I can’t remember and passed it around, noting how historic the scene of four Black women doing men’s work should feel in our hands. My mind couldn’t leave how different the women all looked, how I didn’t know any of what brought them to that photo op or what happened after. When speaking of Black folk, I always feel we are cheated in how disconnected we are made from our individuality, even and especially when we are installed as heroes. This logic puzzle of a poem speaks to that.”
EMILY LEE LUAN was born in 1992 and raised in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. She is the author of I Watch the Boughs (2021), selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A 2020 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, she holds an MFA in poetry from Rutgers University in Newark.
Of “When My Sorrow Was Born,” Luan writes: “I light up when I find a poem that insists on the explicit naming of ‘my sorrow’ or ‘my sadness.’ Writing those phrases into a poem can be both gratifying and difficult—simultaneously working against the traditional, apolitical sensibility of ‘not telling’ and confronting the bald head of your sadness. In Khalil Gibran’s poem of the same name, the speaker’s sorrow is anthropomorphized and embodied. I love his repetition of and almost absurd insistence on naming Sorrow; the ‘and’ that begins each line a mirror of grief that appears again and again and again. I began writing after this poem as an exercise in walking with the emotion I most often approach as object. In Gibran’s version, the speaker’s Sorrow dies and he is left alone. I’m not sure my Sorrow is dead yet, or if our Sorrows ever leave us.”
DORA MALECH was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1981, and lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is on the faculty of The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of the poetry collections Flourish (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020), Stet (Princeton University Press, 2018), Say So (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), and Shore Ordered Ocean (The Waywiser Press, 2009). Eris Press (Urtext Ltd.) published Soundings (a selected volume of poems and artwork) in the UK in 2019, and Tupelo Press published a chapbook of her poetry titled Time Trying in Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic in 2020. She has received an Amy Clampitt Residency Award, a Mary Sawyers Baker Prize, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, and a r
esidency fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.
Of “All the Stops,” Malech writes: “This poem belongs not to the storied sweep of American road trip literature, but to the less-sung start-and-stop of the daily commute. It was ‘written’ first in my mind as a quotidian collection of recurring observations, thoughts, memories, and feelings that began to organize themselves into a map-to-nowhere, or rather, an idiosyncratic map of the interchanges and cul-de-sacs of my mind. Folks familiar with University Parkway in Baltimore might recognize the ‘THIS IS YOUR SIGNAL’ sign; it’s intended to stop absent-minded drivers (and T-bone collisions) at the first of two close traffic lights, but how many of us have idled beneath it and tried to believe it was telling us (à la Rilke) to change our lives? For me, themes of obedience and disobedience cohered at the point of revision—that process that often tells me what has actually been on my mind. And I had to fact-check the final simile with my husband, a film and media studies scholar; I loved the idea of red shapes appearing ‘evergreen’ on a film negative, but would the era of highly flammable nitrate stock have overlapped with the era of color? His verdict was yes, but the overlap would have been brief. All the poem needed was the possibility, so the figure remained.”
SALLY WEN MAO was born in Wuhan, China, in 1987, and was raised in northern California. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019), and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). She has received an NEA fellowship and was recently a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington at the George Washington University, and a Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute. Her work was selected for The Best American Poetry 2013. She is a Kundiman fellow in both fiction and poetry.
Of “Playing Dead,” Mao writes: “I wrote this poem in 2017, during the autumn rise of #MeToo. At the time, I was grappling with and re-examining aspects of my past. How as I came of age, I internalized and ‘accepted’ a lot of harmful cultural and societal norms around consent and the treatment of women because apparently that’s ‘just how it was.’ The norms were not a problem, I was the problem for feeling the way I did. I thought back to a situation in college that had caused me a lot of emotional harm, and how there were no resources or support and so I felt compelled to just accept it, and that my feelings didn’t matter. Ten years later, I went back and reevaluated that situation and realized that I never gave consent, and my surprise and shock were elements of a violation that I did not know or identify as a violation. The image of the possum is so compelling to me because the possum’s fight-or-flight mode parallels the experience of survivors, especially women, who pretend to be dead just to get through or bear something. Often this pretending fails. Metaphors serve as imperfect conduits to a difficult experience or emotion, and in this case, I was leaning into that metaphor.”
FRANCISCO MÁRQUEZ was born in Miami, Florida, in 1994 and raised in Maracaibo, Venezuela. He has received fellowships from the Poetry Project, Tin House, and the Fine Arts Work Center. He is assistant web editor at Poets & Writers and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Of “Provincetown,” Márquez writes: “This poem was written during a long, cold winter on a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. As part of my routine, and as a way of getting out of my own head, I allowed myself to take long walks down the coast every day, often making it to the breakwater, and letting the moving light and landscape fill my head instead. Once I sat down to write, I arranged the observations into a coherent structure and, with very little editing, almost like a gift, the poem came together rather mysteriously. I think the poem served as a kind of deep study of the various themes I had written into at the time, and years before, regarding home, exile, immigration, community, and my relationship to nature. I often feel unsure or unsatisfied with most of what I write, but this poem was one of the few times it felt different, as if some clear, familiar voice had reached its way through.”
HANNAH MARSHALL was born in Winfield, Illinois, in 1987, and grew up in the Driftless Area of the Midwest. She currently lives in south-central Illinois, where she works as the advising editor for Greenville University’s literary journal, The Scriblerus, and as the poetry editor for Converse College’s literary journal, South 85. She received her MFA in creative writing from Converse College.
Of “This Is a Love Poem to Trees,” Marshall writes: “Trees are one of my obsessions. I take pictures of bark and leaves to identify each species. I run my hands over their rough skin, press my ear to their trunks, listen for their voices. I walk my neighborhood cataloguing my companions through each season. The trees, of course, don’t love me back, but they tolerate my caresses and grow with imperceptible slowness. When I wrote ‘This Is a Love Poem to Trees,’ I was at a residency in South Carolina. I wandered the campus, missing my family and reveling in the lush myrtle and oak and magnolia. Even as I found comfort in the trees, they were for me a symbol of longing. I can mark my homes in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois by tallying the trees that were my friends in these places. I have done so in this poem, tracing my human and ecological love stories through time and space.”
SHANE MCCRAE was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1975. His most recent books are Sometimes I Never Suffered and The Gilded Auction Block, both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In 2021, the Cleveland State University Poetry Center released an expanded edition of his first book, Mule, with an introduction by Victoria Chang. McCrae has received an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Whiting Writer’s Award. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.
McCrae writes: “Although ‘The Hastily Assembled Angel on Care and Vitality’ was selected from The Yale Review, where it was published in 2020—for which I will forever be grateful—it was first published in The Baffler in 2019, for which I will also forever be grateful. I screwed up, and as a result the poem was accidentally published twice, and I want to acknowledge The Baffler for publishing it in the first place. As for the content of the poem, the hastily assembled angel is forever finding himself immobilized by his imperfect understanding of his role as an observer, and, because of this, though all he does, and all he’s supposed to do, is observe, imperfectly observing.”
Writer, educator, and activist LUPE MENDEZ was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1976. He is the author of the poetry collection Why I Am Like Tequila (Willow Books, 2019), winner of the 2019 John A. Robertson award for best first book of poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. He lives in Houston, where he dedicates energy as the founder of Tintero Projects in addition to working as a public school educator while currently serving as Poets & Writers’ Literary Outreach Coordinator for Houston.
Of “There Is Only You,” Mendez writes: “My daughter, Luz María Magdalena Mendez Rosario, was born in the month of May and when I finally got to bring my parents up from Galveston to Houston to have them see her for the first time, they were all smiles and laughs. My mother must have given her about ten blessings and my dad kept insisting that I take care of my wife and not go out and have a party to celebrate the birth (it was something he did, that all Mexican families used to do, making mothers work extra hard). I distinctly remember as we were leaving so I could take them back down to their car my father called home to Jalisco—to La Pareja, the rancho where my family is from, and he tells my grandfather that he no longer has plans to move us back home to Mexico. He told him, ‘My future is here, with this baby. We have our legacy.’ As the first Mendez to be born in the U.S., I was taken aback. I always felt like being in between two worlds. But in my father’s eyes, I am as immigrant as he is, as Mexican as he and my daughter is something even more. She is all Dominican. She is all Mexican. She is all things.”
FRANCINE MERASTY is a Nehithaw Iskwew (Woodland Cree Woman) from Opawikoschikanek (Pelican Narrows), a reserve in Northern Saskatchewan. She is a member of the Peter Ballantyne Cree Natio
n, a fluent Cree speaker, and is a lawyer and executive assistant at the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations in Saskatchewan. Francine’s lived experience as an Indigenous woman from the Pelican Narrows reservation, her memories of the wilderness, her experiences as a residential school survivor, and her current work as a lawyer, all shape her perspective. She began writing poetry in the winter of 2017 while working as a statement taker and legal counsel for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. She won a 2019 Indigenous Voices Award. Her first publication, Iskotew Iskwew: Poetry of a Northern Rez Girl, was released by Bookland Press in 2021.
Of “Since Time Immemorial,” Merasty writes: “I was filling out my law school application in January, 2013, and one of the questions on the application was ‘How long has your family lived in Saskatchewan?’ Being literally indigenous to Northern Saskatchewan, I really had no idea what to write. As long as the trees? As long as the stars?
“My mind was then flooded with the memory of a traditional hoop dancing group I belonged to as a girl. The group leader who introduced us always began with the story of the dance, and how those measured steps had been taken since ‘time immemorial.’
“I looked up the meaning of that phrase in the dictionary: ‘a time so long ago that people have no record or knowledge of it.’ ”
YESENIA MONTILLA is an Afro-Latina poet & a daughter of immigrants. She received her MFA from Drew University in poetry & poetry in translation. She is a CantoMundo graduate and a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow. The Pink Box, her first collection, was published by Willow Books in 2015. Her second collection, Muse Found in a Colonized Body, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2022. She lives in Harlem, New York.