The Best American Poetry 2015

by David Lehman

  DEXTER L. BOOTH was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1986. He is the author of Scratching the Ghost (Graywolf Press, 2013), which won the 2012 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was selected by Major Jackson. His poems appear in Blackbird, The Southeast Review, Ostrich Review, Grist, Willow Springs, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California.

  Of “Prayer at 3 a.m.,” Booth writes: “Ultimately, our bodies fail us. Our voices fail us. Words fail us, too, but fortunately they hold up better and far longer than bodies do. Faith and hope (pick your brand: Religion, Humanity, Family . . . ) are intangible, yet they’re two of the most vital things we can possess as humans. Youth can be a type of blindness, and that blindness can be sacred.

  “Amendment: Everything is sacred. Everything is sacred. Even death.”

  CATHERINE BOWMAN was born on November 26, 1957, in El Paso, Texas. She is the author of 1-800-HOT-RIBS (Gibbs Smith, 1993), Rock Farm (Gibbs Smith, 1996), Notarikon (Four Way Books, 2006), The Plath Cabinet (Four Way Books, 2009), and Can I Finish, Please? (Four Way Books, 2016). She has edited Word of Mouth, Poems Featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. She lives on a farm in Bloomington, Indiana, and teaches at Indiana University.

  Bowman writes: “I was thinking about the word ‘makeshift,’ imagining what it means to ‘make do’ or ‘shift making’ with the tools at hand—the imagination—within states of loss, abandonment, exile, environmental destruction, oil spills, etc.—the makeshift father, the makeshift mother, the makeshift grave, the makeshift holy city. The first lines in the poem came out of seeing photos of shorebirds and waterfowl, the laughing gull and royal tern covered in oil following the Gulf oil disaster. In what ways is the imagination resilient, generative, and/or destructive? I guess that is what the chiastic structure revealed for me, though I am not really sure. I am intrigued by the image of a fire ladder. I was working on the poem and had written several lines and was feeling kind of stuck. I was thinking about the poem when I went to bed and hoped some solution would come up while sleeping. That night I had a dream in which a sideways wooden X appeared. That’s how the chiastic structure emerged. The poem ends with ‘string pieces for two’: music?—hopeful, I think.”

  RACHAEL BRIGGS was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1984, but has lived for the last eight years in Australia. She is an associate professor in philosophy at the University of Queensland, and a research associate at the Australian National University. Her first collection of poems, Free Logic, was published in 2013 by University of Queensland Press.

  Briggs writes: “ ‘in the hall of the ruby-throated warbler’ is a love poem. When I wrote it, I followed the sounds and the feelings, and let the ideas follow. It’s in Sapphic meter (or the English translation of Sapphic meter), which I feel is one of the most beautiful rhythmic devices I can command. Sapphic meter is also appropriate for a love poem addressed to a woman, by a woman. I’ve been writing Sapphic sonnets ever since a friend, commenting on another of my Sapphic love poems, complained that the last two lines weren’t pulling their weight. First I thought, ‘I can’t cut the second half of a stanza! That’s against the formal rules!’ Then I thought, ‘Says who?’ ”

  JERICHO BROWN has received a Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry. His first book, Please (New Issues, 2008), won the American Book Award, and his second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon, 2014), was named one of the best books of the year by Library Journal and the Academy of American Poets. He is an assistant professor in the creative writing program at Emory University in Atlanta.

  Brown writes: “Can a single poem be: surreal, personal, about a ‘we’ just as much as it is about an ‘I,’ political, and interested in pop culture and current events? I wrote ‘Homeland’ thinking about Henry Louis Gates and Barack Obama and what it means to be a very lonely citizen in a country that doesn’t want your citizenship.”

  RAFAEL CAMPO, MA, MD, DLitt, was born in Dover, New Jersey, in 1964, and teaches and practices internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is on the faculty of Lesley University’s creative writing MFA program. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Poetry Series award, and a Lambda Literary Award for his poetry. His third collection of poetry, Diva (Duke University Press, 2000), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Enemy (DUP, 2007) won the Sheila Motton Book Award from the New England Poetry Club. In 2009, he received the Nicholas E. Davies Memorial Scholar Award from the American College of Physicians, for outstanding humanism in medicine; he has also won the Hippocrates Open International Prize for original verse that addresses a medical theme. Alternative Medicine (DUP, 2013), his newest book, has recently been the subject of stories on PBS NewsHour and the CBC’s Sunday Edition radio show.

  Campo writes: “My intent in the poem was to reflect on the tension between ‘fact’ and ‘truth’ in the distinct kinds of stories we tell about ourselves when we are ill. As a physician, I am trained to value only the factual data pertaining to a patient’s disease: what the potassium level is, how many lymph nodes are enlarged on the CT scan, which antiretroviral medication causes what side effect. Yet the poet in me always yearns to understand the human truths of our experience of illness, such as what does it mean when we say ‘the pain is like a cold wind blowing on my face’ or ‘silence equals death.’ Too often in medicine, we doctors use our relentless focus on fact and our steely ‘medicalese’ as means of distancing ourselves from the people under our care, to make it easier for us to get through our endless work; I believe that the empathy that arises from a more truthful engagement with illness, one that embraces diverse ways of knowing about suffering and the richly metaphoric language those under our care use to describe it, can actually make us better healers. Thus when I saw the newspaper headline ‘Doctors Lie, May Hide Mistakes,’ I felt acutely the irony in how the physician’s usual dispassionate, don’t-tell-me-what-you-feel stance, which does contribute to poorer outcomes for patients, can also lead to misrepresenting the very facts we so slavishly pursue. The poem, then, becomes the indelible medium for more deeply wondering at when our bodies betray us, and things go terribly wrong; perhaps it is all the more necessary when there is no new analgesic that is more effective for the chronic pain, or the tumor is inoperable. I do not mean to say that fact and truth cannot coexist in addressing illness; on the contrary, they are utterly complementary, and the narrative of illness that entails both is the closest we can get to offering meaningful hope to the afflicted. In the end, it is our shared vulnerability, our imperfections and our frailty, our inability (no matter how much information we memorize or statistics we calculate) to escape our mortality, that makes us all human.”

  JULIE CARR was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1966. She is the author of six books of poetry, including 100 Notes on Violence (Ahsahta, 2010), Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines (Coffee House, 2010), RAG (Omnidawn, 2014), and Think Tank (Solid Objects, 2015). She is also the author of Surface Tension: Ruptural Time and the Poetics of Desire in Late Victorian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2013), and coeditor of Active Romanticism: The Radical Impulse in Nineteenth-Century and Contemporary Poetic Practice (Alabama UP, 2015). Her cotranslations of Apollinaire and contemporary French poet Leslie Kaplan have been published in Denver Quarterly and Kenyon Review, and a chapbook of selections from Kaplan’s Excess—The Factory has been released by Commune Editions. A 2011–2012 NEA fellow, she is an associate professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she teaches in the MFA creative writing program and the Intermedia Arts Writing and Performance PhD program. She regularly collaborates with the dance artist K. J. Holmes. She lives in Denver and helps to run Counterpath Press and Counterpath Gallery.

  Carr writes: “ ‘A fourteen-line poem on sex’ is
one of many fourteen-line poems I’ve been writing as interludes in a long project called Real Life: An Installation. They are an experiment in propulsion, disjunction, and radical enjambment. In this one, for the first and perhaps last time, I pun on my name. The portion of I-40, the ‘Music Highway,’ that runs from Nashville to Asheville passes through Knoxville and the foothills of the Crab Orchard Mountains. I probably ran out of gas near the Pigeon River Gorge. I hiked across the median, down a grassy slope, and across another highway to find a gas station. A kind gentleman drove me back to the car with a plastic jug of gas between my feet.”

  CHEN CHEN was born in Xiamen, China, in 1989. He received his MFA in poetry from Syracuse University in spring 2015. A Kundiman Fellow, he has published his work in Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, DIAGRAM, and Crab Orchard Review. He was a finalist for Narrative’s 30 Below Contest and won second place in the Joy Harjo Poetry Prizes from Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts. For more information, visit chenchenwrites.com.

  Of “for i will do/undo what was done/undone to me,” Chen writes: “I spent three years in Syracuse, New York, pursuing an MFA in poetry. It snowed a lot. I learned about lake effect and Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Snow Man’ and how to walk to campus without slipping and breaking an arm. People in the program said, ‘Don’t write a Syracuse snow poem’ and ‘You’re going to write a Syracuse snow poem eventually.’ This is the Syracuse snow poem I could not help writing. I’m not sure if it is an elegy or an ode. Either way, it is a shivery love letter to the weathers and mysteries of a place that has given me so much.”

  SUSANNA CHILDRESS was born in 1978 in La Mirada, California, and, after living overseas, grew up in the near-Appalachia of southern Indiana. She has also spent time in Austin, where she received a master’s from the University of Texas; Tallahassee, where she received a PhD from Florida State; Oklahoma City, where she received a husband; Valparaiso, Indiana, where she held a Lilly postdoctoral fellowship in the Arts and Humanities; and now Holland, Michigan, where she teaches creative writing at Hope College. She is the author of Jagged with Love (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005) and Entering the House of Awe (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2011). She is an associate editor of 32 Poems, works with the Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series, publishes short fiction and creative nonfiction, and constitutes, along with Joshua Banner, the music group Ordinary Neighbors, whose full-length debut, The Necessary Dark, is based on her writing.

  Of “Careful, I Just Won a Prize at the Fair,” Childress writes: “The date on the first draft of this poem, twice as long as the end result, indicates that I was six months pregnant with our second child, so I’m guessing that, between hyperemesis gravidarum (all-day morning sickness to the point of grave danger) and hypersomnia (a cousin to narcolepsy—untreatable during pregnancy), I inhabited generous grounds for my anger and exhaustion and pathos. Still, when I read the poem now, I sense a straddling: I had a foot in two hemispheres. Inside a marriage, a home, a womb: love does nothing and everything and nourishes and depletes and worms its way into grand moments as well as the frivolous and diurnal. How can we imagine love accomplishes anything. How can we go a full minute without it. What are we (each) in its cuffs if not barreling, broken, majestic.”

  YI-FEN CHOU is the pen name of Michael Derrick Hudson, who was born in Wabash, Indiana, in 1963. He currently lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he works for the Allen County Public Library in the Genealogy Center. A portfolio of five of his poems was recently named cowinner of the 2014 Manchester Poetry Prize. His poems have won The Madison Review 2009 Phyllis Smart Young Prize, River Styx 2009 International Poetry Contest, and the 2010 and 2013 New Ohio Review contests. In addition to Prairie Schooner, his poems have appeared in various journals, including Boulevard, Columbia, Fugue, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, New Letters, New Orleans Review, Northwest Review, Prick of the Spindle, Washington Square, and West Branch.

  He writes: “There is a very short answer for my use of a nom de plume: after a poem of mine has been rejected a multitude of times under my real name, I put Yi-Fen’s name on it and send it out again. As a strategy for ‘placing’ poems this has been quite successful for me. The poem in question, ‘The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve,’ was rejected under my real name forty (40) times before I sent it out as Yi-Fen Chou (I keep detailed submission records). As Yi-Fen the poem was rejected nine (9) times before Prairie Schooner took it. If indeed this is one of the best American poems of 2015, it took quite a bit of effort to get it into print, but I’m nothing if not persistent.

  “I realize that this isn’t a very ‘artistic’ explanation for using a pseudonym. Years ago I did briefly consider trying to make Yi-Fen into a ‘persona’ or ‘heteronym’ à la Fernando Pessoa, but nothing ever came of it.

  “ ‘The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve’ is made up of bungled or half-bungled history, botany, entomology, mythology, and theology. That engineers or scientists once insisted that bumblebees can’t really fly is false, according to Snopes.com. Years ago I read that some of the plants found growing on the ruins of the Colosseum in Rome are otherwise found only in Africa or the Near East, brought in with (and excreted by) the exotic animals brought to be slaughtered in the arena. This might be true, but even so it is more likely rhinoceroses or giraffes pooped the seeds, but tiger poop seemed more apt and funnier to me (I also had T. S. Eliot’s ‘Christ the tiger’ from ‘Gerontion’ vaguely in mind). ‘Jesus wept’ is the King James Bible verse everybody knows, since it is the shortest (John 11:35), and I kept it intact here. But I don’t think Poseidon ever had anything to do with Philomel, a myth I also filched from Eliot (who got her from Ovid, according to Wikipedia). The jellyfish I got from visits to Cocoa Beach, Florida, where they sometimes wash up by the score and I always worry about stepping on them.

  “The result I was hoping for with all this bungling (as much as poems have results) was to suggest Original Sin, or at least that echt-human feeling of being wrong most of the time. And how getting things wrong goes back a long, long time for us. I wasn’t trying to blame this mess on Eve.”

  ERICA DAWSON was born in Columbia, Maryland, in 1979. Her first collection of poems, Big-Eyed Afraid, won the 2006 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and was published by Waywiser Press in 2007. Measure Press published her second collection, The Small Blades Hurt, in 2014. Her work has appeared twice in The Best American Poetry. She is an assistant professor of English and writing at the University of Tampa.

  Of “Slow-Wave Sleep with a Fairy Tale,” Dawson writes: “One Sunday I picked up an old copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, read ‘Little Briar Rose’ three times, and remembered how, as a child, I put myself in princess’ shoes. I slept for a hundred years. I woke to a prince. As an adult, I saw myself as a new character in the story, but still regular Erica. Everything was magical except for me.

  “When I started the sonnet, the context of a dream made sense, especially a dream during slow-wave sleep where there’s no rapid eye movement but sometimes parasomnias like sleepwalking or night terrors. I liked the idea of a kind of unconscious agency—moving through a world you’re not quite part of as you’re crashing through it.

  “The other day I shaved Rapunzel’s head.”

  DANIELLE DETIBERUS was born in Connecticut in 1980. She has lived all along the East Coast of the United States—from Boston, Massachusetts, to Asheville, North Carolina, and a few places in between. She now lives and teaches in Charleston, South Carolina, where she serves as the program chair for the Poetry Society of South Carolina. Her work has appeared in Arts and Letters, The Southeast Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Tar River Poetry.

  Of “In a Black Tank Top,” DeTiberus writes: “In my manuscript, I write a lot about love—about its complexities, about how one can never fully know one’s beloved. On the day I wrote the first draft of this poem, I was thinking about how much desire propels and sustains a long-term relationship, which is mired in
the domestic, the banal. The body can have so much power over the mind, and the first time we’re truly aware of this is during puberty. High school, then, is a fiery experiment: a contained space with pulsing sparks, dreaming about and trying to ignite with one another. I wanted to marry that juvenile, twitterpated longing with a more mature, knowing voice. This poem makes me laugh—and blush; I think that it’s sexy precisely because it approaches sex from the perspective of someone who is just discovering her sexuality. It’s also, of course, cheeky because it’s a concrete poem. That idea occurred to me only after several drafts, and it felt like a nod to the days I’d dot my i’s with hearts. Shaping it into a visual poem was an attempt to re-create the immediacy of the gaze, which can be at once tender and dominant. My hope is that this poem looks back at the reader with a wink, like a lover, coy and unabashed.”