by David Lehman
LUCY WAINGER was born in New York City in 1997. She attended Stuyvesant High School and studies creative writing at Emory University.
Wainger writes: “The first draft of ‘Scheherazade.’ was a found haiku, culled from my third-period English class notes at the end of sophomore year. I rewrote it as a prose poem during third-period English my junior year, and again during third-period Acrylic Painting my senior year. After that it no longer felt like ‘my’ poem, which is how I knew it was finished.”
CRYSTAL WILLIAMS was born in 1970 in Detroit, Michigan. She is the author of four books of poems, most recently Detroit as Barn (Lost Horse Press, 2014). Her third book, Troubled Tongues, was chosen by Marilyn Nelson for the 2009 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize. A graduate of New York University (BA) and Cornell University (MFA), she is professor of English and associate vice president for strategic initiatives at Bates College. She has been on the faculty at Reed College and Columbia College Chicago. In 2012 she was appointed an Oregon Arts Commissioner, and currently serves on the boards of the Maine Humanities Council and the Barbara Deming/Money for Women Fund.
Of “Double Helix,” Williams writes: “I’ve become interested in the ways in which what we do to each other and how we are with each other are repeated and reflected across time and distance. After I read Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, I shared the book with a colleague and it became clear to me that his father’s experience as a Holocaust survivor and my father’s experience as a black man born in 1907 in Alabama were similar in seminal and instructive ways. I wanted to explore the personal choices both of these men made in their lives that made it possible for their children to feel deep affinity toward one another. I was also interested in finding a way—through form—to reflect the transmutation of meaning, what I imagine a double helix structure might look like in words, and to ultimately suggest that no matter those complications and differences, we humans are a single thing, of a single experience, complicated though it may be. This poem was one of two commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art for the Jacob Lawrence Migration Series exhibit. My enduring gratitude to Leah Dickerman, the Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, for her vision and leadership, and to Elizabeth Alexander for inviting me to participate in the project.”
CHRISTIAN WIMAN was born in West Texas in 1966. He is the author of five books of poetry, most recently a selected poems, Hammer Is the Prayer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), and two books of prose, Ambition and Survival (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) and My Bright Abyss (FSG, 2013). From 2003 to 2013 he was the editor of Poetry. He now lives in New Haven and teaches at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.
Wiman writes: “ ‘Prelude’ no longer has that title, though it remains a prelude to what follows, which is the book of poems I’m working on, which is propelled by, and punctuated with, other untitled fragments, all of which seem to be facets of some ultimate form that will, any day now, I feel quite sure, bring me everlasting peace.”
MONICA YOUN is the author of Blackacre (Graywolf Press, 2016), Ignatz (Four Way Books, 2010), and Barter (Graywolf Press, 2003). The daughter of Korean immigrants, she was born in 1971 and raised in Houston, Texas. A former lawyer, she teaches poetry at Princeton University and in the Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College MFA programs.
Youn writes: “In ‘Greenacre,’ I wanted the reader to occupy the estranged perspective of growing up Asian American in the South, where racial dynamics historically have functioned along a black/white binary. So the positionality of the speaker in the poem—both as not-black and as not-white—is crucial, racial identity as the coincidence of two competing negations, each coming into play at a different point. The central image—the two pale figures in the lake—acts as a fulcrum point for desire and revulsion, rejection and complicity, witness and culpability. And stylistically, this poem was quite a departure for me, veering close to narrative autobiography as I tried to trace the boundary between memory and the transformative imagination.”
C. DALE YOUNG was born in 1969 and grew up in the Caribbean and South Florida. He was educated at Boston College (BS 1991) and the University of Florida (MFA 1993, MD 1997). He is the author of the poetry collections The Day Underneath the Day (Northwestern University Press, 2001), The Second Person, Torn, and The Halo (Four Way Books, 2007, 2011, 2016) and a collection of linked short stories, The Affliction, forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2018. He practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, he lives in San Francisco with his spouse, biologist and classical music composer Jacob Bertrand.
Of “Precatio simplex,” Young writes: “I spend the vast majority of my time working as a radiation oncologist, a physician who treats cancer patients with radiation therapy. Early in 2016, my aunt, for whom this poem is written, began the very rapid decline seen with many who have pancreatic cancer. Her pain was intense and severe. Despite caring for patients with cancer every day, I was not prepared for the feelings of helplessness I felt when faced with my aunt in this way. I found myself walking along the beach near my home one day talking to myself, verbalizing my awful desire that she pass because it seemed better than the pain she could not manage. And then I felt immediate guilt. I’m a doctor, a cancer doctor, who works every day to help people survive and live, and here I was asking God to take my aunt. A few days later, she died. Roughly one month after her funeral, I discovered a voice-mail message my aunt left on my phone. I don’t know how I missed it, but I had. When I heard her voice on my phone, I burst into tears. All of it came back to me: her decline; her pain; the awfulness of it. The poem came within hours of my outburst.”
DEAN YOUNG was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, in 1955. He has published eleven books of poetry and a book of prose about poetry, The Art of Recklessness (Graywolf Press, 2010).
Of “Infinitives,” Young writes: “Me and a million other poets will feel the loss of Tomazˇ Sˇalamun for the rest of our lives. There is for me an indisputable truth to his work, a truth that can only be accessed through the sort of volatile, unsubjugated imagination that seems in very short supply in our myopic contemporary picture. That’s the work I want to try to do.”
KEVIN YOUNG is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, newly named a National Historic Landmark. Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016, Young is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose, most recently Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995–2015 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), longlisted for the National Book Award; Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets; Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Knopf, 2011); and Dear Darkness (Knopf, 2008). His collection Jelly Roll: A Blues (Knopf, 2003) was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His first nonfiction book, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf, 2012), won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award; it was also a New York Times Notable Book for 2012 and a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Young’s next nonfiction book, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, will be out from Graywolf in November 2017.
Young writes: “ ‘Money Road’ traces my driving the Delta with friend and Southern Foodways Alliance leader John T. Edge—we started out visiting Booker’s Place in Greenwood, Mississippi, for an oratorio the SFA had commissioned from me on Booker Wright, barkeep, activist, waiter, and local legend. Turns out Greenwood is where the term Black Power was popularized at a rally by Stokely Carmichael in 1966, just a few blocks from Booker’s. Nearly fifty years later one could still see why—not least of which because Emmett Till was lynched a few miles away in Money, with its cotton gins and train tracks, in 1955. Driving to Money that day, it was bitter cold, snow accomp
anying what became the pilgrimage recorded in the poem. The site of Till’s lynching feels both holy and haunted.
“I am writing this just days after the news revealed—at least to those who had bought the story—that the white woman at the center of the case, who had claimed Till whistled at her or called her baby, confessed that Till had in fact not done a thing. I am heartened that the poem had already said he ‘whistled or smiled / or did nothing,’ though I still wonder why had even well-meaning southern and American accounts decried the lynching but somehow believed the lynchers? Till’s murderers—who lied in court, got acquitted in no time by an all-white jury, then promptly sold their story without fear of reprisal—should not be believed. I think in some small way it’s because we cannot believe the whole of the truth—that evil does discriminate—much like, in more recent cases from Trayvon Martin to Michael Brown, some cling to some sense of black culpability in their own killings. The poem calls out to us to remember but also to revisit and revise what we think of the past—not in the ways of bluesman Robert Johnson’s unlikely gravesite along the Money Road, or the fake plantation there that proves almost as haunting—but in the reality of the now-crumbling storefront where Till was brought and then killed in the night for no earthly, or only earthly, reasons.”
MATTHEW ZAPRUDER was born in Washington, DC, in 1967. He is the author of four collections of poetry: Sun Bear (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon, 2010), The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon, 2006), and American Linden (Tupelo Press, 2002). He is cotranslator, with historian Radu Ioanid, of the Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu’s last collection, Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems (Coffee House Press, 2008). Zapruder’s most recent book is Why Poetry (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2017). An associate professor in the MFA program in creative writing at Saint Mary’s College of California, he is also editor-at-large at Wave Books, and from 2016 to 2017 served in the annually rotating position of editor of the poetry column for The New York Times Magazine. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife and son.
Zapruder writes: “I wrote ‘Poem for Vows’ on the occasion of the wedding of two friends, the composer Gabriel Kahane and Emma Tepfer. I was unable to attend so wanted to send along something that naturally conveyed my genuine feelings of happiness for them, along with my equally genuine (and, from personal experience, ever-growing) sense of the mysteries of marriage. It’s such a strange and ancient thing to say, at a certain point in time, that ‘I bring to you my entire past: not just my own, but whatever came before that made me. And also, I bring to you my future, everything that cannot yet be known.’ As I worked on the poem, I was surprised that I started writing about my imagined version of climate scientists trying to figure out how to save our planet. I saw them looking at miniature storms. And then as I wrote the last lines, I discovered I believe that the deep act of faith two people bring to a union might, in some elusive yet essential way, be related to what we will need in order to rescue our species from its path toward destruction.”
MAGAZINES WHERE THE POEMS WERE FIRST PUBLISHED
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Academy of American Poets, Poem-a-Day, ed. Alex Dimitrov. www.poets.org
AGNI, poetry eds. Sumita Chakraborty and Lynne Potts. www.bu.edu/agni
The American Poetry Review, eds. David Bonanno and Elizabeth Scanlon. 320 S. Broad St., Hamilton #313, Philadelphia, PA 19102. www.aprweb.org
The American Scholar, poetry ed. Langdon Hammer. www.theamericanscholar.org
The Antioch Review, poetry ed. Judith Hall. P.O. Box 148, Yellow Springs, OH 45387. review.antiochcollege.org/antioch-review-home-page
BuzzFeed, executive ed., culture Saeed Jones. www.buzzfeed.com/reader
Callaloo, ed. Charles Henry Rowell. www.callaloo.tamu.edu
Cave Wall, eds. Rhett Iseman Trull and Jeff Trull. www.cavewallpress.com
Cherry Tree, ed. Jehanne Dubrow. www.washcoll.edu/centers/lithouse/cherry-tree
The Collagist, poetry ed. Marielle Prince. www.thecollagist.com
Denver Quarterly, poetry ed. Bin Ramke. www.du.edu/denverquarterly
Fifth Wednesday, eds. James Ballowe, Nina Corwin, and Susan Azar Porterfield. www.fifthwednesdayjournal.com
The Georgia Review, ed. Stephen Corey. Main Library, Room 706A, 320 S. Jackson St., University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602-9009. www.thegeorgiareview.com
Harper’s, ed. James Marcus. www.harpers.org
Harvard Review, poetry ed. Major Jackson. Lamont Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138. www.harvardreview.fas.harvard.edu
The Hopkins Review, ed. David Yezzi. www.hopkinsreview.jhu.edu
jubilat, eds. Kevin González and Caryl Pagel; executive ed. Emily Pettit. www.jubilat.org/jubilat/
The Kenyon Review, poetry ed. David Baker. www.kenyonreview.org
The Massachusetts Review, poetry eds. Ellen Doré Watson and Deborah Gorlin. Photo Lab 309, 211 Hicks Way, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003. www.massreview.org/
Mississippi Review, editor-in-chief Steve Barthelme. www.mississippireview.com
The Nation. www.thenation.com
New England Review, poetry ed. Rick Barot. www.nereview.com
New Ohio Review, poetry ed. Jill Rosser. English Dept. 360 Ellis Hall, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701. www.ohio.edu/nor
The New Yorker, poetry ed. Paul Muldoon. www.newyorker.com
The Paris Review, poetry ed. Robyn Creswell. 544 W. 27th St., New York, NY 10001. www.theparisreview.org
Ploughshares, poetry ed. John Skoyles. www.pshares.org
Plume, editor-in-chief Daniel Lawless. www.plumepoetry.com
Poetry, ed. Don Share. www.poetryfoundation.org
Prairie Schooner, editor-in-chief Kwame Dawes; poetry eds. Arden Eli Hill and Rebecca Macijeski. 123 Andrews Hall, Lincoln, NE 68588-0334. www.prairieschooner.unl.edu
Raritan, editor-in-chief Jackson Lears. 31 Mine St., New Brunswick, NJ 08901. www.raritanquarterly.rutgers.edu
Salmagundi, eds. Robert Boyers and Peg Boyers. Skidmore College, 815 N. Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866. www.skidmore.edu/salmagundi
The Sewanee Review, poetry ed. Robert Walker. www.thesewaneereview.com
The Southern Review, poetry ed. Jessica Faust. 338 Johnston Hall, Baton Rouge, LA 70803. www.thesouthernreview.org
Southwest Review, editor-in-chief Greg Brownderville. www.smu.edu/SouthwestReview
storySouth, poetry ed. Luke Johnson. www.storysouth.com
The Sun, ed. Sy Safransky. 107 North Roberson St., Chapel Hill, NC 27516. www.thesunmagazine.org
The Threepenny Review, ed. Wendy Lesser. www.threepennyreview.com
Virginia Quarterly Review. www.vqronline.org
Waxwing, poetry eds. Justin Bigos and W. Todd Kaneko. www.waxwingmag.org
The Yale Review, ed. J. D. McClatchy. Yale University, P.O. Box 208243, New Haven, CT 06520-8243. www.yalereview.yale.edu
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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The series editor thanks Mark Bibbins for his invaluable assistance. Warm thanks go also to Ron Horning, Stacey Harwood, Thomas Moody, and Keri Smith; to Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu of Writers’ Representatives; and to Ashley Gilliam, David Stanford Burr, Daniel Cuddy, Erich Hobbing, and Jessica Yu at Scribner.
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.
Dan Albergotti, “Weapons Discharge Report” from storySouth. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
John Ashbery, “Commotion of the Birds” from Commotion of the Birds. © 2016 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Ecco/HarperCollins. Also appeared in Harper’s.
Mary Jo Bang, “Admission” from The Paris Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
David Barber, “On a Shaker Admonition” from The American Scholar. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Dan Be
achy-Quick, “Apophatic” from Harvard Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Bruce Bond, “Homage to a Painter of Small Things” from Raritan. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
John Brehm, “Intrigue in the Trees” from The Sun. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Jericho Brown, “Bullet Points” from BuzzFeed. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Nickole Brown, “The Dead” from Cave Wall. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Cyrus Cassells, “Elegy with a Gold Cradle” from AGNI. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Isaac Cates, “Fidelity and the Dead Singer” from The American Scholar. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Allison Cobb, “I Forgive You” from After We All Died. © 2016 by Allison Cobb. Reprinted by permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Ahsahta Press. Also appeared in Denver Quarterly.
Leonard Cohen, “Steer Your Way” from The New Yorker. Reprinted by permission of the estate of Leonard Cohen.
Michael Collier, “A Wild Tom Turkey” from Ploughshares. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Billy Collins, “The Present” from New Ohio Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Carl Dennis, “Two Lives” from The New Yorker. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Claudia Emerson, “Spontaneous Remission” from The Southern Review. Reprinted by permission of the estate of Claudia Emerson.
David Feinstein, “Kaddish” from jubilat. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Carolyn Forché, “The Boatman” from Poetry. Reprinted by permission of the poet.