by David Lehman
ARTHUR SZE was born in New York City in 1950. He has published ten books of poetry, including Sight Lines (2019), Compass Rose (2014), and The Ginkgo Light (2009), all from Copper Canyon Press. A professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts, he lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Sze writes: “ ‘The White Orchard’ is situated outside our house in Santa Fe and moves through space and time. The structure of the poem follows an invented form: each line picks up a word, or words, from the previous line, and a word from the last line is picked up in the title, so the motion of the poem embodies line and circle.”
NATASHA TRETHEWEY was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966. She is the author of five collections of poetry: Domestic Work (2000), Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002), Native Guard (2006)—for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize—Thrall (2012), and, most recently, Monument: Poems New and Selected (2018). A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she served two terms as the nineteenth Poet Laureate of the United States (2012–2014) and was named a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2019. She is Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. She was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2017.
OCEAN VUONG was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1988. He is the author of the debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019). His poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds won the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and teaches in the MFA program at UMass Amherst.
DAVID WOJAHN was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1953. His most recent books are the poetry collection For the Scribe, which appeared from the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2017, and From the Valley of Making: Essays on Contemporary Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2015). He teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and in the MFA program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Of “Still Life: Stevens’s Wallet on a Key West Hotel Dresser,” Wojahn writes: “I love the poetry of Wallace Stevens, but its art-for-art’s-sake grandiosity appalls me. His verse has little sense of social consciousness and tells us next to nothing about his domestic life; he famously said that ‘money is a kind of poetry.’ I wanted to write a poem that both praised and condemned Stevens. To do so I tried to imagine the contents of his wallet, and I placed his wallet on a hotel dresser in Key West, Florida, his annual vacation spot, where he would go to escape his wife, his daughter, and his job as an insurance executive. It was a place where he could drink and make bets on the greyhound races. But even Stevens couldn’t escape the real world entirely.
“The Bonus Army, comprised of destitute World War I veterans, marched on Herbert Hoover’s Washington in 1932, asking for compensation for their war service. They never received it. General Douglas MacArthur, whose troops teargassed and dispersed the Bonus Army, killing several of its members in the process, saw to that.”
KEVIN YOUNG was born in 1970. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and nonfiction, most recently Brown: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018) and Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press, 2017), both New York Times Notable Books. Bunk won the Anisfield-Wolf Prize in Nonfiction. His other books include Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995–2015 (Knopf, 2016) and Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014), which won the Lenore Marshall Prize for poetry from the Academy of American Poets. Young, who was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2011, has edited eight other collections, including The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010. Named University Distinguished Professor at Emory University, Young was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. He is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the poetry editor of The New Yorker.
Young writes: “The note accompanying the poem’s first appearance still stands: ‘Hive’ is the final poem in my new book Brown—a collection that takes up boyhood and brownness, moving through Kansas and the South, from James Brown to John Brown to the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case that transformed American life. Indeed, life hums here, in this boy remembered or imagined, the poem offering a kind of winged benediction—a song that summons suffering, but does not succumb, I hope. Readers might be interested to know that up until the last moment, I considered cutting the poem from my book—from fears of its being too benedictory—but now I see that it was almost too harrowing yet hopeful. I’m glad I kept it.”
MAGAZINES WHERE THE POEMS WERE FIRST PUBLISHED
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The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, eds. Dawn Lundy Martin (February), Tracy K. Smith (April), Matthew Shenoda (May), Rigoberto González (September), and Ross Gay (October). www.poets.org
AGNI, poetry eds. Sumita Chakraborty and Lynne Potts. www.agnionline.bu.edu
The American Poetry Review, ed. Elizabeth Scanlon. www.aprweb.org
The American Scholar, poetry ed. Langdon Hammer. www.theamericanscholar.org
Asheville Poetry Review, eds. Keith Flynn and Luke Hankins. www.ashevillepoetryreview.com
Asian American Literary Review, editors-in-chief Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis and Gerald Maa. www.aalrmag.org
The Believer, poetry ed. Jericho Brown. www.believermag.com
Black Renaissance Noire, ed. Quincy Troupe. www.nyubrn.org
The Brooklyn Rail, poetry ed. Anselm Berrigan. www.brooklynrail.org
The Cincinnati Review, poetry ed. Rebecca Lindenberg. www.cincinnatireview.com
The Common, poetry ed. John Hennessy. www.thecommononline.org
Fifth Wednesday, www.fifthwednesdayjournal.com
Five Points, eds. David Bottoms, Megan Sexton, and Beth Gylys. www.fivepoints.gsu.edu
Freeman’s, ed. John Freeman. www.freemansbiannual.com
Green Mountains Review, poetry ed. Elizabeth Powell. www.greenmountainsreview.com
Gulf Coast, poetry eds. Michelle Orsi, Theodora Bishop, and Devereux Fortuna. www.gulfcoastmag.org
Harper’s, poetry ed. Ben Lerner. www.harpers.org
Harvard Review, poetry ed. Major Jackson. www.harvardreview.org
The Hopkins Review, ed. David Yezzi. www.hopkinsreview.jhu.edu
The Iowa Review, poetry ed. Izzy Casey. www.iowareview.org
The Kenyon Review, poetry ed. David Baker. www.kenyonreview.org
Love’s Executive Order, ed. Matthew Lippman. www.lovesexecutiveorder.com
Massachusetts Review, poetry eds. Ellen Doré Watson and Deborah Gorlin. www.massreview.org
The Nation, poetry eds. Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith. www.thenation.com
New England Review, poetry ed. Rick Barot. www.nereview.com
The New Republic, poetry ed. Cathy Park Hong. www.newrepublic.com
New Letters, editor-in-chief Robert Stewart. www.newletters.org
The New Yorker, poetry ed. Kevin Young. www.newyorker.com
The Paris Review, ed. Emily Nemens, advisory ed. Robyn Creswell, guest poetry ed. Shane McCrae. www.theparisreview.org
Ploughshares, poetry ed. John Skoyles. www.pshares.org
Poetry Daily, editorial director Peter Streckfus. www.poems.com
Prairie Schooner, editor-in-chief Kwame Dawes. www.prairieschooner.unl.edu
The Rumpus, poetry eds. Cortney Lamar Charleston, Carolina Ebeid, and Molly Spencer. www.therumpus.net
Salamander, poetry ed. Valerie Duff-Strautmann. www.salamandermag.org
Salmagundi, editor-in-chief Robert Boyers, executive ed. Peg Boyers. www.salmagundi.skidmore.edu
The Seventh Wave, poetry ed. Christina Shideler. www.theseventhwave.co
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 Southampton Review, poetry ed. Cornelius Eady. thesouthamptonreview.com
STAT®REC, publisher John Reed. www.statorec.com
SWWIM, eds. Jen Karetnick and Catherine Espos
ito Prescott. www.swwim.org
The Threepenny Review, ed. Wendy Lesser. www.threepennyreview.com
Time, www.time.com
Times Literary Supplement, poetry ed. Alan Jenkins. www.the-tls.co.uk
Valley Voices, ed. John Zheng. www.libguides.mvsu.edu/valleyvoices/valley-voices
Virginia Quarterly Review, poetry ed. Gregory Pardlo. www.vqronline.org
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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The series editor thanks Mark Bibbins for his invaluable assistance. Warm thanks go also to Victoria Chang, Amy Gerstler, Stacey Harwood, Terrance Hayes, Didi Jackson, Thomas Moody, Natasha Trethewey, and Virginia Valenzuela; to Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu of Writers’ Representatives; and to Ashley Gilliam, David Stanford Burr, Dan Cuddy, Erich Hobbing, and Rosie Mahorter at Scribner. The poetry editors of the magazines that were our sources deserve our applause—they are the secret heroes of contemporary poetry. Major Jackson is indebted to Ryan Conroy and Anna Gibson for their help.
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.
Dilruba Ahmed, “Phase One” from Asian American Literary Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Rosa Alcalá, “You & the Raw Bullets” from Poem-a-Day. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Margaret Atwood, “Update on Werewolves” from Freeman’s. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Catherine Barnett, “Central Park” from Human Hours. © 2018 by Catherine Barnett. Reprinted by permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press. Also appeared in The American Poetry Review.
Joshua Bennett, “America Will Be” from The Nation. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Fleda Brown, “Afternoons at the Lake” from The Southern Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Sumita Chakraborty, “Essay on Joy” from The Rumpus. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Victoria Chang, “Six Obits” from The Kenyon Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Chen Chen, “I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party” from Poem-a-Day. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Leonard Cohen, “Drank a Lot” from The Flame: Poems, Notebooks, Lyrics, Drawings. © 2018 by Old Ideas LLC. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Also appeared in The New Yorker.
Laura Cronk, “Like a Cat” from STAT®REC. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Kate Daniels, “Metaphor-less” from Five Points. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Carl Dennis, “Armed Neighbor” from New Letters. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Toi Derricotte, “An apology to the reader” from Prairie Schooner. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Thomas Devaney, “Brilliant Corners” from The Brooklyn Rail. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Natalie Diaz, “Skin-Light” from Poem-a-Day. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Joanne Dominique Dwyer, “Decline in the Adoration of Jack-in-the-Pulpits” from The Kenyon Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Martín Espada, “I Now Pronounce You Dead” from The Massachusetts Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Nausheen Eusuf, “The Analytic Hour” from The American Scholar. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Vievee Francis, “Canzone in Blue, Then Bluer” from Asheville Poetry Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Gabriela Garcia, “Guantanamera” from The Cincinnati Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Amy Gerstler, “Update” from Ploughshares. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Camille Guthrie, “Virgil, Hey” from The New Republic. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Yona Harvey, “Dark and Lovely After Take-Off (A Future)” from Poem-a-Day. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Robert Hass, “Dancing” from The American Poetry Review and Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence (Beacon Press, 2017). Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Terrance Hayes, “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin” from American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. © 2018 by Terrance Hayes. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House. Also appeared in Harvard Review.
Juan Felipe Herrera, “Roll Under the Waves” from Love’s Executive Order. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Edward Hirsch, “Stranger by Night” from The Kenyon Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Jane Hirshfield, “Ledger” from Times Literary Supplement. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
James Hoch, “Sunflowers” from The American Poetry Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Bob Holman, “All Praise Cecil Taylor” from Black Renaissance Noire. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Garrett Hongo, “The Bathers, Cassis” from The Kenyon Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Ishion Hutchinson, “Sympathy of a Clear Day” from Freeman’s. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Didi Jackson, “The Burning Bush” from New England Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Major Jackson, “In Memory of Derek Alton Walcott” from The Paris Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Ilya Kaminsky, “from ‘Last Will and Testament’ ” from The Paris Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Ruth Ellen Kocher, “We May No Longer Consider the End” from Poem-a-Day. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Deborah Landau, “Soft Targets” from Soft Targets. © 2019 by Deborah Landau. Reprinted by permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Copper Canyon Press. Also appeared in The American Poetry Review.
Quraysh Ali Lansana, “Higher Calling” from Gulf Coast. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Li-Young Lee, “The Undressing” from The American Poetry Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
David Lehman, “It Could Happen to You” from The New Yorker. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Ada Limón, “Cannibal Woman” from The Carrying. © 2018 by Ada Limón. Reprinted by permission of Milkweed Editions. Also appeared in SWWIM.
Rebecca Lindenberg, “A Brief History of the Future Apocalypse” from Southern Indiana Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Nabila Lovelace, “The S in ‘I Loves You, Porgy’ ” from Poem-a-Day. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Clarence Major, “Hair” from The New Yorker. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Gail Mazur, “At Land’s End” from Salamander. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Shane McCrae, “The President Visits the Storm” from The Gilded Auction Block. © 2019 by Shane McCrae. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Also appeared in The Iowa Review.
Jeffrey McDaniel, “Bio from a Parallel World” from The Southampton Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Campbell McGrath, “Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool/The Founding of Brasilia (1950)” from Salmagundi. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Ange Mlinko, “Sleepwalking in Venice” from The Paris Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Kamilah Aisha Moon, “Fannie Lou Hamer” from Poem-a-Day. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Andrew Motion, “The Last of England” from The American Scholar. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Paul Muldoon, “Aubade” from The New Yorker. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
John Murillo, “On Confessionalism” from The Common. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Naomi Shihab Nye, “You Are Your Own State Department” from Fifth Wednesday. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Sharon Olds, “Rasputin Aria” from The Southampton Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Michael Palmer, “Nord-Sud” from Harper’s. Reprinted by pe
rmission of the poet.
Morgan Parker, “The Black Saint & The Sinner Lady & The Dead & The Truth” from Harper’s. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Willie Perdomo, “Head Crack Head Crack” from The Crazy Bunch. © 2019 by Willie Perdomo. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House. Also appeared in Green Mountains Review.
Carl Phillips, “Star Map with Action Figures” from Virginia Quarterly Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Ishmael Reed, “Just Rollin’ Along” from Black Renaissance Noire. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Paisley Rekdal, “Four Marys” from AGNI. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Sonia Sanchez, “Belly, Buttocks, and Straight Spines” from Black Renaissance Noire and Valley Voices. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Nicole Santalucia, “#MeToo” from The Seventh Wave. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Philip Schultz, “The Women’s March” from Luxury. © 2018 by Philip Schultz. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Co. Also appeared in The Southern Review.
Lloyd Schwartz, “Vermeer’s Pearl” from Harvard Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Alan Shapiro, “Encore” from The Threepenny Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Jane Shore, “Who Knows One” from The New Yorker. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Tracy K. Smith, “The Greatest Personal Privation” from Wade in the Water. © 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. Reprinted by permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press. Also appeared in The Believer.
A. E. Stallings, “Harm’s Way” from The Hopkins Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Arthur Sze, “The White Orchard” from The Kenyon Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Natasha Trethewey, “Duty” from Monument: Poems New and Selected. © 2018 by Natasha Trethewey. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Also appeared in Time.
Ocean Vuong, “Partly True Poem Reflected in a Mirror” from Freeman’s. Reprinted by permission of the poet.