The Best American Poetry 2019

David Lehman, Major Jackson

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781982106577
• eBook ISBN: 9781982106584
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

The 2019 edition of The Best American Poetry—“one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets)—now guest edited by Major Jackson, award-winning poet and poetry editor of the Harvard Review.

Since 1988, The Best American Poetry has been the leading anthology of contemporary American poetry. The Washington Post said of the 2017 edition, “The poems...have a wonderful cohesion and flow, as if each contributes to a larger narrative about life today…While readers may question some of the selections—an annual sport with this series—most will find much that resonates, including the insightful author notes at the back of the anthology.”

The state of the world has inspired many to write poetry, and to read it—to share all the rage, beauty, and every other thing under the sun in the way that only poetry can. Now the foremost anthology of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Major Jackson, the poet and editor who, “makes poems that rumble and rock” (poet Dorianne Laux). This brilliant 2019 edition includes some of the year’s most defining, striking, and innovative poems and poets.

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES AND COMMENTS

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DILRUBA AHMED was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1973. Her book, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press, 2011), won the Bakeless Prize. A graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers, she has taught at Bryn Mawr College and in Chatham University’s low-residency MFA program.

Of “Phase One,” Ahmed writes: “After #45 was voted into office, I found myself grappling daily with a mix of very strong feelings: resentment, anger, what felt like hatred. Worse, my bitterness was not directed strictly toward some abstract or nameless entity, but also toward some individual people in my life. I knew I’d be unable to function with such terrible feelings, and yet I struggled to find a way beyond them. What kind of mind-set, I wondered, could grant one the perspective that transcends resentment and anger, and inches toward understanding, or even healing? A parental view, one of unconditional love? An effort to approach a godlike sense of distance, so far removed it might enable one to observe with what I imagined to be a mix of big-hearted forgiveness, maybe pity, or gentle reproach? Or simply detachment? Nothing I could envision felt authentic or even feasible to me.

“I found myself pondering what it takes to be truly empathetic, to have genuine compassion, to open oneself to understanding even under seemingly impossible circumstances. I grew interested in the notion of forgiveness, with self-forgiveness as a precursor to that. The idea of turning inward, as some kind of initial step, felt both genuine and viable. The notion that the understanding or forgiveness that we might extend to others must begin within began to resonate with me.

“While I’ve tried to funnel my strong feelings into action via local political movements, I don’t know that I’ve found effective ways to cope with my anger and bitterness, or whether healing and forgiveness are possible—or even warranted—in some scenarios. In the meantime, this poem happened. I owe a debt to Ross White for providing critical feedback on early versions of ‘Phase One.’ The ‘white curtain’ in the poem refers to ‘Try to Praise the Mutilated World’ by Adam Zagajewski.”

ROSA ALCALÁ was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1969, to Spanish immigrants. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently MyOTHER TONGUE (Futurepoem, 2017). As a translator she has focused on contemporary Latin American women poets living in the United States. She edited and cotranslated The New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña (Kelsey Street Press, 2018). She has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship and is a professor of creative writing in the University of Texas at El Paso’s Bilingual MFA Program, where she has taught since 2004.

Alcalá writes: “ ‘You & the Raw Bullets’ is part of a series in the second person that began as a way to speak to versions of who I had been as a younger woman. The poem began while I listened to someone on the radio talk about the importance of referring to the perpetrators of sexual harassment and assault, not just the victims—that sexual assault was actively committed, not just passively received. Thinking through this while the radio report played, I had a vision of a bullet, or bullets, which I called ‘raw,’ entering my mouth over and over again. These bullets were the many times my younger body had to accept and swallow subtle or outright violations and feelings of fear in public spaces: the grope on public transportation, the catcall on the street, a physical assault in a park. And all the bullets I’d swallowed over the course of my life were still lodged in my older body. This realization made me angry, not just for myself, but for all the others whose bodies—some of them targets for real bullets—must navigate daily all types of dangers normalized by a racist and patriarchal culture. It made me angry for my daughter, whom I had brought into this toxic world. The poem began to transform these feelings of personal desperation into something powerful: the recognition that my body in midlife was stronger than ever, and the possibility from there of collective action: What if we all took what we’ve swallowed and spit it back?”

MARGARET ATWOOD was born in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1939. Her latest book of short stories is Stone Mattress: Nine Tales (2014); her latest novel, The Heart Goes Last (2015). Of her many novels, The Blind Assassin won the Booker Prize in 2000; Alias Grace won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Montello in Italy; and The Handmaid’s Tale was adapted for the screen by Harold Pinter and became the basis of a critically acclaimed television series. The Door is her most recent volume of poetry (2007). Her most recent nonfiction books are Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008) and In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011). Atwood lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.

CATHERINE BARNETT was born in Washington, DC, in 1960. She is the author of three collections, Human Hours (winner of the 2018 Believer Book Award in Poetry and a New York Times “Best Poetry of 2018” selection), The Game of Boxes (James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets), and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced. She has won a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches in the creative writing program at NYU, is a Distinguished Lecturer at Hunter College, and lives in New York City, where she also works as an independent editor.

Of “Central Park,” Barnett writes: “I see I carried both Elizabeth Bishop (with a slight variation to the opening of her marvelous ‘Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance’) and Emily Dickinson (with her radical negations) into Central Park, where the benches seem flush with praise and lament. When I found out how expensive the benches are, and how few remain, my old kleptomaniac tendencies were aroused, along with an echo of Eliot’s (echoing Dante’s) ‘so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.’ I just saw the Bruce Nauman exhibition at MoMA and was moved by the way he subverts time and makes absence a presence (see his Venice Fountains). I love the way the benches in Central Park invite us to take the place of those who have disappeared, making our own inevitable disappearances all the more palpable and turning the benches into a common way station. Whether named for you or not, a bench is a humanizing form, allowing several people to sit together at the same time and take a rest of uncertain duration from clamor and uncertainty. In history, chairs were saved for the VIPs; benches were for all.”

JOSHUA BENNETT was born in New York, New York, in 1988. He is the author of The Sobbing School (Penguin Books, 2016), which was a National Poetry Series winner, as well as Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Harvard University Press, 2020), Owed (Penguin, 2020), and Spoken Word: A Cultural History, which is forthcoming from Knopf. In 2010, he delivered the commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College.

Bennett writes: “I wrote ‘America Will Be’ a little over a year ago, during a New York summer where my father and I would get breakfast at IHOP every other week. My father integrated his high school in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1966, and many of his most striking tales were about his time as a teenager in the Jim Crow South. He never made the experience sound all that heroic. Mostly, he described it as lonely, confusing. He talked about the difficulty of his schoolwork, and the forms of physical violence he had to navigate every day. He emphasized what it meant for him, as an individual human being, to spend his senior year in such an unforgiving, unfamiliar place; one that was, by design, meant to exclude him and the people he loved.

“The poem is my attempt to reflect this set of concerns, while also highlighting the astonishing fact of my father’s courage, and persistence, in the midst of what might appear to be an altogether unlivable situation. The situation is always inextricably linked to what James Baldwin and others have called the black condition: our perpetual state of emergency and emergence. In that vein, this is a work of celebration, repair, and reclamation. It is my assertion that my father’s irreducibly black America is a historical corrective, a present reality, and a vision for the future. It is a song for the myriad who are unheralded and nonetheless loved beyond measure.”

FLEDA BROWN was born in Columbia, Missouri, in 1944. The Woods Are on Fire, her new and selected poems, was chosen by Ted Kooser for the University of Nebraska poetry series in 2017. She has nine previous collections of poems. Her work has twice appeared in The Best American Poetry. Driving with Dvorák, her memoir, was published in 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, where she directed the Poets in the Schools program. She was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001 to 2007. She now lives with her husband, Jerry Beasley, in Traverse City, Michigan, and is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program in Tacoma, Washington.

Of “Afternoons at the Lake,” Brown writes: “I’m not a game player, except under duress. I am so glad to have gotten a poem, at least, out of hours of suffering through Monopoly. Oh, that’s not true. As often as I could, I’ve pawned off the chore on those who enjoyed it. It’s the sheer greed, even in fun, that makes me twitchy. The game’s orchestrated stages of wealth-gaining, with its nasty side effects. Midas with his literally hardened heart. And that iconic rich guy in the top hat, the God of the whole thing, who wins past wanting to win. The best antidote to that I know is Keats. Is poetry. Is standing on the end of the dock where there are no goals except remembering the lines of the poem.”

SUMITA CHAKRABORTY was born in Nyack, New York, in 1987 and raised in Massachusetts. She has received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prize from the Poetry Foundation. She teaches at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. “Essay on Joy” is from her first poetry collection, Arrow, which is forthcoming from Alice James Books in the United States and Carcanet Press in the United Kingdom in September 2020.

Of “Essay on Joy,” Chakraborty writes: “This poem is about the afterlives of acts that occur at the intersections of emotional and physical violence, especially in the context of domestic violence, especially during childhood. I wanted to think about the simultaneously ritualized and unpredictable nature of this kind of violence—which is why I hope the poem reads both as a cohesive and circular myth and as though its loops of thought sometimes jump with a verse-paragraph break into a strange new space—and I wanted to think about what kinds of affect scripts we write in the aftermath of such violence, for which I draw on autobiography and on Spinoza’s Ethics. Along the way the poem is invested in thinking through the relationship between embodied self-perception, physical exertion, appetites (for eros, for food, for danger, for pain), and labor. What kinds of bodily encounters follow a body’s encounter with these forms of violence? That’s one of the poem’s largest questions.

“The story of a large number of dead grackles falling from the sky in Boston—which is where I spent most of my life (although I didn’t live there when this happened)—is true, and remains unexplained. It is true, too, that one of their toes points backward.”

VICTORIA CHANG was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1970. Her new book of poems, OBIT, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Barbie Chang was published by Copper Canyon in 2017. The Boss (McSweeney’s, 2013) won a PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Other poetry books are Salvinia Molesta and Circle. Her children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, was illustrated by Marla Frazee and published by Beach Lane Books/Simon & Schuster in 2015 and was named a New York Times Notable Book. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches in Antioch’s low-residency MFA program.

Of “Six Obits,” Chang writes: “After my mom died in 2015 following a long illness (pulmonary fibrosis), I absolutely did not want to write about it or write elegies. One day on the radio, I learned about a documentary film called Obit about writers of obituaries. That word with the long O and the hard T rung and touched me. I sat at a stoplight thinking about how when someone dies, everything dies. I went home and over two weeks and in a state of frenzy (and deep sadness), wrote seventy-five of these OBIT poems. I meant their formal shape to resemble newspaper obits. The form helped both to constrain my sadness and expound upon it in new ways.”

CHEN CHEN was born in Xiamen, China, in 1989. He is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, which won the 2018 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. He teaches at Brandeis University.

Of “I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party,” Chen writes: “I wrote this poem after a conversation with Muriel Leung in which she asked what would happen if I imagined my parents having to make a bridge to me, instead of the other way around. For so long I’ve had to be the one reaching out to them, doing that draining work of educating them out of their homophobia. Also, I’ve realized how frustrated I am with movies and TV shows that depict the coming-out process as a onetime event, either immediately triumphant or tragic. I think usually the process is recursive, messy, the pains as well as the joys stranger than one might anticipate.”

LEONARD COHEN (1934–2016) was a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest civilian honor. The Jewish-Canadian singer, songwriter, poet, novelist, and painter was born in the Westmount area of Montreal. Brought up as an orthodox Jew, he was educated at McGill University, where he studied with Irving Layton and Louis Dudek. A member of the “Montreal School of Poets,” he published his first book of poems, Let Us Compare Mythologies, at the age of twenty-two. In 1967, Cohen moved to the United States to pursue a recording career. He wrote “Hallelujah,” “...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Dilruba Ahmed, “Phase One”
• Rosa Alcalá, “You & the Raw Bullets”
• Margaret Atwood, “Update on Werewolves”
• Catherine Barnett, “Central Park”
• Joshua Bennett, “America Will Be”
• Fleda Brown, “Afternoons at the Lake”
• Sumita Chakraborty, “Essay on Joy”
• Victoria Chang, “Six Obits”
• Chen Chen, “I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party”
• Leonard Cohen, “Drank a Lot”
• Laura Cronk, “Like a Cat”
• Kate Daniels, “Metaphor-less”
• Carl Dennis, “Armed Neighbor”
• Toi Derricotte, “An apology to the reader”
• Thomas Devaney, “Brilliant Corners”
• Natalie Diaz, “Skin-Light”
• Joanne Dominique Dwyer, “Decline in the Adoration of Jack-in-the-Pulpits”
• Martín Espada, “I Now Pronounce You Dead”
• Nausheen Eusuf, “The Analytic Hour”
• Vievee Francis, “Canzone in Blue, Then Bluer”
• Gabriela Garcia, “Guantanamera”
• Amy Gerstler, “Update”
• Camille Guthrie, “Virgil, Hey”
• Yona Harvey, “Dark and Lovely After Take-Off (A Future)”
• Robert Hass, “Dancing”
• Terrance Hayes, “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin”
• Juan Felipe Herrera, “Roll Under the Waves”
• Edward Hirsch, “Stranger by Night”
• Jane Hirshfield, “Ledger”
• James Hoch, “Sunflowers”
• Bob Holman, “All Praise Cecil Taylor”
• Garrett Hongo, “The Bathers, Cassis”
• Ishion Hutchinson, “Sympathy of a Clear Day”
• Didi Jackson, “The Burning Bush”
• Major Jackson, “In Memory of Derek Alton Walcott”
• Ilya Kaminsky, “from ‘Last Will and Testament’ ”
• Ruth Ellen Kocher, “We May No Longer Consider the End”
• Deborah Landau, “Soft Targets”
• Quraysh Ali Lansana, “Higher Calling”
• Li-Young Lee, “The Undressing”
• David Lehman, “It Could Happen to You”
• Ada Limón, “Cannibal Woman”
• Rebecca Lindenberg, “A Brief History of the Future Apocalypse”
• Nabila Lovelace, “The S in ‘I Loves You, Porgy’ ”
• Clarence Major, “Hair”
• Gail Mazur, “At Land’s End”
• Shane McCrae, “The President Visits the Storm”
• Jeffrey McDaniel, “Bio from a Parallel World”
• Campbell McGrath, “Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool/The Founding of Brasilia (1950)”
• Ange Mlinko, “Sleepwalking in Venice”
• Kamilah Aisha Moon, “Fannie Lou Hamer”
• Andrew Motion, “The Last of England”
• Paul Muldoon, “Aubade”
• John Murillo, “On Confessionalism”
• Naomi Shihab Nye, “You Are Your Own State Department”
• Sharon Olds, “Rasputin Aria”
• Michael Palmer, “Nord-Sud”
• Morgan Parker, “The Black Saint & The Sinner Lady & The Dead & The Truth”
• Willie Perdomo, “Head Crack Head Crack”
• Carl Phillips, “Star Map with Action Figures”
• Ishmael Reed, “Just Rollin’ Along”
• Paisley Rekdal, “Four Marys”
• Sonia Sanchez, “Belly, Buttocks, and Straight Spines”
• Nicole Santalucia, “#MeToo”
• Philip Schultz, “The Women’s March”
• Lloyd Schwartz, “Vermeer’s Pearl”
• Alan Shapiro, “Encore”
• Jane Shore, “Who Knows One”
• Tracy K. Smith, “The Greatest Personal Privation”
• A. E. Stallings, “Harm’s Way”
• Arthur Sze, “The White Orchard”
• Natasha Trethewey, “Duty”
• Ocean Vuong, “Partly True Poem Reflected in a Mirror”
• David Wojahn, “Still Life: Stevens’s Wallet on a Key West Hotel Dresser”
• Kevin Young, “Hive”
• Contributors’ Notes and Comments
• Magazines Where the Poems Were First Published
• Acknowledgments
• About the Editors
• Copyright