The Best American Poetry 2021

by David Lehman

  “With regard to form, I settled on it in part because the poem was originally a block of text I’d typed into my phone, and someone in a workshop warned that journals might not publish it because it was too long. Since I don’t believe in editing work solely for publication, breaking up the text seemed like a nice compromise. In hindsight, I love how the lines look randomly cast on the page like sacred lots, which directly relates to the speaker’s ambivalence about finding love versus being satisfied with the ‘enoughness’ of her current situation. Happiness is attainable, even though the future is uncertain and the present feels unbearable. And goodness, if I write poetry for any concrete, articulable reason, this might be it.”

  SUSAN BRIANTE was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1967 and is the author most recently of Defacing the Monument (Noemi Press, 2020), a series of essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics, and the state. She has published three books of poetry: Pioneers in the Study of Motion (2007), Utopia Minus (2011), and The Market Wonders (2016), all from Ahsahta Press. Briante is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona.

  Briante writes: “I wrote ‘Further Exercises’ as I finished work on my book Defacing the Monument, a series of essays that (among other things) tries to think through the ethics of writing about crisis. While writing can transform readers and shift perceptions, I felt haunted by the limits of what it can do. The poem was a way to trace that uneasiness.”

  JERICHO BROWN was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1976. He is the author of The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), which won the Pulitzer Prize. His first book, Please (New Issues, 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon, 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The Tradition also won the Paterson Poetry Prize. Brown is the director of the creative writing program and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English at Emory University.

  Brown writes: “ ‘Work’ is the result of my having been commissioned to write a poem in response to the 2019–2020 Romare Bearden exhibit at the High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, where I live.”

  CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY was born in Arcata, California, in 1948, and grew up in Santa Barbara. He taught at Fresno State and the University of California, Santa Barbara and Riverside. Recent books of poetry are Star Journal: Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), Chaos Theory (Plume Editions, 2018), Cloud Memoir: Selected Longer Poems 1987–2017 (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2018), Agnostic (Lynx House Press, 2019), and The Pre-Eternity of the World (Stephen F. Austin, 2021). He has edited several critical collections and anthologies, most recently The Long Embrace: Contemporary Poets on the Long Poems of Philip Levine (Lynx House Press, 2020) and Naming the Lost: The Fresno Poets—Interviews and Essays (Stephen F. Austin, 2021). Buckley was a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry for 2007–2008. He received the 2008 James Dickey Prize from Five Points magazine, a Fulbright Award in Creative Writing to the former Yugoslavia, four Pushcart Prizes, two awards from the Poetry Society of America, and NEA grants in poetry for 2001 and 1984.

  Of “After Tu Fu,” Buckley writes: “Certainly I am not alone in revering and drawing inspiration from Tu Fu. Many years ago an opening line of one of his poems set me off, something close to the opening here about facing the winter dawn. I was thinking of January and an upcoming birthday, and as always about the passing of time. Not much original there. But the voice in Tu Fu’s poem centered the emotion and set a response to experience going for me—his honesty and clarity, the modesty in the face of change, the managing of nostalgia and cherishing of life. The poem saw many iterations, beginning as a prose piece. Then over the years, several versions, until this final distillation. For me, art is always long, and it took many rewrites over the years to arrive at this final form.”

  VICTORIA CHANG was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1970. Her most recent poetry book is OBIT, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. She has published four other poetry books, of which the most recent prior book is Barbie Chang (Copper Canyon, 2017). A book of hybrid essays called Dear Memory is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2021. A new book of poems, The Trees Witness Everything, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2022. She also occasionally writes children’s books, of which the most recent is a middle-grade verse novel, Love, Love (Sterling Publishing, 2020). She lives in Los Angeles and is the program chair of Antioch’s MFA program in creative writing.

  Chang writes: “I wrote this ‘Marfa, Texas’ poem during a Lannan Residency Fellowship. At the time, I wasn’t writing poems and hadn’t written a poem in so long (maybe five years) that I wasn’t sure I would ever write a poem again. I had planned to take long walks, look at art objects, and read instead. But a friend who was in residence at the MacDowell Colony at the same time started writing poem letters to me so that I might start writing again. I initially resisted, but soon began to enjoy writing again. This poem was one of those poem letters that I wrote back to my friend. I’m grateful, as when I returned home, I began writing many more poems. This one’s shape was inspired by the art objects I viewed at the Judd Foundation and the Chinati Foundation.”

  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 (BOA Editions, 2017), which was nominated for the National Book Award for Poetry and won the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. He has received a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brandeis University.

  Of “The School of Eternities,” Chen writes: “This is a love poem and also an ode to Wegmans, a supermarket chain I first encountered while living in Syracuse, New York. I didn’t understand why so many people I met in Syracuse talked so much about this supermarket. Over time I came to see how it was a cultural phenomenon that united people, that provided a sense of identity and geography; Wegmans as a beacon, as one of the cardinal directions! There’s north, south, east, west, and Wegmans. For years I associated the supermarket with upstate New York, as well as with my partner, who was born and raised in that region. Falling in love with a person can also make you fall in love with a place. Moving across the country to Lubbock, Texas, for the creative writing PhD program at Texas Tech meant no more Wegmans. And I thought moving back to where I grew up, in the Boston area, would mean that, too—when in fact, we now live twenty minutes’ driving distance from a two-story, very fancy Wegmans. However trivial and sentimental, it’s been a source of comfort, especially during this era of the coronavirus pandemic. In its later movement, this poem is an elegy for my partner’s mother, who died in 2015 from pancreatic cancer. She also loved talking about trips to Wegmans. So it doesn’t strike me as at all odd for this piece to be simultaneously a love poem, an elegy, and an ode to a supermarket.”

  Born in South Korea in 1992 and raised mainly in Indiana, SU CHO earned her BA from Emory University and her MFA in Poetry from Indiana University. Her essay “Cleaving Translation” won The Sycamore Review’s nonfiction prize. She lives in Milwaukee and is pursuing a PhD. You can find her at suchowrites.com.

  Cho writes: “Before my family immigrated to Queens, New York, I was equipped with my hot pink Barbie traveling house suitcase and the ABCs. I felt unstoppable. I must have been hopeful, though I did not know that word, because I believed that if I knew ‘dog’ and ‘cat,’ I would be okay. I quickly learned that was not true.

  “ ‘Abecedarian for ESL in West Lafayette, Indiana’ is a rare poem for me because it found the page quickly, and I feel as though I wrote the poem just for myself. The abecedarian guided me in a way that sometimes felt effortless but was quick to remind me that the notion of effortlessness requires a lot of foundational work. I often say that my memory of speaking Korean is entangled with my memory of learning English. My ability to speak the language is not a given because it took a lot of work from my parents, memories both good and bad. This poem was a way for me to remember and perhaps for others to remember. I remember the sounds of Korean words before I can remember what those so
unds mean, and I’ll run through what sounds right to me until my parents say yes, ok, that one, we know what you mean. This poem marks the unremarkable wrongs of childhood. But I wrote them down to remember because if not for them, how would I recognize my feelings and rage today?”

  AMA CODJOE was born in Austin, Texas, in 1979 and was raised in Youngstown, Ohio. She is the author of Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, forthcoming in 2022) and Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. She has received a 2017 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, a 2019 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and a 2021 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship.

  HENRI COLE was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. He has published ten collections of poetry, including Middle Earth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). He has received the Jackson Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent collection is Blizzard (FSG, 2020). A memoir, Orphic Paris, was published by New York Review Books in 2018. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College and lives in Boston.

  Cole writes: “ ‘Gross National Unhappiness’ appears in my collection Blizzard after the poem ‘Super Bloom,’ in which I say, ‘You said you would always / tell the truth, Mr. President, but that was a lie, so I’m / pressing my white face to your White House door.’ ‘Gross National Unhappiness’ is a postscript. I am not sure if it is civic, or ethical, or political. As a history poem with a singular self, it remembers Lowell, Rich, and McKay. It uses anaphora and aphorism, two of my favorite devices. Though the theme is dark, I want the title to give a little chuckle. Though I live quietly, I write, in part, to decry the abuse of power, and to uplift ‘vagrants, self-haters, hermits, junkies, / chumps, the defeated, the paranoid, / the penniless, and those led astray by desire.’ ”

  BILLY COLLINS was born in the French Hospital in New York City in 1941. He was an undergraduate at Holy Cross College and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside. His books of poetry include Whale Day (Random House, 2020), The Rain in Portugal (Random House, 2016), Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems 2003–2013 (Random House, 2013), Horoscopes for the Dead (Random House, 2011), Ballistics (Random House, 2008), The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems (Random House, 2005), a collection of haiku titled She Was Just Seventeen (Modern Haiku Press, 2006), Nine Horses (Random House, 2002), Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (Random House, 2001), Picnic, Lightning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), The Art of Drowning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), and Questions About Angels (William Morrow, 1991), which was selected for the National Poetry Series by Edward Hirsch and reprinted by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1999. He is the editor of Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry (Random House, 2003) and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Everyday (Random House, 2005). He is a former Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College (City University of New York). A frequent contributor and former guest editor of The Best American Poetry series, he was appointed United States Poet Laureate 2001–2003 and served as New York State Poet 2004–2006. He also edited Bright Wings: An Anthology of Poems about Birds illustrated by David Sibley (Columbia University Press, 2010). He was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  Of “On the Deaths of Friends,” Collins writes: “I think this poem can happily explain itself on the page, but I can say something about its progress and its sources. It begins by weaving through some popular sequences of dying, then oddly switches to the tone of a lecturer (‘will not be considered here’). The speaker is now abruptly placed by a lakefront at evening, momentarily giving the poem the stability of a time and a place. Here, the speaker falls into a meditation (greater Romantic lyric), in which he tries to imagine where his deceased friends have gone (In Memoriam), a ‘place’ far removed from the joys of life (fox, kettle). He runs along a train platform like a man in a black-and-white movie, before returning to the present and the sensorium where he began (ripples, breeze, whistle, trees, clouds), only now he is left shivering in the face of his own mortality and overwhelmed by the powerful inflowing of perception.”

  ADAM O. DAVIS was born in Tucson, Arizona, in 1980, and raised in France, New Jersey, Scotland, and Utah. He is the author of Index of Haunted Houses (Sarabande, 2020), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize. The recipient of the 2016 George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, he lives in San Diego, California, where he teaches English literature at The Bishop’s School.

  Davis writes: “The earliest iteration of ‘Interstate Highway System’ served as a series of terse second-person commands—something of a lyric roadmap telling you to go this way, then that, now this until you arrived at the poem’s ultimate question, which is, of course: How will you live with and within yourself under the umbrella of America? I don’t know much better now than I did then, but subsequent drafts expanded the telegraphic directions and shifted the focus inward so that ‘I’ now had to answer for what was being offered. That, coupled with a peripatetic life and roughly 3,000 miles’ worth of roadside observations gleaned from a 2015 road trip following defunct railroad lines from Pittsburgh to San Diego (a story for another time), soon brought the poem as it is now known into being, though I’m indebted to Jericho Brown who turned it down the first time I submitted it to The Believer, noting that it was close but the ending needed some work and I should resend it when the work was done. When the work was done I did exactly that and I must’ve done something right because not only did he publish it but it’s now published here.”

  KWAME DAWES was born in 1962 in Accra, Ghana, and raised in Jamaica. He is the author of twenty-two books of poetry and numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. His latest collection, Nebraska, was published in 2020. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and teaches at the University of Nebraska and the Pacific MFA Program. He is director of the African Poetry Book Fund and artistic director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. Dawes is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has won an Emmy, the Forward Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Windham Campbell Prize for poetry. In 2021, Kwame Dawes was named editor of “American Life in Poetry” column.

  Of “Before the Riot,” Dawes writes: “Sometime close to writing this poem, meaning, in May 2020, I also wrote, ‘We who live inside / history go blind to its machinations; / and this is the use of poetry.’ Which is to say that my hope is that poetry is resistant to this blindness—not a blessing, really, but a necessity. This year, I have felt acutely this sense of living inside history.”

  TOI DERRICOTTE was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1941. Her sixth collection of poetry, “I”: New and Selected Poems, was published in 2019. Other books of poetry include The Undertaker’s Daughter, Tender, and Captivity. Her literary memoir, The Black Notebooks, received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for nonfiction and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She was awarded the Frost Medal in 2020 and has received three Pushcart Prizes, the 2012 Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement, a Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award from the United Black Artists, and the 2012 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. With Cornelius Eady, she cofounded the Cave Canem Foundation, a home for the many voices of African American poetry. She is professor emerita from the University of Pittsburgh and a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

  Derricotte writes: “The poem ‘The Great Beauty’ was written years after I saw the movie but just a few days after I saw the pigeons. I found myself one day at a Zoom meeting, talking about the appearance of the pigeons when I had been out walking, and the people who heard the story seemed to get a kick out of it. I’d never thought about translating a story about some event in my daily life into a poem. Usually I think daily events aren’t worthy of poetry. However, since
people seemed to enjoy the story, I thought, why not try? And I had promised a friend to exchange a new poem with her that very evening.

  “When I sat down to write, I remembered the flamingos’ appearance in the movie I had seen and I made the connection between the two events. And so ‘The Great Beauty’ was written.”

  JAY DESHPANDE was born in Austin, Texas, in 1984. He is the author of Love the Stranger (YesYes Books, 2015) and the chapbooks The Rest of the Body (YesYes Books, 2017) and The Umbrian Sonnets (PANK, 2020). He is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner fellowship, a Kundiman fellowship, the Scotti Merrill Memorial Award, and residencies at Civitella Ranieri and the Saltonstall Arts Colony. He teaches at Columbia University and in the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program.

  Of “A Child’s Guide to Grasses,” Deshpande writes: “I grew up in rural New Hampshire, and much of my interior landscape is furnished by the woods and fields I played in as a child. But there’s something solipsistic about childhood memory: you recall how things felt and smelled, but it is much harder to decipher context. When I think about growing up near Dartmouth College (motto: Vox clamantis in deserto), I want to recognize how power played out on the land. Exactly whose ‘wilderness’ was this? By exploring this question on the level of language and the sensorium, I began to consider how my childhood adjacent to academia shaped my relationship to institutions of power as an adult.” Editor’s note: the Dartmouth motto translates as “a voice crying from the wilderness.”

  NATALIE DIAZ was born in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is Mojave and Akimel O’odham. She has two books: When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) and Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf, 2020).

  Of “lake-loop,” Diaz writes: “This poem began as many of my poems do lately, in water, in desire, in wonder of my body in relationship to the body of land. When you say the word ‘lake’ in Mojave, you are saying that the lake is a body of water who is alone. I have been thinking about this loneliness for years. This wanting to return to the other body/bodies that are also yours, to want to be in relationship with, one of many, not the center but overwhelmed in momentum.”