The Best American Poetry 2021

by David Lehman

  ALEX DIMITROV is the author of three books of poetry—Love and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), Together and by Ourselves (Copper Canyon, 2017), Begging for It (Four Way Books, 2013)—and the chapbook American Boys (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2012). He has taught writing at Princeton University, Columbia University, and New York University, and was the senior content editor at the Academy of American Poets. Dimitrov founded the queer poetry salon Wilde Boys (2009–13), which brought together emerging and established writers in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. With Dorothea Lasky, he cofounded Astro Poets and is the coauthor of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac (Flatiron Books, 2019). On Twitter, he writes an endless poem called “Love” in real time, one tweet a day. He was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1984, and lives in New York City.

  Of “Love,” Dimitrov writes: “I wrote this poem, one line a day, throughout the Trump presidency. There seemed to be so much negativity everywhere—in the country, online, and even in art—that I wanted to remember what I loved about life. I wanted to give people hope.”

  RITA DOVE was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1952. She is the author of a novel, short stories, the drama The Darker Face of the Earth, as well as ten books of poetry, including Thomas and Beulah, winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize, and Sonata Mulattica, a poetic tribute to nineteenth century Afro-European violin prodigy George Bridgetower (2010 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award). Her eleventh poetry collection is Playlist for the Apocalypse (W. W. Norton, 2021). She has received an NAACP Image Award (for Collected Poems 1974–2004), the Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, and the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award. She was U.S. Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995 and is the only poet to have received both the National Humanities Medal (from President Clinton, 1996) and the National Medal of Arts (from President Obama, 2011). She edited The Best American Poetry 2000 and The Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry, and has written weekly poetry columns for both The Washington Post and The New York Times. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Dove is Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, where she has been teaching since 1989.

  Of “Naji, 14. Philadelphia.,” Dove writes: “I usually have little recollection of a poem’s origin story—partly because the path from first spark to completed text is often a long and fractured one, but also because each poem’s trajectory is so different, trying to replicate past strategies would be futile. I do remember that this poem was initially one of a series of testimonials to Black Lives Matter, with each title consisting of a first name plus one distinguishing word. I had written the first poem (‘Trayvon, Redux’) just days after that tragedy in a red-hot rage; but as the tally grew—and with it the impunity granted to the perpetrators—so, too, did my despair, a kind of ferocious hopelessness. Who could have imagined such an escalation of racially tinged acts, each more outrageous and tragic and utterly senseless than the last? No words seemed able to encompass what was happening in our neighborhoods, in our country.

  “By the time Naji’s story hit the public, four years had passed since Trayvon Martin’s murder. The number of Black victims to police brutality—intentional or accidental, undocumented or filmed or word against word, but nearly always defended by those in blue and justified by their political and judicial enablers—continued to mount. I worried that I had become numb to the steady barrage of hatred. And then suddenly—while reading a newspaper account I would have wished away if I could—very clearly I heard a fourteen-year-old boy asking for his mother, begging for a place to lay his head. I could not soothe him, so I let him speak.

  “P.S.: After a week in the ICU, this young man survived—but I’m not sure about his childhood or his soul.”

  CAMILLE T. DUNGY, born in Colorado and raised in California, is the author of the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (W. W. Norton, 2017) and four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan, 2017). She edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2009), coedited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology (Persea, 2009), and served as assistant editor on Gathering Ground: Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (University of Michigan Press, 2006). She is the poetry editor for Orion Magazine. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, a Colorado Book Award, two Northern California Book Awards, two NAACP Image Award Nominations, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry. Dungy is currently a University Distinguished Professor in the English department at Colorado State University. www.camilledungy.com

  Dungy writes: “I wrote ‘This’ll hurt me more’ during a spring/summer of protests in America, which could be any spring/summer in America, but which, in this case, was the spring/summer of 2020. I was exhausted when I wrote this poem. I’m still exhausted now.”

  LOUISE ERDRICH was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, in 1954. Her novels include Love Medicine (Harper & Row, 1984) and LaRose (HarperCollins, 2012), both winners of the National Book Critics Circle Prize for Fiction, The Plague of Doves (HarperCollins, 2006), and The Round House (HarperCollins, 2014), which received the National Book Award. Her last book of poetry was Original Fire (HarperCollins, 2003). She lives in Minnesota and is the owner of a small independent bookstore, Birchbark Books.

  Of “Stone Love,” Erdrich writes: “I was driving my daughter and her friend back from a summer camp for Native students at the University of Iowa. They were asleep in the backseat. I was thinking about meteors and a lusciously curved stone bench that a friend of mine was making. Words surged into my mind and at the same time a thunderstorm hit and there was nowhere to stop. I could hardly see through the rain. Lightning was crackling down all around us. Still, lines and words kept arriving. It was very inconvenient, but what an experience.… I finally pulled off at a fast-food place, sent the girls inside, and wrote the poem on an unpaid parking ticket.”

  KATHY FAGAN’s fifth book, Sycamore (Milkweed, 2017), was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award. Milkweed will publish her new collection, Bad Hobby, in 2022. Born in New York in 1958, Fagan has received fellowships from the NEA, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. She directs the MFA program at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, where she also serves as series coeditor for the OSU Press/The Journal Wheeler Poetry Prize. This is her first appearance in The Best American Poetry.

  Of “Conqueror,” Fagan writes: “When my deaf, dementing dad lived with me, I planned each day around his care. Caregivers know just how intense rare moments of freedom can feel; some may experience a keener sense of time and its passing. Those years are mostly over for me now, but what I learned about the dynamics of our little family, as well as larger American institutions failing the poor, the aged, and the disabled every day, has informed my later life and work irrevocably.”

  CHANDA FELDMAN was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1976. She is the author of Approaching the Fields (LSU Press, 2018) and is an assistant professor of creative writing at Oberlin College.

  Of “They Ran and Flew from You,” Feldman writes: “This poem is based on the walks I took with my kids to and after school when we lived in central Israel. I was mesmerized to witness how they maneuvered in their surroundings, to see what they were clued into that I, as an immigrant, was not: they knew the wild plants they could eat and the ones not to touch, and they were always teaching me Hebrew rhymes, poems, and songs. There was also the pleasure of observing my kids’ continual and evolving games with their friends on the park structures they visited every day. Watching these daily scenes, I was reminded how place imprints us and structures our knowledge and memories.”

  NIKKY FINNEY was born by the sea in South Carolina in 1957 and raised during the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts Movements. She is the author of On Wings Made of Gauze (Morrow, 1985), Rice (TriQuarterly, reprinted in 2013), The World Is Round (TriQuarterly, reprinted
in 2013), and Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly, 2011), which won the National Book Award for Poetry. Her new collection of poems, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, was released from TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press in 2020.

  Of “I Feel Good,” Finney writes: “Growing up in South Carolina in the 1970s meant that James Brown was always singing truth and dance music in my ear. His music raised me and raised my Black consciousness, too. When I heard that the money he left in his will to the ‘needy children of South Carolina and Georgia’ never made it to them but instead was being gobbled up by rich white lawyers who didn’t think a Black man could make such a rich decision on his own—about where his hard earned money should go—I wanted to write something for him—and for the hundreds of other Black musicians whose money was posthumously preyed over by men who couldn’t even dance.”

  LOUISE GLÜCK was born in New York City in 1943. Among many honors for her work are a 1993 Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, a 2014 National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020. She teaches at Yale University and Stanford University, and was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1993.

  NANCY MILLER GOMEZ was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, but grew up in Kansas. She worked in Los Angeles as a lawyer and a television producer before moving to Santa Cruz, California. She cofounded the Santa Cruz Poetry Project to provide poetry workshops to incarcerated men and women. Her chapbook, Punishment, was published in 2018 as part of the Rattle chapbook series. She has an MFA from Pacific University and is working on her first full-length manuscript.

  Of “Tilt-A-Whirl,” Gomez writes: “The Kansas I grew up in was a land of contradictions: wholesome and quaint with an undercurrent of squalor. But the weird Americana of my childhood has provided a wellspring of material: pig farmers, livery barns, truck stops, horse traders. My older sister Janis chauffeured me through the rural Midwest of my youth. In summer, we traversed the back roads of Kansas and Missouri, blasting Pink Floyd in an old Skylark with the windows down. Once we stopped at a small town carnival on a weekday. Despite its cheerful facade, an empty carnival is a haunted, unhappy place. Against this backdrop, I witnessed for the first time how my beautiful sister attracted attention from men in a way that felt dangerous. It was a revelation made all the more impactful because I idolized her. To me, she was mature, worldly, and in control, so to see her made defenseless was terrifying. In retrospect, I recognize she was only sixteen at the time, still a child despite her self-assured way of moving through the world. But the feeling of being caught on the wrong side of a power imbalance has stayed with me all these years and resurfaced in this poem.”

  JORIE GRAHAM was born in New York City in 1950 and raised in Italy. She returned to the United States to finish her education. Her fourteen collections of poetry include, recently, Fast and Runaway, both from HarperCollins/Ecco. Two volumes of her selected poetry have appeared: The Dream of the Unified Field, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1996, and From the New World. Graham was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1990. She lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Harvard University.

  RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS is a poet, novelist, and visual artist. Her most recent collection, a hybrid of poetry and photography, is Seeing the Body (W. W. Norton 2020), which was nominated for a 2021 NAACP Image Award. Griffiths has received fellowships from Kimbilio, Cave Canem Foundation, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Yaddo. Her debut novel, Promise, is forthcoming from Random House in 2022. She lives in New York City.

  FRANCINE J. HARRIS was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1972. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Here is the Sweet Hand (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), play dead (Alice James Books, 2016), and allegiance (Wayne State University Press, 2012). play dead was the winner of the Lambda Literary and Audre Lorde Awards. An associate professor of English at the University of Houston, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

  Of “Sonata in F Minor, K.183: Allegro,” Harris writes: “In addition to the ekphrastic tribute, I love being able to connect my work to Ann Petry’s seminal novel. Reading The Street during my brief return to New York was rather uncanny. So much paranoia haunts this cautionary tale that it is difficult to parse from actual danger; and thus spoke to much of the experience I was having this time around with the city—the bustle, the crowds, the rush. Everything seemed to blur into a haze of possible disaster—which may be bad for stress level, but great for poems!”

  TERRANCE HAYES was born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1971. His most recent publications include American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018), and To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight (Wave Books, 2018). He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2014.

  Of “George Floyd,” Hayes writes: “I heard the protesters marching by my home that first Friday after George Floyd was murdered. I left my desk to walk with them into Washington Square Park. All of it was peaceful. All of it cathartic. When we stood in the park there were these blue spells of silence between chants. I went home and wrote this poem.”

  EDWARD HIRSCH was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1950 and educated at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania. He has published ten books of poems, including Gabriel: A Poem (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), a book-length elegy for his son, and Stranger by Night (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020). He has also published six prose books, most recently A Poet’s Glossary (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), a full compendium of poetic terms, and 100 Poems to Break Your Heart (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021). He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2016. He is a MacArthur Fellow and serves as president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

  Of “Waste Management,” Hirsch writes: “It was a sort of schooling—that job as a garbageman in my hometown. It was an experience that changed me. The poem is directive and addresses my twenty-year-old self in the present tense—do this, but don’t do that—in one run-on onrushing sentence of short, jittery lines that tries to capture a working day on the route, my formal education in collecting trash, finding out what it means to work for a living, getting a hard daily lesson in becoming invisible.”

  ISHION HUTCHINSON was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections Far District (Peepal Tree Press, 2010) and House of Lords and Commons (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

  Of “David,” Hutchinson writes: “The poem’s shape, unlikely as it may seem, is a madrigal in the sense that it counterpoints various fictive moments of incoherence out of twice standing, both times speechless, in front of Michelangelo’s David. The first encounter solidifies what Derek Walcott calls poetry, the combination of the natural and the marmoreal. The second encounter is more disturbing: David is both agent and witness to the horror of history which is the future of the giant’s fall, a catastrophe he is powerless to change. God has compromised David; the imminent victory will be a false victory, and what will remain for David, and for us, is the struggle to regain free will over divine will. Still, after such knowledge, what innocence? The poem wants to know.”

  DIDI JACKSON, born in Columbus, Ohio, is the author of Moon Jar (Red Hen Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares. She teaches creative writing at Vanderbilt University.

  Of “Two Mule Deer,” Jackson writes: “When I was at the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California (as a guest/partner), I sat looking out a wall of windows in our studio as two female mule deer emerged from the surrounding woods and passed right by me. It was Jennifer Johns who said that deer are good determiners of danger. She knew I was afraid of hiking with the possibility of mountain lions nearby, especially since a man was killed by a mountain lion while biking earlier that month. The lines ‘You
know how it feels / wanting to walk into / the rain and disappear’ are from Mary Oliver’s poem ‘At Blackwater Pond’ in her book Twelve Moons. I hope this poem might bring attention to issues of sexual assault.”

  MAJOR JACKSON is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Absurd Man (W. W. Norton, 2020) and Roll Deep (Norton, 2016). Recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He is the poetry editor of the Harvard Review and was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2019.

  Of “Double Major,” Jackson writes: “Since encountering W. E. B. DuBois’s notion of ‘double-consciousness,’ I have long contemplated the phenomenon of the divided self and the authenticating act of poetry as a means of bringing into conversation those contained multitudes. In this case, in writing the poem I was also instinctively hunting down a relationship between freedom and the unconscious, how my lifelong pursuit for language has ultimately been about a quest for individuation, emotional and intellectual clarity, and salvation. This self-portrait poem, like others written in this vein, is indebted to Jorge Luis Borges, and has allowed me to give form to that interplay between my psychic landscapes and the other Majors who show up when I sit down to write.”

  AMAUD JAMAUL JOHNSON was born in Compton, California, in 1972. He is the author of three poetry collections, Imperial Liquor (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), Darktown Follies (Tupelo Press, 2013), and Red Summer (Tupelo Press, 2006). He has received a Pushcart Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Edna Meudt Poetry Award, and the Dorset Prize, as well as fellowships from MacDowell, Stanford, Bread Loaf, and Cave Canem. He directs the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is the Halls Bascom Professor of English.