The Best American Poetry 2021

by David Lehman

  Of “a brief meditation on breath,” Montilla writes: “2020 was a year in which the breath became politicized by all citizens. I say ‘by all’ because for Black people in this country the breath has always been political; I am imagining Eric Garner and George Floyd would agree if they were still here. With the pandemic, and mask-wearing becoming the norm, I began to ruminate on how these two circumstances I am living through—being Black in America and existing during a pandemic that literally takes away your breath—could coexist in a poem. In the process of writing it I learned about the ways I take in air, the ways I hold breath, too.”

  KAMILAH AISHA MOON was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1973. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her books include Starshine & Clay (Four Way Books, 2017), and She Has a Name (Four Way Books, 2013). She has received fellowships at MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, and Hedgebrook. She is an assistant professor of poetry and creative writing at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia.

  Of “Irony,” Moon writes: “This triolet allows the speaker to lament having no time left to enjoy the rest of a life freed after finally clearing a major existential hurdle.”

  STANLEY MOSS was born in Woodhaven, New York, on June 21, 1925. He was educated at Trinity College and Yale University, and he served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. After the war he worked at Botteghe Oscure and taught English in Rome and Barcelona. His first book of poems, The Wrong Angel, was published in 1966, and since then he has also published The Skull of Adam (1979), The Intelligence of Clouds (1989), Asleep in the Garden (1997), A History of Color (2003), Songs of Imperfection (2005), New and Selected Poems (2006), Rejoicing (2009), No Tear is Commonplace (2013), It’s About Time (2015), Almost Complete Poems (2016), Abandoned Poems (2018), God Breaketh Not All Men’s Hearts Alike: New and Selected Poems 1948–2019, and Act V, Scene I (2020). His books have been published in German (tr. by Hans Magnus Enzensberger), Chinese (tr. by Fu Hao), and Spanish (tr. by Valarie Mejer). Moss has worked as an editor at New Directions, New American Library, Bookweek, New York Herald Tribune, and New American Review. In 1977, he founded Sheep Meadow Press, a nonprofit publishing company that publishes poetry and belles lettres. He makes his living as a private art dealer, largely in Spanish and Italian Old Masters. He lives in Clinton Corners, New York.

  Of “A Smiling Understanding,” Moss writes: “I have a special relationship with trees. At times of sorrow or great difficulty I know trees I love would lend me a helping hand, a branch if they could. I think my trees know I don’t want my sap to freeze. That’s common sense.”

  DG NANOUK OKPIK was born in Anchorage, and her family is from Barrow, Alaska. She earned an MFA from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and is the author of Corpse Whale (University of Arizona Press, 2012), which won the American Book Award. Inupiat, Inuit from Alaska, okpik received the Truman Capote Literary Trust Scholarship. An alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts, she lives in Santa Fe.

  Of “When White Hawks Come,” okpik writes: “Traveling in dream state, waking up, as fast as I could, to write this piece, in bed. The dream ‘sashays’ as the poem is in constant movement but ‘suspended’ in old man forest. I stayed there in the blue night in ‘mirth,’ rapture, and in laughter.”

  CECILY PARKS was born in New York in 1976. She is the author of two poetry collections: Field Folly Snow (University of Georgia Press, 2008) and O’Nights (Alice James Books, 2015). She is the poetry editor of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University.

  Parks writes: “To begin to write ‘December,’ I looked at all the photographs I’d taken on my phone during the month of December 2017. There they were: the freak Texas snow, children playing on a white bed, masks, a manicure, a note taped to the door, ice skates, ponies, hay, and so on, including a photo of my family’s coats piled in an airport lounge on the last day of the month. The draft of Anne Sexton’s that the poem refers to is an early version of ‘Flee on Your Donkey’ and can be found at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. I love the way Sexton’s scrawled declaration, which is in all caps in the original—‘AT LAST I FOUND YOU’—reveals how sometimes we write to discover what we’re writing.”

  PATRICK PHILLIPS was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1970. He is the author of three books of poems, including Elegy for a Broken Machine (Knopf, 2015). His first work of nonfiction, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (W. W. Norton, 2016), won the American Book Award and was named a best book of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Smithsonian. Phillips teaches writing and literature at Stanford University.

  Of “Elegy with Table Saw & Cobwebs,” he writes: “This poem grew out of a real experience—the day I first returned to my father-in-law’s basement woodshop, and found everything exactly as he’d left it before he died. It’s a place where I’d spent many happy hours working and learning from Ollie, an engineer, tinkerer, and jack-of-all-trades, whose shop was waiting like the Titanic on the bottom of the sea. Everything dust-covered and frozen in time, with the only difference being that the man himself—the one for whom it all existed—was now gone.

  “Like a lot of poems, this one started with astonishment, in its etymological sense of being turned to stone. I felt mute and paralyzed standing in that room, and the only thing I knew for certain was that the experience meant something. That it was important. So for me writing the poem wasn’t about recording what I’d learned from walking down those steps, but trying to make sense of it.

  “I find formal patterns calming and consoling, and almost of its own volition this poem settled into an invented form, with all those a sounds repeating at the ends of lines. That wasn’t planned, but a way to keep going even as the pressure to stop talking mounted. A way to dwell in a place full of love and memory and loss and, of course, its terrible lesson: that even the most mundane objects might outlive us. My friend Ollie was far too modest for some grand poetic monument. So I tried, at least, to fashion something from scraps.”

  ROGER REEVES was born and raised in Mount Holly, New Jersey, a small town about forty minutes due east of Philadelphia. He has published one book of poems, King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). His next book of poems, Best Barbarian, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton in March of 2022.

  Of “For Black Children at the End of the World—and the Beginning,” Reeves writes: “ ‘I don’t want the police to shoot me,’ said L—, a friend’s five-year-old child, as they were waiting to participate in a socially distant car-caravan protest that would snake its way through the South Austin streets, a protest aimed at the City Manager and the City Council’s recent deliberation over the police budget. Another friend’s child, a boy of eight, said the same thing while participating in a protest shortly after the murder of George Floyd, waving at snipers on the roof of the capitol building in hopes that if he waved, the snipers might not shoot him. Some of the snipers waved back. I realized that these black children must be accounted for, loved, considered in the middle of this moment of protesting, in the middle of this fight against white supremacy. I wrote this poem as a turn to them, to the Black children that live in America and have lived in America. I wrote it for all of us.”

  ED ROBERSON was born on December 26, 1939, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His most recent of twelve books of poetry are Asked What Has Changed (Wesleyan University Press, 2021) and mph & Other Road Poems (Verge Publications, 2021). Other titles include To See the Earth Before the End of the World (Wesleyan, 2010) and City Eclogue (Atelos, 2006).

  Of “For Air,” Roberson writes: “This poem, with the central image of air, is one of many responding to the senseless police choking murder of George Floyd, but in actuality, it is in response to the numerous unjustified murders of Black people by police force.”

  MARGARET ROSS was born in New York City in 1986. Her first book, A Timeshare, was published by Omnidawn in 2015. The recipient of a Fulbright grant and a Wallace
Stegner Fellowship, she currently teaches at the University of Chicago.

  Of “Blood,” Ross writes: “This poem began as an attempt to write about forms of etiquette shaped by white American fictions, among them the fantasy of linear time in which every present is a blank slate and the past is past.”

  ANGBEEN SALEEM was born in 1989 in Gujranwala, Pakistan, and was raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is working on her first collection of poems.

  Saleem writes: “I wrote ‘brown and black people on shark tank’ in a workshop with Angel Nafis and for some reason, it was one of those poems that came to me very quickly. I think it’s because part of writing the poem was actually just watching the show Shark Tank every Friday night for years and thinking about the ways capitalism requires people of color to sell their trauma, and even that is not always enough. I wanted to capture this notion without being condescending, so that I wasn’t attacking people put in these positions, and with a sense of humor, so that I was capturing the absurdity of life under late stage capitalism.”

  Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, NICOLE SEALEY is the author of Ordinary Beast and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. She has received the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review and a Poetry International Prize, as well as fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, Cave Canem, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Poetry Project. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2018. Formerly the executive director at Cave Canem Foundation, she is a visiting professor at Boston University and Syracuse University.

  EVIE SHOCKLEY was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. Her most recent poetry collections are the new black (Wesleyan, 2011) and semiautomatic (Wesleyan, 2017); both won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her critical work includes her monograph, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa, 2011). She has received the Lannan Literary Award for poetry, the Stephen Henderson Award, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, MacDowell, and Cave Canem. She is professor of English at Rutgers University.

  Of “women’s voting rights at one hundred (but who’s counting?),” Shockley writes: “I was fortunate to be invited to write a poem for the Academy of American Poets and New York Philharmonic’s Project 19, their joint initiative to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment by commissioning new work from nineteen women poets and nineteen women composers. Though the commission did not place any limits on what I might write about, I was almost immediately drawn to consider the differential meaning of this anniversary for women in terms of race. The delayed access of white women to this important aspect of U.S. citizenship was even further deferred for Black women, who suffered exclusion from the polls on racial grounds, like Black people generally. My poem calls us not only to remember the difference racism made (and continues to make, in numerous ways), but also remember and honor the essential, even heroic, roles played by Black women for more than a century in the ongoing struggle for voting rights—whether in the national spotlight, like Fannie Lou Hamer, or quietly and locally, like Leatha Shockley (my beloved mother!). The formal structure of the poem, its varying discourses, and attention to language, which I enjoyed the challenge of creating, are all in service of illuminating this history and the opportunity we each have to create the conditions for freedom and equality.”

  DARIUS SIMPSON is a writer, educator, performer, and skilled living-room dancer from Akron, Ohio. He was a recipient of the 2020 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.

  Of “What Is There to Do in Akron, Ohio?” Simpson writes: “This poem was born from a session of poets throwing jokes at me about Ohio and my being from there. During these series of playfully disrespectful comments about my home state someone asked what there even was to do in Ohio.”

  PATRICIA SMITH was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1955. She is the author of eight books of poetry, including Incendiary Art (Northwestern University Press, 2017), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the 2018 NAACP Image Award; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008). She is a Guggenheim fellow, an NEA grant recipient, a former fellow at Civitella Ranieri, Yaddo, and MacDowell, a professor in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College and at the City University of New York.

  Of “The Stuff of Astounding: A Golden Shovel for Juneteenth,” Smith writes: “Crafting a commissioned poem is always a tremendous challenge, especially with a topic as expansive as Juneteenth—celebration of the emancipation of our country’s enslaved. I wanted the poem to inform the unfamiliar and bolster the spirits of those who can actually trace their beginnings back to those whose shackles were loosed that day. Faced with the daunting task of speaking to everyone about something so utterly necessary, I also wanted to embed a message that spoke resolutely to the present day. After all, it is history that roots us. I decided that the golden shovel, the poetic form created by Terrance Hayes, was the perfect solution. And there’s the message, visible when you read down the right side of the poem: ‘Unless we are intent on ripping the world from its root in the sky, we live with these truths—the black breath is gospel, the black voice will not be silent, the black body is free, and black lives matter.’ ”

  MONICA SOK was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1990. She is the daughter of Khmer refugees and the granddaughter of Em Bun, a master weaver from Takeo, Cambodia, to whom her first book, A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), is dedicated. Sok has received fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, Hedgebrook, Elizabeth George Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Kundiman, Jerome Foundation, and MacDowell. A Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, Sok teaches poetry to Southeast Asian youths at the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants in Oakland, California.

  Of “Ode to the Boy Who Jumped Me,” Sok writes: “After this incident I asked myself: What is it like to feel safe, seen, and heard all at once and all the time? In this poem, I wove two complex experiences together (getting jumped/being ghosted), while considering the layers of silence in both. I wrote this as an ode, not to praise the boy who jumped me but to directly address him, to let him know that I saw him that night even when he could not see me.”

  ADRIENNE SU, born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1967, is the author of five books of poems: Peach State (University of Pittsburgh, 2021), Living Quarters (Manic D Press, 2015), Having None of It (Manic D, 2009), Sanctuary (Manic D, 2006), and Middle Kingdom (Alice James Books, 1997). She has received fellowships from the Barbara Deming Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she is professor of creative writing and poet-in-residence at Dickinson College.

  Su writes: “By the time I wrote the poem ‘Chinese Restaurant Syndrome,’ I had been trying to write it for many years. It began in 1999 as an essay on MSG: how I perceived it and how it was perceived in China and the United States. The essay never succeeded, but I couldn’t scrap it, as it contained a kernel of irritation that seemed to have potential.

  “In 2016, when I started the poem, I was thinking not about the essay but about how much of my early life had been spent in Chinese restaurants. Hosting a Chinese meal at home generally involves last-minute, high-heat cooking of as many dishes as guests, which means the cook, who has probably spent the day cleaning house and prepping ingredients, misses most of the meal. Since Chinese restaurants eliminate this problem, usually at reasonable prices, while offering dishes that are hard to make at home, such as stir-fried lobster, most of the Chinese American gatherings in my life, from casual get-toge
thers to large family reunions, have been restaurant-centered.

  “It felt urgent to get this down because in 2016, many of the elders with whom I had shared those early meals were no longer living or had become too ill to dine out. For the most part, they were also of the generation that had made us Americans. Irritation had given the poem a start, if in the wrong genre. Grief completed it.”

  ARTHUR SZE was born in New York City in 1950. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021). His previous book, Sight Lines (Copper Canyon, 2019), received the National Book Award for Poetry. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

  Of “Acequia del Llano,” Sze writes: “In northern New Mexico, acequias are the lifeblood of agriculture and promote sharing of resources and food. During this challenging year with COVID-19, I found my involvement with the Acequia del Llano particularly rewarding. I decided to use the Japanese haibun form to personalize my involvement. The haibun is a form that begins with prose and then interrupts that motion with a haiku, then the prose continues, along with another haiku, and so on. As I wrote ‘Acequia del Llano,’ I decided to play off these expectations and constraints. Instead of using one haiku after another, I used a 5-7-5 syllable link (this order is broken in one instance) and then a 7-7 syllable link. The two links create the equivalent of a Japanese tanka, a 5-7-5-7-7 syllable form. In writing these links, I wanted to create poems inside of the larger prose poem. In the four sections, each section contains a haiku, a tanka, as well as prose. I see these forms as a way to explore microcosms inside the macrocosm, as a way to create islands inside of a larger flow, and also as a way to aggregate and magnify resonances.”

  PAUL TRAN was born in San Diego, California, in 1992, and is the author of the debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling, forthcoming from Penguin Poets in 2022. Their work has appeared in The New Yorker and Poetry. A recipient of the Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, Paul is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University.