The Best American Poetry 2015

by David Lehman

  SAEED JONES’s debut poetry collection, Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House Press), won the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award and was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem and Queer/Art/Mentorship.

  Jones writes: “ ‘Body & Kentucky Bourbon’ is loosely based on a brief relationship I had with a man I desired but did not truly understand or love. I didn’t realize just how much we had been strangers to one another until well after the relationship ended. And I began to wonder if, in fact, this intimate strangeness is perhaps more common than one would expect. I wanted to write a poem that would force me—every time I read it—to reflect on everything I did not and could not know about him as a kind of penance for not having the presence of mind to just ask him when we were still a part of each other’s life.”

  JOAN NAVIYUK KANE was born in Anchorage, Alaska, in 1977. She teaches at the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Inupiaq with family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska, she raises her young sons in Anchorage. A graduate of Harvard College and the School of the Arts at Columbia University, she is the author of The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife (published in 2009 by NorthShore Press Alaska and brought back into print in 2012 by the University of Alaska Press) and Hyperboreal (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). She has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, an American Book Award, the Alaska Literary Award, an artist fellowship from the Rasmuson Foundation, a fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and the United States Artists Creative Vision award.

  Of “Exhibits from the Dark Museum,” Kane writes: “I was fortunate to work closely with the elders committee of Sitnasuak Native Corporation in Nome, Alaska, on several years of Inupiaq language projects and subsistence calendars. The meetings never passed without hours of stories about Nome, our home villages, or places far distant. The poem here arose after one of these meetings, when I’d returned to Anchorage on the flight from Nome that travels north through the subarctic before turning south to Anchorage. One of the elders had been cleaning out old buildings in Nome, with the contents of the buildings dating from Nome’s gold rush, and talking about the many hauntings and layers of history that populate both the town and our memories of all the change we’ve seen and continue to see in Alaska. I arrived in Anchorage and couldn’t sleep, troubled by images and stories of disturbance, feeling unsettled. I got up to write the poem as my husband and children slept.”

  LAURA KASISCHKE was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1961. She has published eight collections of poetry, most recently The Infinitesimals (Copper Canyon, 2014), as well as eight novels. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Chelsea, Michigan, and teaches at the University of Michigan.

  Of “For the Young Woman I Saw Hit by a Car While Riding Her Bike,” Kasischke writes: “The poem contains the story of this minor accident, just as it happened, along with my overreaction to it, which brought in an ambulance and drew a crowd. The end of the poem is, I suppose, my excuse for that overreaction. Witnessing it threw me back to another time and place—where part of me resides permanently, I guess, and from which, I think, all these years later, I relive the other experience in every fender bender I see, and every time a loved one gets the flu or comes home an hour late, all that. I’m not sure I’d made this connection so clearly before I wrote this poem—not that it will change anything, but at least I got a poem out of it.”

  Born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Altadena, California, DOUGLAS KEARNEY lives with his family in California’s Santa Clarita Valley. He teaches in the BFA in critical studies and the MFA in creative writing at CalArts, where he received his MFA in writing (2004). His third poetry collection, Patter (Red Hen Press, 2014), examines miscarriage, infertility, and parenthood. His second book, The Black Automaton (Fence Books, 2009), was a National Poetry Series selection. He has received residencies or fellowships from Cave Canem and the Rauschenberg Foundation. Two of his operas, Sucktion and Crescent City, have received grants from the MAP Fund. Sucktion has been produced internationally. Crescent City premiered in Los Angeles in 2012. He has been commissioned to write or teach ekphrastic poetry for the Weisman Museum (Minneapolis), Studio Museum in Harlem, MOCA, SFMOMA, the Getty, and the Hammer.

  Of “In the End, They Were Born on TV,” Kearney writes: “About six months into my wife N’s very difficult pregnancy, her OB/GYN called to tell me she had transferred N to a new doctor. It turns out the new doctor was a star of a reality TV show about difficult pregnancies and how such challenging work affects the doctors’ own families and relationships. It wasn’t long before the show’s producer asked N whether she would be willing to appear on the show.

  “Through most of her pregnancy, N had hyperemesis—morning sickness on steroids. She would vomit dozens of times a day; even water made her vomit. She was on an IV for nutrition and was at home on bed rest, and, as it happened, she became familiar with the TV show during those months she spent lying very still on the couch. She found it helpful to watch other women in similar circumstances, so she agreed to be on the show.

  “The poem pivots on a shoot the crew did at our home when, in pursuit of emotional exposition, the interviewer pressed us to discuss the miscarriage that had terminated N’s last pregnancy. Each time we tried to tell the story, some external sound—dogs and low-flying aircraft—ruined the take. The details with which we told the story diminished with each interrupted retelling. As the poem says: ‘It was horrible.’

  “Still, the crew was professional and kind. The doctors gave my wife the best care we could have imagined. To my knowledge, the show—we were a two-episode arc!—never aired. We have it on DVD, though. We’ll show it to the twins when they’re a bit older.”

  JENNIFER KEITH is a web content writer for Johns Hopkins Medicine. She attended the University of Virginia and graduated from the American University in Washington, DC, with a degree in cinema. She received the 2014 John Elsberg poetry prize. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she collects tea and plays bass guitar for the rock band Batworth Stone.

  Of “Eating Walnuts,” Keith writes: “As a child, I read about a squirrel learning to eat hazelnuts through trial and error. I was impressed that this instinct-driven animal had to teach itself, making several unsuccessful attempts before finding the most effective method.

  “My late father was a painter with unusual spatial intelligence and perhaps a touch of OCD. He loved showing my mother and me better, more efficient ways of doing small things like loading the dishwasher. This wasn’t nearly as exasperating as it sounds.

  “My current job involves spending time with neurosurgeons who are fantastically creative in discovering new ways to access brain lesions while avoiding damage to surrounding tissue and structures. Thus the poem takes on another layer of meaning for me.”

  DAVID KIRBY was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1944, and teaches at Florida State University. He is the author most recently of The Biscuit Joint (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) and A Wilderness of Monkeys (Hanging Loose Press, 2014). For more, see www.davidkirby.com.

  Of “Is Spot in Heaven?” Kirby writes: “At the heart of this poem is Sam Cooke’s haunting ballad ‘A Change Is Gonna Come,’ in which a man worn down by life on earth says he doesn’t want to leave because he doesn’t know what’s on the other side. That’s a question that vexes both theologians and children alike, one that I answer the way one can only in a poem, where the poet has the opportunity to invent a world that contains everything this world doesn’t. When I look back at my poems, it seems that most of them are little problem-solving machines; this one is no different.

  “Currently I’m reading Andrew Grant Jackson’s 1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music, a book about a time when, in his words, ‘You couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing a new classic,’ including Cooke’s song but also ‘Like a
Rolling Stone,’ ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,’ ‘Respect,’ ‘The Sound of Silence,’ ‘Yesterday,’ ‘People Get Ready,’ and hundreds of others. How’d that happen? A statistician I know said it’s pretty simple: events tend to occur at more or less regular intervals, though sometimes they occur more often in a given time period and sometimes less so.

  “That said, individual persistence has to count for something. Of the recording sessions that led to the release of the Stones’ ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,’ the band knocked out the greatest rock song ever without even trying because, as Jackson says, they were always trying. ‘Is Spot in Heaven?’ marks my sixth appearance in the Best American Poetry series, yet my first poem didn’t appear there till I was fifty-four years old. So hang in there, you poets.”

  ANDREW KOZMA was born in Tucson, Arizona, in 1976. He lives in Houston, Texas, where he teaches technical writing at the University of Houston. His book of poems, City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award.

  Of “Ode to the Common Housefly,” Kozma writes: “I guess there are two things at work here: the form and the subject. The subject is easy. I’ve always been fascinated by insects, and a few years ago I decided to write a series of odes in celebration of those insects that most people (except entomologists, I suppose) would not celebrate. The form is my attempting to mix earnestness with pomposity, the ornate with the mundane, trying to pack so much into the poem (sonically and linguistically) that it bleeds outside its own lines, finally transforming into the honest appreciation of a housefly couched in a psalm-like prayer.”

  HAILEY LEITHAUSER was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1954 and grew up in Florida and Maryland. She is the author of Swoop (Graywolf, 2013). Her work appears in Copper Nickel, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, and The Best American Poetry 2010 and 2014. She has lived up and down the East Coast and has had too many jobs to count, her last full-time gig as the senior reference librarian at the Department of Energy. She now teaches occasionally at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

  Of “The Pickpocket Song,” Leithauser writes: “ ‘Pickpocket’ came to be when I was muttering around one day last winter, whining online about a terminal lack of inspiration, and possibly to shut me up, Amy Beeder devised an exercise for us to try in which she sent me a line from a draft she was toying with to use anywhere within a poem of my own. I was then to send her a line from my draft for her to incorporate, so that each poem would end up sharing the two lines.

  “Neither of us knew what the other person’s title or subject matter was beforehand so there was much joy and long-distance clinking of glasses when the lines actually ended up playing quite well off one another and we both got a nice poem out of the deal. (If you want to find out which were the borrowed lines, you can read both poems in the 2014 summer issue of 32 Poems. As to who wrote which line, I’ll never tell.) We liked the exercise so much that now we’re talking about putting together an anthology as soon as we can come up with a dozen or so like-minded writers to pair off and a snappy title.”

  DANA LEVIN was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1965 and grew up in the Mojave Desert. She is the author of three books of poetry: In the Surgical Theatre (Copper Canyon Press, 1999), Wedding Day (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), and Sky Burial (Copper Canyon Press, 2011). A recipient of awards from the Rona Jaffe, Whiting, and Guggenheim foundations, Levin splits her time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Maryville University in St. Louis, where she serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence. This is her first appearance in The Best American Poetry.

  Of “Watching the Sea Go,” Levin writes: “I was staying on a beloved part of the Northern California coast intending to write, but all I kept doing was taking thirty-second videos of the sea. It seemed like such an absurd activity (the sea was right there!), but I was compelled. On the page I’d been troubling our environmental future; perhaps the videos were little stays against the End.”

  PATRICIA LOCKWOOD was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1982, and raised in all the worst cities of the Midwest. She is the author of the poetry collections Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (Penguin Books, 2014) and Balloon Pop Outlaw Black (Octopus Books, 2012).

  Of “See a Furious Waterfall Without Water,” Lockwood writes: “In 1969, they drained Niagara Falls. In 2010, I was messing around on my computer, and I saw a headline enjoining me to look at ‘a waterfall without water.’ I clicked through and found a photoset of empty Niagara. It had not occurred to me that a waterfall could be conditional, like a lap. The character, all of a sudden, stood there quite solidly, fixing his cuffs and looking generally dissipated, needing nothing so much as a drink. It was apparent he had a wedding to go to.”

  DORA MALECH was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1981 and grew up in Maryland. She earned degrees at Yale University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has received a Frederick M. Clapp Poetry Writing Fellowship from Yale, a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Teaching-Writing Fellowship from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a Glenn Schaeffer Poetry Award, a Writer’s Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. The Waywiser Press published her first full-length collection of poems, Shore Ordered Ocean, in 2009, and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center published her second collection, Say So, in 2011. Her poetry has been adapted into short films for the Motionpoems series, and it has been featured in a musical collaboration with composer Jacob Cooper in his song cycle Silver Threads (Nonesuch Records, 2014). Malech lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she joined the faculty of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University as an assistant professor of poetry in 2014.

  Of “Party Games,” Malech writes: “After piñatas made appearances at a friend’s baby shower a few years ago and another friend’s bachelorette party this past year, my childhood fascination was revived. Watching some of the kindest, gentlest women I knew beating a papier-mâché animal with a stick got me thinking about the complicated role of play, especially violent play, in childhood and adulthood. Not all of this thinking made its way into the poem, and there are numerous cultural and religious traditions and a rich global history of the piñata that didn’t make their way explicitly into the scene. I focused in on specific visual memories: the moment when the stick we were using to hit the piñata (actually just an ancient wooden-handled ice-scraper from my car) broke under the force of the blows, the smile beneath the blindfold, the two-fisted grip, and so forth. In revising the poem, I chose to specify the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘we,’ but never to specify the age of the participants, so the poem could be read as a child’s game, as I had witnessed and experienced many times. It felt important to me on a personal level that the poem functioned as a palimpsest, with adult violence enacted in a child’s game and a child’s sense of play revived in adulthood.”

  DONNA MASINI was born in Brooklyn in 1954 and has lived in New York ever since. She is the author of two collections of poems—Turning to Fiction (W. W. Norton, 2004) and That Kind of Danger (Beacon Press, 1994), which was selected by Mona Van Duyn for the Barnard Women Poet’s Prize—and a novel, About Yvonne (Norton, 1998). She is an associate professor of English at Hunter College, where she teaches in the MFA creative writing program. She has recently finished The Good Enough Mother, a novel.

  Of “Anxieties,” Masini writes: “After finishing a novel, I was in that drifting place, scribbling, slowly collecting drafts toward a new book I’m calling 4:30 Movie. Terrance Hayes gave me the idea of the ‘word scramble poem’—a form he’d ‘invented.’ As with any prompt, it might or might not lead somewhere, but there’s always a surprise (once you find ‘orgasm’ imbedded in ‘smorgasbord’ it starts you off somewhere unexpected) and my first attempt ended up as a couple of lines in another poem: ‘If you think in anagrams, / parades and drapes, diapers, rape, despair and aspire / all come out of paradise.’ In these poems I’ll give myself different formal conditions, but every line must end (and in s
ome poems begin) with one of the words that comes out of the scramble. Sometimes I use it to ‘warm up.’ Here’s the thing: I’ve always loved watching words nesting or recombining inside other words. As a kid I’d look at a street sign or Corn Flakes box and see how many words I could find inside a word or phrase. I think it calmed me down. So this process feels deeply familiar. Sometimes I try it when I’m anxious about writing—a sort of ‘meditation meets Boggle’—hence the title of this poem.”

  Born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1972, AIREA D. MATTHEWS is a Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow. She is a lecturer of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she earned her MFA. She is the co–executive editor of The Offing.

  Matthews writes: “ ‘If My Late Grandmother Were Gertrude Stein’ started as a Facebook status shortly after I read Stein’s Tender Buttons. I began to consider the ways in which my grandmother, a fifth-grade dropout during the Great Depression, grasped at language to share her fractured narratives. She didn’t have any direct experience with modernism as a formal construct. However, I noticed a relationship between Gertrude Stein and my grandmother’s disparate lives and identities. The poem serves as a seemingly impossible bridge between the three of us.”

  JAMAAL MAY writes and records poetry, music, and short films. He is the author of Hum and founder of Organic Weapon Arts, which he codirects with his partner, Tarfia Faizullah.

  Of “There Are Birds Here,” May writes: “I wanted to throw my half cent into the national conversation about Detroit. A deluge of thoughtless speaking on the subject drove me to reach for craft elements that would help me argue for attention to the space between shadow and light—the space we all actually exist in. The bird figuration came in when I jokingly said, ‘Hey, there are birds in there, too,’ after I noticed that reviewers latched on to the metal in Hum but usually overlooked the feathers. They also show up because I’m obsessed with the hypothesis that context is more important than object. Birds were among the pet objects I heard writers express their ire for seeing in ‘too many poems’ (too many for what, I wonder). The layer beneath is ‘I’m tired of birds appearing in the same context.’ But since we don’t invent a new language for every book anyway, are we ever really doing much more than looking for a new context when we decide to put this word next to that one? So if I can make a plain, old bird do real work in a poem, I get to start the conversation about limited thinking right there. I cribbed the negation move from Alan Dugan’s ‘Closing Time at the Second Avenue Deli.’ He never lets the metaphor rest, even though he knows it can’t be taken back after we’ve seen it. It’s a great way to show complexity rather than beg others to acknowledge it. My closing lines got worked and reworked until the music and sense synced with the enjambments. It creates a tension between sentence and line that puts ambivalence in the reader’s body, which can’t be achieved by simply saying ‘this is complicated.’ Michael Bazzett, an excellent poet and high school teacher, told me he and his students call this a ‘pump fake,’ a basketball move in which you quickly pretend to shoot so that the defender flinches or jumps to block you, making it easy to just go around them.