by David Lehman
Weaver writes: “ ‘City of Eternal Spring’ is the title poem from my most recent collection of poetry, the book that completes my Plum Flower Trilogy that began with The Plum Flower Dance and includes The Government of Nature. This title poem from City of Eternal Spring takes as its subject the Daoist strategy of working toward emptiness in sitting meditation and in the application of new consciousness acquired in meditation toward the business of daily living and the exploration of self and experience.
“ ‘City of Eternal Spring’ also refers to the heart, which in Chinese is represented by the character xin and also means ‘mind.’ In Daoist contemplative life, the realization of the heart and mind as one is preliminary to working toward emptiness. In that way the poem celebrates release from the entanglement of trauma and trauma repetition, a victory in that my life is no longer so deeply circumscribed by the trauma and by its effects.
“The poem establishes imagery of the mind as architectural structure, one that is both filled and transformed by the process of healing from childhood sexual abuse through healing contexts established in intersections with Chinese culture. The mind as architectural structure with consciousness formed in light and the tiniest specks of electromagnetic energy driven by the body’s considerable electricity have formed a central metaphor for my work over the last ten years. It emerges from my Daoist studies and a foundation in math, science, architecture, and engineering I received early in life.”
CANDACE G. WILEY is cofounder and codirector of The Watering Hole, an online community dedicated to poets of color. She was born in 1985 and raised between small towns in rural South Carolina, where there were more cattle than people and no need for stoplights. She received her BA from Bowie State University (the first Maryland HBCU), her MA from Clemson University, and her MFA at the University of South Carolina. She has served as the creative writing director for a production of the musical revue Jacques Brel: Alive and Well and Living in Paris, which was a benefit performance for Haiti, and she has written dialogues and poetry for the prototype of Ghosts of South Carolina College, an iPhone app that shows the enslaved people who built and maintained antebellum USC. She has recently returned to the United States after conducting research in San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia, as a Fulbright Fellow. Palenque is one of the many towns founded by escaped slaves in the 1600s—and the only one that still exists in Colombia. The people have their own language as well as customs that trace back to the Bantu and Kikongo in West Africa. She teaches in South Carolina.
On “Dear Black Barbie,” Wiley writes: “While in the process of going through Denise Duhamel’s Kinky, I needed to add bits of my own childhood perception of Barbie to the conversation. Although I grew up well loved by my African American community, saw many of its members as beautiful and handsome, and had a healthy sense of self, I still had a very complex relationship to skin. Later, as an undergraduate student at Bowie State University, a Historically Black University, I met many other young women who were willing to admit shameful childhood propensities toward whiteness as the standard of beauty—shameful because we were young, revolutionary, decidedly black, and millennial—although we still had to reassert and re-remind ourselves, and each other, of our own inherent beauty. This state of unrecognized beauty worked with the hypersexualization of Barbie to the extent that it opened a young girl, who did not fully know that sex existed, to create her own childhood lesbian erotica following the idea that if Ken couldn’t love Barbie, someone had to.
“With this poem, I was able to take a real childhood memory and pair it with my own adult commentary about the very historical lightening and blond-ing of African American women whose beauty is to be admired as it is and the masculinization of those who do not fit the aforementioned categories of the ‘beautiful.’ Each is a ticket that costs something. This poem asks: Have African American women earned the right to ‘womanhood’ and have we really progressed?”
TERENCE WINCH’s most recent books are This Way Out (Hanging Loose Press, 2014), Lit from Below (Salmon Poetry [Ireland], 2013), and Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor (Hanging Loose, 2011). He has received an American Book Award, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Gertrude Stein Award for innovative writing. Born in the Bronx, New York, he has lived in the Washington, DC, area for many years. He has played traditional Irish music all his life.
Of “Subject to Change,” Winch writes: “I have been writing a lot of sonnets in the past year or two, so much so that even when I don’t set out to write a sonnet, I somehow wind up with a fourteen-line poem. I think that’s what happened with this poem. Change—what the Romantics called ‘mutability’—is one of the great subjects of poetry, right up there with sex and death. We are always trying to elude what Wordsworth called ‘the unimaginable touch of Time,’ and I think this poem is a protest against the ways in which we are ruthlessly measured by the passage of time.”
JANE WONG was born in New Jersey in 1984. The recipient of fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Kundiman, Squaw Valley, and the Fine Arts Work Center, she holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She teaches at the University of Washington and the Richard Hugo House in Seattle.
Wong writes: “ ‘Thaw’ is a poem for the New Year—a proclamation of warmth and messiness. H.D.’s early work feels tied to this poem; she writes in ‘Oread’: ‘hurl your green over us, / cover us with your pools of fir.’ I wanted that feeling of impossible warmth and potential, hurling us into each new day.”
MONICA YOUN is the author of Blackacre (Graywolf Press, 2016), Ignatz (Four Way Books, 2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Barter (Graywolf Press, 2003). She received her AB from Princeton University, her MPhil in English literature from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and her JD from Yale Law School. She practiced law for more than a decade, testifying before Congress on multiple occasions, appearing as an expert commentator on PBS and MSNBC, and publishing political commentary in Slate and The New York Times. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. She has been awarded the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and the Witter Bynner Fellowship of the Library of Congress. She currently teaches poetry at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts and in the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College.
Of “March of the Hanged Men,” Youn writes: “This poem is part of a series loosely based on François Villon’s fifteenth-century poem ‘Ballade des pendus’ (‘Ballad of the Hanged Men’). Villon’s poem is in the voice of a group of corpses hanging from a gibbet in the town square, describing their processes of bodily decomposition and praying for human forgiveness and divine absolution. The figure of the hanged man also features in multiple religious and cultural traditions, often signifying a moment of transformation into a predestined role. This particular poem draws from my residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbertide, Italy, where, on successive days, I saw the ants described in the poem as well as Piero della Francesca’s great painting The Resurrection in the nearby town of San Sepolcro.”
MAGAZINES WHERE THE POEMS WERE FIRST PUBLISHED
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Able Muse, poetry ed. Alexander Pepple. www.ablemuse.com
The Academy of American Poets, Poem-a-Day series, ed. Alex Dimitrov. www.poets.org
Alaska Quarterly Review, editor-in-chief Ronald Spatz. University of Alaska Anchorage, 3211 Providence Drive, Anchorage, AK 99508. www.uaa.alaska.edu/aqr/
The American Poetry Review, eds. David Bonanno and Elizabeth Scanlon. 320 S. Broad St., Hamilton #313, Philadelphia, PA 19102. www.aprweb.org
The Atlantic Monthly, poetry ed. David Barber. The Watergate, 600 New Hampshire Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20037.
The Awl, poetry ed. Mark Bibbins. www.theawl.com
Beltway Poetry Quarterly, ed. Kim Roberts. www.beltwaypoetry.com
Birdfeast, editor-in-chief Jessica Poli. www.birdfeastmagaz
ine.com
Blackbird, an online journal of literature and the arts, senior eds. Gregory Donovan and Mary Flinn. www.blackbird.vcu.edu
Burrow Press Review, ed. Ryan Rivas and guest poetry ed. Erica Dawson. www.burrowpressreview.com
The Carolina Quarterly, poetry ed. Lee Norton. 510 Greenlaw Hall CB# 3520, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520. www.thecarolinaquarterly.com/
The Cincinnati Review, poetry ed. Don Bogen. PO Box 210069, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0069. www.cincinnatireview.com
Colorado Review, poetry eds. Donald Revell, Sasha Steensen, and Matthew Cooperman. Department of English, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523-9105. www.coloradoreview.colostate.edu/colorado-review
Columbia Poetry Review, eds. John Bishop, Abigail Zimmer, James Eidson, Tyler Cain Lacy, David A. Moran, Christopher Neely, Daniel Scott Parker, Victoria A. Sanz, Matthew Sharos, Amy Jo Trier-Walker, and Gabrielle Faith Williams. www.colum.edu/columbiapoetryreview
Conduit, ed. William Waltz. 788 Osceola Avenue, Saint Paul, MN 55105. www.conduit.org
Court Green, eds. CM Burroughs, Tony Trigilio, and David Trinidad. Department of Creative Writing, Columbia College Chicago, 600 South Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60605. www.colum.edu/courtgreen
Denver Quarterly, poetry ed. Bin Ramke. University of Denver, Department of English, 2000 E. Asbury, Denver, CO 80208. www.du.edu/denverquarterly/
Fence, poetry eds. Brian Blanchfield, Max Winter, Farid Matuk, Charles Valle, Mendi Lewis Obadike, and Rebecca Wolff. www.fenceportal.org
Fruita Pulp, ed. Kyle Harvey. www.fruitapulp.com
The Georgia Review, ed. Stephen Corey. Main Library, Room 706A, 320 S. Jackson St., The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602-9009. garev.uga.edu
Granta, poetry ed. Rachael Allen. www.granta.com
Harper’s, “Readings” ed. Giles Harvey. www.harpers.org
The Hopkins Review, eds. John T. Irwin, Brad Leithauser, Alice McDermott, Jean McGarry, Mary Jo Salter, Dave Smith, and David Yezzi. The Writing Seminars, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 North Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21218. www.thehopkinsreview.com
The Iowa Review, poetry eds. Nikki-Lee Birdsey and Anthony Cinquepalmi. 308 EPB, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242. www.iowareview.org
The Journal, poetry eds. Megan Peak and David Winter. www.thejournalmag.org
The Kenyon Review, poetry ed. David Baker. www.kenyonreview.org
Kinfolks Quarterly, poetry eds. Jerriod Avant, Aziza Barnes, Joshua Bennett, Sean DesVignes, Safia Elhillo, Eve Ewing, Nate Marshall, and Lauren Yates. www.kinfolksquarterly.com
Lemon Hound, ed. Sina Queyras. www.lemonhound.com
The Literary Review, poetry ed. Craig Morgan Teicher. www.theliteraryreview.org
The Manhattan Review, ed. Philip Fried. 440 Riverside Drive #38, New York, NY 10027. www.themanhattanreview.com
Muzzle, editor-in-chief Stevie Edwards; poetry eds. Benjamin Clark and Laura Swearingen-Steadwell. www.muzzlemagazine.com
The New Criterion, poetry ed. David Yezzi. 900 Broadway, Suite 602, New York, NY 10003. www.newcriterion.com
New Ohio Review, ed. Jill Allyn Rosser. English Dept., 360 Ellis Hall, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701. www.ohio.edu/nor/
The New Yorker, poetry ed. Paul Muldoon. 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. www.newyorker.com
Ninth Letter, poetry ed. Michael Madonick. University of Illinois, Dept. of English, 608 South Wright St., Urbana, IL 61801. www.ninthletter.com
PANK, eds. Colin Winnette, Roxane Gay, and M. Bartley Seigel. www.pankmagazine.com
The Paris Review, poetry ed. Robyn Creswell. 544 W. 27th St., New York, NY 10001. www.theparisreview.org
Pleiades, poetry eds. Wayne Miller and Kathryn Nuernberger. www.ucmo.edu/pleiades/
PMS poemmemoirstory, poetry ed. Halley Cotton. www.uab.edu/cas/englishpublications/pms-poemmemoirstory
Poetry, ed. Don Share. www.poetryfoundation.org
Poetry Daily, eds. Don Selby and Diane Boller. www.poems.com
Poetry Northwest, ed. Kevin Craft. www.poetrynw.org
Post Road, guest ed. Suzanne Matson. www.postroadmag.com
Powder Keg, eds. Zoe Dzunko and Sarah Jean Grimm. www.powderkegmagazine.com
Prairie Schooner, assistant editors: poetry, Arden Eli Hill and Rebecca Macijeski. 123 Andrews Hall, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE 68588-0334. www.prairieschooner.unl.edu
A Public Space, poetry ed. Brett Fletcher Lauer. www.apublicspace.org
Rattle, eds. Alan Fox and Timothy Green. 12411 Ventura Blvd., Studio City, CA 91604. www.rattle.com
The Rumpus, poetry ed. Brian Spears. www.therumpus.net
The Southampton Review, poetry ed. Julie Sheehan. www.stonybrook.edu/southampton/mfa/publishing/tsr.html
The Southern Review, poetry ed. Jessica Faust. Louisiana State University, 338 Johnston Hall, Baton Rouge, LA 70803. www.thesouthernreview.org
Southwest Review, editor-in-chief Willard Spiegelman. PO Box 750374, Dallas, TX 75275-0374. www.smu.edu/SouthwestReview
Subtropics, poetry ed. Sidney Wade. www.subtropics.english.ufl.edu
32 Poems, ed. George David Clark; associate eds. Susanna Childress, Nick McRae, Matt Morton, and Michael Shewmaker. Valparaiso University, 1320 Chapel Drive South, Valparaiso, IN 46383. www.32poems.com
The Threepenny Review, ed. Wendy Lesser. PO Box 9131, Berkeley, CA 94709. www.threepennyreview.com
Tupelo Quarterly, senior poetry eds. T. J. Jarrett, Katherine Durham Oldmixon, and Stacey Waite. www.tupeloquarterly.com
Unsplendid, eds. Douglas Basford, Jason Gray, and Ida Stewart. www.unsplendid.com
upstreet, poetry ed. Jessica Greenbaum. upstreet-mag.org/
Verse Daily, eds. Hunter Hamilton and Campbell Russo. www.versedaily.org
The Volta, eds. Afton Wilky and Joshua Marie Wilkinson. www.thevolta.org
West Branch, ed. G. C. Waldrep. www.bucknell.edu/westbranch
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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The series editor thanks Mark Bibbins for his invaluable assistance. Warm thanks go also to Nora Brooks, Danielle Chin, and Stacey Harwood; to Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu of Writers’ Representatives; and to Ashley Gilliam, David Stanford Burr, Daniel Cuddy, Erich Hobbing, and Gwyneth Stansfield at Scribner.
Grateful acknowledgment is made of the magazines in which these poems first appeared and the magazine editors who selected them. A sincere attempt has been made to locate all copyright holders. Unless otherwise noted, copyright to the poems is held by the individual poets.
Sarah Arvio, “Bodhisattva” from the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Derrick Austin, “Cedars of Lebanon” from Burrow Press Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Desiree Bailey, “A Retrograde” from Muzzle. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Melissa Barrett, “WFM: Allergic to Pine-Sol, Am I the Only One” from The Journal. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Mark Bibbins, “Swallowed” from Lemon Hound. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Jessamyn Birrer, “A Scatology” from Ninth Letter. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Chana Bloch, “The Joins” from The Southern Review and Poetry Daily. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Emma Bolden, “House Is an Enigma” from Conduit. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Dexter L. Booth, “Prayer at 3 a.m.” from The Volta. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Catherine Bowman, “Makeshift” from The New Yorker. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Rachael Briggs, “in the hall of the ruby-throated warbler” from Able Muse. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Jericho Brown, “Homeland” from Fence. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Rafael Campo, “DOCTORS LIE, MAY HIDE MISTAKES” from upstreet. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Julie Carr, “A fourteen-line poem on sex” from The Kenyon Review. Reprin
ted by permission of the poet.
Chen Chen, “for i will do/undo what was done/undone to me” from PANK. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Susanna Childress, “Careful, I Just Won a Prize at the Fair” from Columbia Poetry Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Yi-Fen Chou, “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” from Prairie Schooner. Reprinted by permission of Michael Derrick Hudson.
Erica Dawson, “Slow-Wave Sleep with a Fairy Tale” from Tupelo Quarterly. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Danielle DeTiberus, “In a Black Tank Top” from Rattle. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Natalie Diaz, “It Was the Animals” from Poetry. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Denise Duhamel, “Fornicating” from The Literary Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Thomas Sayers Ellis, “Vernacular Owl” from Poetry. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
