Best American Poetry 2018

by David Lehman

Sometimes I spoke to you, if only in dreams.

  Dear Office, the memory of photosynthesis

  runs like an electrical current

  through your walls, your concrete floors,

  the humming bevatron of your dataports.

  I have woven new garments

  from my own hair, which seeks the earth.

  Things I vouchsafe:

  I have never been afraid of the falling dream.

  I speak in no tongue other than my own.

  I cannot even order a meal in your country.

  When I sleep at night I recall your secret,

  which is the world’s secret, only

  smaller and green, a lost coin’s verdigris.

  At those times you are a weather unto me.

  Let me be the first to greet you

  when you sit at the right hand of our God.

  from Seneca Review

  WANG PING

  * * *

  老家—Lao Jia

  At fifteen, my father ran away from his widowed mother to fight the Japanese.

  “I’ll come back with a Ph.D. and serve my country with better English and knowledge,”

  I pledged at the farewell party in Beijing, 1986.

  家 : jia—home: a roof under which animals live.

  老家 : lao jia—old home that ties us to ancestors, land, and sea.

  When asked where I’m from,

  I say “Weihai,” even though

  nobody knows where it is,

  even though I’ve never been to the place.

  He lost his left ear in a bayonet fight with a Japanese soldier. Two years later, American cannons split his eardrums.

  The night I arrived at JFK, the Mets won the World Series and the noise on the street went on till three. I got up at six and went to work in my sponsor’s antique shop in Manhattan.

  The bag lady stopped her cart on the busy street and peed onto a subway grate.

  “Did you jump or fly?” asked my landlady from her mah-jongg table. Then she laughed and told me that her husband had jumped ship ten years ago, in Brooklyn. When he opened his fifth Chinese take-out, he bought her a passport and flew her to Queens.

  The only thing he liked to talk about was his old home, Weihai, its plump sea cucumbers and sweet apples, men with broad shoulders, stubborn thighs, and girls with long braids making steamed bread.

  “I don’t know why,” she said, shivering behind her fruit stand. “Back home, I could go for days without a penny in my pocket, and I didn’t feel poor. Now, if my money goes down below four figures, I panic.” She scanned the snow-covered streets of Chinatown. “I guess I really don’t want to be homeless here.”

  I hired the babysitter when she mentioned her hometown—Weihai.

  The president visited the rice paddies in Vietnam where a pilot had been downed thirty-three years ago, before he brought his bones back home.

  My father tried to return to Weihai after his discharge from the Navy. With his rank, he could find work only in a coal-mine town nearby. My mother refused to go. He went alone, and soon contracted TB. Mother ordered me to date the county administrator’s son so my father could come home.

  “No, I’m not sad.” The street kid shook her head.

  “How can I miss something I’ve never had?”

  On her sixtieth birthday, my grandma went home to die. She would take two ships, one from the island to Shanghai, then from Shanghai to Yantai. From there, she would take two buses to reach Weihai. I carried her onto the big ship at the Shanghai Port, down to the bottom, where she’d spend three days on a mattress, on the floor, with hundreds of fellow passengers. “How are you going to make it, Grandma?” I asked. She pulled out a pair of embroidered shoes from her parcel and placed them between my feet. “My sweetheart and liver, come to see your old home soon, before it’s too late.”

  House—房—fang: a door over a square, a place, a direction.

  He never lost his accent, never learned Mandarin or the island dialect.

  Weihai, a small city

  in Shandong Province,

  on the coast of the Yellow Sea,

  a home, where my grandfather

  and his father were born,

  where my grandma married,

  raised her children, and

  now lies in the yam fields,

  nameless, next to her husband,

  an old frontier to fend off Japanese pirates,

  a place I come from, have never seen.

  Back from America, my mother furnished her home on the island, bought an apartment in a suburb of Shanghai, and is considering a third one in Beijing. “A cunning rabbit needs three holes,” she wrote to her daughters, demanding their contributions.

  They swore, before boarding the ship, that they’d send money home to bring more relatives over; in return, they were promised that if they died, their bodies would be sent back home for burial.

  I drink American milk—a few drops in tea.

  I eat American rice—Japanese brand.

  Chinese comes to me only in dreams—in black-and-white

  pictures.

  Since my father ran away at fifteen, all he talked about was his lao jia—old home—on the shore of the Yellow Sea.

  Room—屋—wu: a body unnamed and homeless until it finds a destination.

  We greet a stranger with

  “Where are you from?”

  When we meet a friend on the street, we say,

  “Where have you been? Where are you going?”

  My mother buried her husband on the island of East China Sea, where he lived for forty years.

  家—a roof under which animals live

  房—a door over a square, a place, a direction

  屋—a body unnamed and homeless until it finds a destination

  —my wandering roots for lao jia—老家

  from Poetry

  JAMES MATTHEW WILSON

  * * *

  On a Palm

  The local psychic closed up shop last week;

  Took down her shingle with its big black palm

  Held up to lure those driving by away

  From busy motions to her inner calm;

  To draw them where sharp incense burned and scarves

  Billowed mysterious shadows down the hall;

  Where faded posters of the astral signs

  And chakra nodes sagged from each hapless wall.

  She’d greet them in her gold-ringed gypsy getup,

  Her hands emerging to enfold their own

  And lead them to a table draped in silks

  While querying in a warm and foreign tone.

  Of late, she’d clutch them with a tighter grip

  And seek to stretch one hour into two

  With natal charts, then tarot cards, and listening

  For any dead who might be passing through.

  I’m glad the window’s dark, For Rent sign hung.

  But, when I see my hands gripped round the wheel,

  The knuckles growing cracked and lined with age,

  I think how there is no one who will peel

  Them open, lay the fingers gently straight,

  And study all those traceries of fate.

  from Presence

  RYAN WILSON

  * * *

  Face It

  A silence, bodied like wing-beaten air,

  Perturbs your face sometimes when parties end

  And, half-drunk, you stand looking at some star

  That flickers like a coin wished down a well,

  Or when you hear a voice behind you whisper

  Your name, and turn around, and no one’s there.

  You’re in it then, once more, the stranger’s house

  Perched in the mountain woods, the rot-sweet smell

  Of fall, the maples’ millions, tongues of fire,

  And there, whirl harrowing the gap, squint-far,

  That unidentified fleck, approaching and

  Receding at once, rapt in the wind
’s spell—

  Pulse, throb, winged dark that haunts the clean light’s glare—

  That thing that you’re becoming, that you are.

  from The New Criterion

  CHRISTIAN WIMAN

  * * *

  Assembly

  It may be Lord our voice is suited now

  only for irony, onslaught, and the minor hierarchies of rage.

  It may be that only the crudest, cruelest transformations touch us,

  gauzewalkers in the hallways of a burn ward.

  I remember a blind man miraculous for the sounds of his mouth,

  every bird rehearsed and released for the children to cheer.

  Where is he now, in what icy facility or sunlit square,

  blackout shades and a brambled mouth, singing extinctions?

  from Resistance, Rebellion, Life

  CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES AND COMMENTS

  * * *

  ALLISON ADAIR was born in Pittsburgh in 1977 and grew up in Gettysburg and Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. She studied at Brown University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. She teaches at Boston College.

  Adair writes: “Though I continued to read and study poetry intensely after graduate school, I didn’t write for several years, until one day I had to. During my first pregnancy, I was vacuuming one of two antique Persian rugs, bought online, when suddenly I felt that something was wrong. Something small, wordless. By the following week, the pregnancy had ended. Around that time, moths began to swarm my apartment. I rolled up the edge of the rug I’d been tending to find it threaded through with larvae—they’d been there all along.

  “Months later, I was pregnant again. Pregnancy was reconnecting me, physically, to poetry, especially in terms of metaphor: as transfer, and as a paradox wherein the familiar becomes unfamiliar, the unfamiliar familiar. This strange time is the occasion of ‘Miscarriage.’ After the second pregnancy ended, I sat down, exhausted, and wrote, from somewhere underneath craft. The poem is decidedly spare—straightforward and bereft. The rug is described literally; the title refuses any play. The only technique I allowed myself, really, comes in the line breaks, which are annotated both in meaning and in sound. But I also couldn’t help reflecting on the hands that might have woven that rug, on where the women in the pattern might have existed before arriving in my apartment, on all they’d seen, all their terrible wisdom.”

  KAVEH AKBAR was born in Tehran, Iran. Calling a Wolf a Wolf, his first book, was published in 2017 by Alice James Books in the United States and by Penguin in the United Kingdom. A recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, he teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson College.

  Of “Against Dying,” Akbar writes: “In the summer of 2013, in the throes of one of many rock bottoms, my body began giving up. I was getting sicker and sicker, closer and closer to a Rubicon that, once crossed, could never be crossed back again. One day, grace of graces, I crawled my way toward help and (very) long story short, I slowly began getting better. The poem asks: ‘how shall I live now / in the unexpected present?’ It was a kind of rebirth. To whom do you submit your gratitude, your bewilderment at being given a second chance? And what to do with a body ravaged by its previous occupant? Roethke said, ‘The serious problems in life are never fully solved, but some states can be resolved rhythmically.’ This poem is deeply invested in that promise.”

  JULIA ALVAREZ was born in New York City in 1950, and grew up in her parents’ native country of the Dominican Republic. She recently retired as a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College. In addition to poetry, she has written fiction, nonfiction, and books for young readers; titles include: Homecoming (Plume, 1996), The Other Side/El Otro Lado (Plume, 1996), and The Woman I Kept to Myself (A Shannon Ravenel Book, 2011). She received a 2013 National Medal of the Arts and is a founder of Border of Lights, an annual gathering of activists, artists, educators at the border of Haiti and the DR. Visit her at juliaalvarez.com.

  Of “American Dreams,” Alvarez writes: “When we arrived in New York in 1960, refugees from the dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, my parents kept telling my sisters and me that this was the land of freedom where we had the opportunity to become whatever we wanted to be. They believed in the American Dream. I wish I could say that I shared their high-mindedness. But I was a kid, and my American Dream was all about candy. I couldn’t get enough of it. In Queens where we lived there was a whole store dedicated to candy, owned by an immigrant mother and her son, earlier-generation versions of us. I roamed the aisles, pronouncing the alluring names under my breath, the son watching me in a way that unsettled me. (Now, I wonder if he was just worried about shoplifting, not interested in my skinny—despite all that sugar—prepubescent body.) During those early years of my sweets-fixation, Martin Luther King was marching; demonstrators were being attacked by dogs, getting jailed, lynched; girls my age were dying in bombed churches. I’m astonished that those scenes on the news didn’t register. Or maybe I was subliminally aware, and that’s why I didn’t buy the un-nuanced version of the American Dream. The violence on TV was not unlike the violence of the regime we had escaped. The American Dream was not equally accessible to all. The Land of Good and Plenty was still just the name of a candy.”

  A. R. AMMONS was born outside Whiteville, North Carolina, in 1926. He started writing poetry aboard a US Navy destroyer escort in the South Pacific in World War II. After his discharge, “Archie”—everyone who knew him called him Archie—attended Wake Forest University, where he studied the sciences. He took a class in Spanish, married the teacher, and went on to work as an executive in his father-in-law’s biological glass company before he began teaching poetry at Cornell University in 1964. Ammons wrote nearly thirty books of poetry, many published by W. W. Norton, including Glare (1997), Garbage (1993), A Coast of Trees (1981), and Sphere (1974). His posthumous books include Bosh and Flapdoodle (Norton, 2005), Selected Poems (Library of America, 2006), and a two-volume set of his collected poems from Norton in 2017. A longtime and greatly beloved professor at Cornell University, Archie was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1994. He died on February 25, 2001, a week after turning seventy-five.

  DAVID BARBER is the author of two collections of poems published by Northwestern University Press: Wonder Cabinet (2006) and The Spirit Level (1995), which received the Terrence Des Pres Prize from TriQuarterly Books. “Sherpa Song” is included in his forthcoming collection, Secret History, to be published by Northwestern in 2019. He is the poetry editor of The Atlantic and teaches in the Harvard Writing Program.

  Of “Sherpa Song,” Barber writes: “Mountaineering is known to be a spiritual pursuit and a technical feat. So, too, poems, at least the ones that move mountains. ‘Sherpa Song’ is one of a series of numbers in my forthcoming collection Secret History cast in a stringent nonce form: five stanzas of five lines, all lashed together in a cat’s cradle of slant rhymes. The gambit is to grapple with syntax and cadence in tight quarters to get to a vantage point that would otherwise remain out of reach. In this case, hitching my gear to the double-edged cognomen ‘sherpa’—both the ancestral and occupational collective term for the storied alpine guides of the Himalayas—was a way of groping toward a rough sympathetic magic that might turn formal stricture into lyric resonance. If pressed on why the form has gotten under my skin, I’d have to echo George Mallory’s gnomic rationale for his assaults on Everest: ‘Because it’s there.’ ”

  ANDREW BERTAINA was born in Merced, California, in 1980. He was raised in Chico, California, and lives in Washington, DC. He works at American University in the library and as an adjunct in the department of literature. His work is available at andrewbertaina.com.

  Bertaina writes: “When I wrote ‘A Translator’s Note,’ I had been reading essays about translation, and thinking about the process and about many of the great writers that I’ve read only in translation. I
n these essays about translation, particularly with, say, War and Peace or In Search of Lost Time, I kept reading arguments as to why one translation or another was more artful or precise than what had come before. It seemed, at least to me, that an argument could be made that every book deserved a thousand translations to try and capture all of the nuances of language and thought of the original.

  “From there, I thought about the immense amount of importance we attach to meeting a writer, as though in their presence, some of their true essence is distilled, and the residual effects attach themselves to the person witnessing them like dust around stars. With those intertwining notions of translation and authorship in mind, I wrote ‘A Translator’s Note,’ as though merely seeing a writer and the way he bent to talk to a woman somehow superseded the boundaries of language.”

  FRANK BIDART was born in Bakersfield, California, in 1939. In 1957 he entered the University of California, Riverside. In 1962 he began graduate work at Harvard, where he studied with Reuben Brower and Robert Lowell. His books include Star Dust (2005) and Desire (1997), both from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Desire received the 1998 Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965–2016 (FSG) won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 2018. Bidart is the coeditor of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems (FSG, 2003). He has taught at Wellesley College since 1972. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  BRUCE BOND was born in Pasadena, California, in 1954 and is the author of twenty books including, most recently, Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (University of Michigan, 2015), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, University of Tampa, 2016), Gold Bee (Helen C. Smith Award, Crab Orchard Award, Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), Sacrum (Four Way Books, 2017), and Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997–2015 (E. Phillabaum Award, Louisiana State University Press, 2017). Five books are forthcoming: Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize, Elixir Press, 2018), Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse Press, 2018), Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions, 2018), Words Written Against the Walls of the City (LSU, 2019), and Scar (Etruscan Press, 2020). He is a regents professor of English at the University of North Texas.