The Best American Poetry 2015 (21 page)

“After mashing up the lines, I didn't think I had a poem—I considered it more of an exercise. But a few months later, I found myself still thinking about ‘WFM.' The idea of recording and making permanent lines from the world's largest classifieds site (over eighty million classified ads are posted to the site each month!) drew me in. And connecting the various authors (many of whom were, um, pining after a ‘missed connection') was a nice bonus.”

M
ARK
B
IBBINS
was born in Albany, New York, in 1968, and has lived in New York City since 1991. He is the author of three books of poems, most recently
They Don't Kill You Because They're Hungry, They Kill You Because They're Full
(Copper Canyon Press, 2014). He teaches in the graduate writing programs of The New School, where he cofounded
LIT
magazine, and Columbia University. His poems have recently appeared in
The New Yorker
,
Poetry
,
Volt
, and
The Literary Review
. He edits the poetry section of
The Awl
.

Of “Swallowed,” Bibbins writes: “When Melissa Broder's last book came out, she invited a pack of us to write poems inspired by the seven deadly sins and seven heavenly virtues. I was assigned gluttony, which accounts for Ciacco's appearance—readers of Dante's
Inferno
might
remember him from the third circle—although one or two other vices also banged up against the poem.”

J
ESSAMYN
B
IRRER
was born in Falls Church, Virginia, in 1975. She lived and worked in Idaho and Washington before moving to her current home of Klamath Falls, Oregon, where she is an autism advocate, stay-at-home parent, and technical writing instructor. Her poems have recently appeared in
Illuminations
and in
Ninth Letter
.

Of “A Scatology,” Birrer writes: “Antonin Artaud said, ‘Where there is a stink of shit there is a smell of being'; Salvador Dalí, that given that our ‘highest mission is to spiritualize everything, it is [our] excrement in particular that needs it most.' Though I am neither French nor particularly surreal, my experience of being is no less a central concern, no less a thing both narrated and dictated by the body. I may feel as though my inward self were secret and hidden away in the closed systems of my anatomy, but in fact the body is not a closed system—in fact, we are all constantly and literally open to the world, human tunnels for food, air, and experience. We take the world in through the mouth, let it wind its way through the soft doughnut of the body, then let it go. This poem came from wanting to explore those voluntary and involuntary practices that make each of us no more and no less than any other creature. I wanted to write a love poem to being—to the anus, the alimentary canal, the body as practical and full of dirt. I wanted to revere the body.”

C
HANA
B
LOCH
was born in New York City in 1940. She is professor emerita of English at Mills College, where she taught for over thirty years and directed the creative writing program. From 2007 to 2012 she served as the first poetry editor of
www.persimmontree.org
, an online journal of the arts by women over sixty. Her
Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems, 1980–2015
, published by Autumn House Press, contains new work as well as selections from her four earlier collections—
The Secrets of the Tribe
(Sheep Meadow, 1980),
The Past Keeps Changing
(Sheep Meadow, 1992),
Mrs. Dumpty
(University of Wisconsin, 1998), and
Blood Honey
(Autumn House, 2009). She is cotranslator of the biblical
Song of Songs
(Random House, 1995; Modern Library Classic, 2006),
The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai
(Harper, 1986; rev. University of California, 1996), Amichai's
Open Closed Open
(Harcourt, 2000), and
Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch
(W. W. Norton, 2009). She has written a critical study,
Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible
(University of California, 1985).

Of “The Joins,” Bloch writes: “Two works of art and an argument—the materials for a poem. Whatever the argument was about, my husband and I had repaired the damage before I left for a month at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, California. On the way there, I was thinking about a ceramic cup I had seen online, a deep crimson, its surface lit by brilliant zigzags that seemed at first like a design element—a beautiful example of
kintsugi
(‘golden joinery'), the art of repairing broken pottery with a lacquer resin laced with gold. This practice honors the history of a broken cup or bowl instead of attempting to disguise it; the repaired vessel is often more beautiful for having been broken.

“In the meadow at Djerassi I found myself drawn to a sculpture by a visiting artist: two conical structures, twenty feet tall, made of slender redwood branches wired together. The two stood side by side, joined at mid-height by crisscrossing branches that made a little roof overhead as you moved from one to the other. The sculptor was a German artist, Roland Mayer, who had named it, appropriately,
Dialog
. I walked in and around and between the two parts, experiencing their connection. The ‘web' of branches that linked them got me thinking about the ways lovers are—and aren't—connected. Although it didn't become part of the poem itself, the time I spent with
Dialog
belongs to its prehistory, a generative experience that is stored in the body gathering energy until it can find its way into words.

“T. S. Eliot wrote that a poet's mind is ‘constantly amalgamating disparate experience,' ‘forming new wholes.' The Japanese art of
kintsugi
and Roland Mayer's
Dialog
joined with my memory of an argument to form a new whole, a poem celebrating the beauty of imperfection in human relationships as in art.”

E
MMA
B
OLDEN
was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1980. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and received her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She is the author of two full-length collections of poetry:
Maleficae
(GenPop Books, 2013) and
medi(t)ations
(Noctuary Press, 2015). She has written four chapbooks of poetry:
How to Recognize a Lady
(part of
Edge by Edge
, Toadlily Press, 2007);
The Mariner's Wife
(Finishing Line Press, 2008);
The Sad Epistles
(Dancing Girl Press, 2008); and
This Is Our Hollywood
(in
The Chapbook
, 2013). She has also written a nonfiction chapbook,
Geography V
(Winged City Press, 2014).

Of “House Is an Enigma,” Bolden writes: “If language is the house in which we all dwell, this poem provided me with a key. I wrote it in
the midst of a situation that I'd been told, in so many ways, that I wasn't supposed to talk about. So let me talk about it here, and plainly, and publicly, for the first time: I was about to have a total hysterectomy. For twenty-some years, I'd struggled with endometriosis and a host of other so-called ‘female problems' so rarely spoken about, publicly or privately, that they're known as silent epidemics. I was single and childless and thirty-two years old. I was furiously silent and furious with silence. I was also furious with language. I faced the biggest decision of my life and even the physician charged with helping me to make this decision spoke in metaphors, which invariably referenced houses. ‘I don't think,' he would say, ‘that your womb could viably house a fetus.' On a long and rambling drive through long and rambling rural Georgia, I noticed that I'd started to notice houses: row after row of them, all settling into their foundations with increasingly unsettled faces. After passing one particularly angry house, it occurred to me that perhaps the house was every bit as angry as I was with the metaphor my doctor used to talk about my situation. I began to write a poem in which the house talked about its frustrations with language and, through its doors, I began to settle my own frustrations and dwell more comfortably—and honestly—in the house that is my body.”

D
EXTER
L. B
OOTH
was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1986. He is the author of
Scratching the Ghost
(Graywolf Press, 2013), which won the 2012 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was selected by Major Jackson. His poems appear in
Blackbird
,
The Southeast Review
,
Ostrich Review
,
Grist
,
Willow Springs
, and
Virginia Quarterly Review
. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California.

Of “Prayer at 3 a.m.,” Booth writes: “Ultimately, our bodies fail us. Our voices fail us. Words fail us, too, but fortunately they hold up better and far longer than bodies do. Faith and hope (pick your brand: Religion, Humanity, Family . . . ) are intangible, yet they're two of the most vital things we can possess as humans. Youth can be a type of blindness, and that blindness can be sacred.

“Amendment: Everything is sacred. Everything is sacred. Even death.”

C
ATHERINE
B
OWMAN
was born on November 26, 1957, in El Paso, Texas. She is the author of
1-800-HOT-RIBS
(Gibbs Smith, 1993),
Rock Farm
(Gibbs Smith, 1996),
Notarikon
(Four Way Books, 2006),
The Plath Cabinet
(Four Way Books, 2009), and
Can I Finish, Please?
(Four Way Books, 2016). She has edited
Word of Mouth, Poems Featured on NPR's All Things Considered
.
She lives on a farm in Bloomington, Indiana, and teaches at Indiana University.

Bowman writes: “I was thinking about the word ‘makeshift,' imagining what it means to ‘make do' or ‘shift making' with the tools at hand—the imagination—within states of loss, abandonment, exile, environmental destruction, oil spills, etc.—the makeshift father, the makeshift mother, the makeshift grave, the makeshift holy city. The first lines in the poem came out of seeing photos of shorebirds and waterfowl, the laughing gull and royal tern covered in oil following the Gulf oil disaster. In what ways is the imagination resilient, generative, and/or destructive? I guess that is what the chiastic structure revealed for me, though I am not really sure. I am intrigued by the image of a fire ladder. I was working on the poem and had written several lines and was feeling kind of stuck. I was thinking about the poem when I went to bed and hoped some solution would come up while sleeping. That night I had a dream in which a sideways wooden X appeared. That's how the chiastic structure emerged. The poem ends with ‘string pieces for two': music?—hopeful, I think.”

R
ACHAEL
B
RIGGS
was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1984, but has lived for the last eight years in Australia. She is an associate professor in philosophy at the University of Queensland, and a research associate at the Australian National University. Her first collection of poems,
Free Logic
, was published in 2013 by University of Queensland Press.

Briggs writes: “ ‘in the hall of the ruby-throated warbler' is a love poem. When I wrote it, I followed the sounds and the feelings, and let the ideas follow. It's in Sapphic meter (or the English translation of Sapphic meter), which I feel is one of the most beautiful rhythmic devices I can command. Sapphic meter is also appropriate for a love poem addressed to a woman, by a woman. I've been writing Sapphic sonnets ever since a friend, commenting on another of my Sapphic love poems, complained that the last two lines weren't pulling their weight. First I thought, ‘I can't cut the second half of a stanza! That's against the formal rules!' Then I thought, ‘Says who?' ”

J
ERICHO
B
ROWN
has received a Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in
The New Republic
,
The New Yorker
, and
The Best American Poetry
. His first book,
Please
(New Issues, 2008), won the American Book Award,
and his second book,
The New Testament
(Copper Canyon, 2014), was named one of the best books of the year by
Library Journal
and the Academy of American Poets. He is an assistant professor in the creative writing program at Emory University in Atlanta.

Brown writes: “Can a single poem be: surreal, personal, about a ‘we' just as much as it is about an ‘I,' political, and interested in pop culture and current events? I wrote ‘Homeland' thinking about Henry Louis Gates and Barack Obama and what it means to be a very lonely citizen in a country that doesn't want your citizenship.”

R
AFAEL
C
AMPO
, MA, MD, DLitt, was born in Dover, New Jersey, in 1964, and teaches and practices internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is on the faculty of Lesley University's creative writing MFA program. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Poetry Series award, and a Lambda Literary Award for his poetry. His third collection of poetry,
Diva
(Duke University Press, 2000), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and
The Enemy
(DUP, 2007) won the Sheila Motton Book Award from the New England Poetry Club. In 2009, he received the Nicholas E. Davies Memorial Scholar Award from the American College of Physicians, for outstanding humanism in medicine; he has also won the Hippocrates Open International Prize for original verse that addresses a medical theme.
Alternative Medicine
(DUP, 2013), his newest book, has recently been the subject of stories on
PBS NewsHour
and the CBC's
Sunday Edition
radio show.