Four Diverse Books That Are Challenging American Poetry

Four Diverse Books That Are Challenging American Poetry

This past summer, the NEH released data that sent news outlets into a frenzy: over the past five years, the number of poetry readers has nearly doubled to 28 million adults. To us, this news was incredibly validating and exciting, given the staggering variety of powerful contemporary poems we’ve been lucky to read and publish over the years. Even as we’ve cultivated Lantern Review as a space for Asian American poetry, we recognize that the lantern is a symbol of enlightenment across cultures, a guiding light that celebrates continued exploration of disparate but interlocking communities. So this month, we pay homage to our namesake and highlight four recent poetry titles that we’ve loved for the ways they’ve challenged exclusionary definitions of “Americanness” in political, social, and literary life. Whether you are a regular reader of poetry or a newcomer to verse, we hope these books can serve as a guide to the diverse traditions of American poetry.

* * *

American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, selected by Tracy K. Smith (Graywolf, 2018)

The title of US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s anthology invokes past laureate Robert Hayden and his poem, “[American Journal].” But while Hayden’s speaker is an alien who observes “the americans     this baffling / multi people” from the outside in, Smith’s assembled communities of voices consider their various amorphous Americas from the interior. Several of our favorite APA poets—such as Tina Chang, Cathy Park Hong, Solmaz Sharif, and John Yau—appear among the radiant, haunting, and witty voices herein. Wrought from revenge for seized land, the joys of fatherhood, the despair of unimaginable loss, the wonder of what remains, these selected poems—or “reports,” as Smith calls them—consider and coax and challenge borders at a moment when our definitions of “nation” and “neighbor” are increasingly unstable.

Citizen Illegal by José Olivarez (Haymarket Books, 2018)

Citizen Illegal is a fierce and playful rewrite of America through Chicanx experiences. José Olivarez exposes the quintessential dissonance and violence of everyday America—in one poem, a white partygoer claims the absence of Mexicans in “this part of New York City” even as the speaker beholds a waiter who “pushes his brown self through the kitchen door” (31). But if white supremacy systematically negates black, brown, and indigenous experiences, Olivarez is a cunning new architect who seizes and repurposes that scaffold. By Olivarez’s pen, heaven is no longer the sterile playspace of the white and moneyed. Instead, it is “gross” (a space where Mexican women can finally revel in novelas), and it is intimate (there are no gentrifiers who destroy family and language). Each poem is unsparing, negating white America’s practices of erasure and affirming Mexican American experiences with song.

bury it by sam sax (Wesleyan University Press, 2018)

The crevices between boy and monster, dead and undead are dangerously thin, and sam sax toes the line brilliantly. He concludes this, his second collection, with a hefty question: “how deep am i indebted to the dead?” (83). The book strives to answer this from the beginning. In the first poem, a fisherman perceives a tug and pulls up “boy, // after boy, / after boy, / after boy, / …” (1). The confessional intertwines with the surreal in these poems of mourning, which salute gay teens lost to suicide, forebears consumed by AIDS, and betraying lovers who have in turn been betrayed by others. This collection is sax’s incantation of a vital lineage—including figures like W. H. Auden, James Baldwin, Tyler Clementi—that makes the dead marvelously undead.

If They Come For Us by Fatimah Asghar (OneWorld, 2018)

If They Come For Us reminds us that the titular question may not be “if” but “when.” Fatimah Asghar writes from her personal and political history as the daughter of Pakistani, Kashmiri, and Muslim diasporas, observing that any sense of material and emotional security must reconcile with the knowledge that “I build & build / & someone takes it away.” In response, Asghar fashions poems that probe brutality while preserving the ordinary: She describes an encounter between her Barbies and stuffed animals, an erotic playdate that devolves into military conquest (35). She points out that perpetrators of ethnic cleansing and genocide during the India/Pakistan partition of 1947 were “Men who wear matching shirts,” “neighbors who like to kill each other” (16). Her measured observations of the ordinary also honor the notions of shelter, kin, and abundance—which are not lost to bloodshed and trauma but are grounded in an auntie’s laughter, a track team’s devotion, and endless jello at the Old Country Buffet. In her essay “Against Witness,” Cathy Park Hong argues that poetry has failed remembrance in this “era of total recall.” Accordingly, Asghar’s poems propel beyond memory and instead stage everyday scenes that grapple with historical atrocity and personal loss. A continuing legacy of violence, she reminds us, “is the cost / of looking the other way.”

* * *

As always, there are so many more incredible new collections than we have space to describe. Here are just a few other other recent books, including a few of this year’s National Book Awards’ finalists, that have been on our radar for the ways in which they push or transform the boundaries of Americanness and American poetry:

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes (Penguin, 2018)

Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018)

Eye Level by Jenny Xie (Graywolf Press, 2018)

Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Copper Canyon Press, 2018)

Not Here by Hieu Minh Nguyen (Coffee House Press, 2018)

We Play A Game by Duy Doan (Yale University Press, 2018)

The Buddha Wonders if She Is Having a Mid-Life Crisis by Luisa A. Igloria (Phoenicia Publishing, 2018)

Bird of the Indian Subcontinent by Subhashini Kaligotla (The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, 2018)

* * *

What boundary-transgressing collections would you recommend to new readers of poetry? To old-timers? Share them with us in the comments or let us know on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram (@LanternReview).

LR News: LR Contributors Selected as Winner, and Finalists, for BEST OF THE NET 2010

Asterio Enrico Gutierrez

We are delighted to announce that LR Contributor Asterio Enrico N. Gutierrez’s poem, “Death poem exercise 64,” which originally appeared in Issue 1, has been selected for the 2010 Best of the Net Anthology.  Asterio’s poem was one of only twelve selected by guest judge Erin Belieu for this year’s Anthology (it appears alongside contributions from such luminaries as B.H. Fairchild and Claudia Emerson), and we are absolutely ecstatic to see his work honored in this way.

(To read Asterio’s poem in Best of the Net 2010, click here).

(To read Asterio’s poem as it originally appeared in Issue 1 of Lantern Review, click here).

Luisa A. Igloria
Subhashini Kaligotla

Congratulations are also in store for LR contributors Luisa A. Igloria and  Subhashini Kaligotla, whose respective poems  “Contingency” and “Sydney Notebook” (which were also originally published in LR Issue 1), were selected as finalists.

Many, many congratulations to Asterio, Luisa, and Subhashini, and as many thanks to the Best of the Net editors for this wonderful honor!

Be sure to check out all of the poems that appear in this year’s Best of the Net Anthology here.

 

 

LR News: Best of the Net 2010 Nominations

We are pleased to announce our nominations for Sundress Publications’ 2010 Best of the Net Anthology.  They are, in order of their appearance in our magazine:

The Newlyweds,” translated by Hsiao-Shih (Raechel) Lee

Sydney Notebook” by Subhashini Kaligotla

Death poem exercise 64” by Asterio Enrico N. Gutierrez

Contingency” by Luisa A. Igloria

All four poems were first published in Issue One of Lantern Review.

* * *

About the Nominated Poets

Hsiao-Shih (Raechel) Lee

Hsiao-Shih (Raechel) Lee is from Kaohsiung, Taiwan. She received her MFA from the University of Notre Dame and is currently a PhD candidate in Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University.

* * *

Subhashini Kaligotla

Subhashini Kaligotla’s poems have appeared in such journals as Crab Orchard Review, The Literary Review, New England Review, and Western Humanities Review, and in poetry collections in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States.  She is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program in poetry and the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship to India for literary translation.  Kaligotla lives in New York City, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in the history of art.

* * *

Asterio Enrico N. Gutierrez

Asterio Enrico N. Gutierrezs fiction and poetry have appeared in Lantern Review, Asia Writes, TAYO, Philippines Free Press, Philippines Graphic, and the Sunday Times Magazine, among others. He lives in Manila, Philippines.

* * *

Luisa A. Igloria

Originally from Baguio City, Luisa A. Igloria is the author of Juan Luna’s Revolver (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), which received the Ernest Sandeen Prize; Trill & Mordent (WordTech Editions, 2005), and eight other books. She currently directs the MFA Creative Writing Program at  Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she cooks with her family, hand-binds books, and keeps her radar tuned for cool lizard sightings. www.luisaigloria.com.

* * *

Congratulations to all four nominees.  We are proud to be represented by such a fine selection of work and wish each of you the best of luck during the judging process!

Summer Reads: Issue 1 Contributor Subhashini Kaligotla

For our Summer Reads series, we’ve asked contributors from Issue 1 to share what they’ve been reading or plan to read this summer.  In this, our last installment, Subhashini Kaligotla shares about her summer reading plans.

Subhashini tells us,

“Since I am very interested in long poems but have succeeded in writing them only by putting together sections or fragments, I thought it would be useful to read Paisley Rekdal, who is a master of the long poem that marries lyric and narrative quite skillfully.  So I am looking forward to reading her Six Girls Without Pants and The Invention of the Kaleidoscope.

The other part of my summer list includes an old favourite—Nick Flynn’s Some Ether—and a few other books that also handle family narratives and loss in a collection of lyric poems: Marie Howe’s What the Living Do; Donald Hall’s The Painted Bed; Gregory Orr’s Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved; and Kevin Young’s Dear Darkness.”

Subhashini’s poem “Sydney Notebook” can be found in Issue 1 of Lantern Review. Many thanks to her, and to all of the Issue 1 contributors who have shared their reading lists with us this summer.  We hope that this series has inspired you to explore new titles and poets in your own summer reading queues.  Now it’s your turn: what is the best book that you’ve read this summer, and why?  We’d love to hear; tell us about it in the comments below.