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This past summer, the NEH <\/span><\/i>released<\/span><\/i><\/a> 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\u2019ve been lucky to read and publish over the years. Even as we\u2019ve cultivated <\/span><\/i>Lantern Review<\/span> 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. <\/span><\/i>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 \u201cAmericanness\u201d\u00a0in political, social, and literary life.\u00a0Whether you are a regular reader of poetry or a newcomer to verse, we hope these books can serve as a guide\u00a0to the diverse traditions of American poetry.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n * * *<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time<\/i><\/b><\/a>, selected by Tracy K. Smith (Graywolf, 2018)<\/b><\/p>\n The title of US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith\u2019s anthology invokes past laureate Robert Hayden and his poem, \u201c<\/span>[American Journal]<\/span><\/a>.\u201d But while Hayden\u2019s speaker is an alien who observes \u201cthe americans \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0this baffling \/ multi people\u201d from the outside in, Smith\u2019s assembled communities of voices consider their various amorphous Americas from the interior. Several of our favorite APA poets\u2014such as Tina Chang, Cathy Park Hong, Solmaz Sharif, and John Yau\u2014appear 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\u2014or \u201creports,\u201d as Smith calls them\u2014consider and coax and challenge borders at a moment when our definitions of \u201cnation\u201d and \u201cneighbor\u201d are increasingly unstable.<\/span><\/p>\n Citizen Illegal<\/i><\/b><\/a> by Jos\u00e9 Olivarez (Haymarket Books, 2018)<\/b><\/p>\n Citizen Illegal<\/span><\/i> is a fierce and playful rewrite of America through Chicanx experiences. Jos\u00e9 Olivarez exposes the quintessential dissonance and violence of everyday America\u2014in one poem, a white partygoer claims the absence of Mexicans in \u201cthis part of New York City\u201d even as the speaker beholds a waiter who \u201cpushes his brown self through the kitchen door\u201d (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\u2019s pen, heaven is no longer the sterile playspace of the white and moneyed. Instead, it is \u201cgross\u201d (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\u2019s practices of erasure and affirming Mexican American experiences with song. <\/span><\/p>\n bury it<\/i><\/b><\/a> by sam sax (<\/b>Wesleyan University Press<\/i><\/b>, 2018)<\/b><\/p>\n 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: \u201chow deep am i indebted to the dead?\u201d (83). The book strives to answer this from the beginning. In the first poem, a fisherman perceives a tug and pulls up \u201cboy, \/\/ after boy, \/ after boy, \/ after boy, \/ \u2026\u201d (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\u2019s incantation of a vital lineage\u2014including figures like W. H. Auden, James Baldwin, Tyler Clementi\u2014that makes the dead marvelously undead.<\/span><\/p>\n If They Come For Us<\/i><\/b><\/a> by Fatimah Asghar (OneWorld, 2018)<\/b><\/p>\n If They Come For Us<\/span><\/i> reminds us that the titular question may not be \u201cif\u201d but \u201cwhen.\u201d 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 \u201cI build & build \/ & someone takes it away.\u201d 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 \u201cMen who wear matching shirts,\u201d \u201cneighbors who like to kill each other\u201d (16). Her measured observations of the ordinary also honor the notions of shelter, kin, and abundance\u2014which are not lost to bloodshed and trauma but are grounded in an auntie\u2019s laughter, a track team\u2019s devotion, and endless jello at the Old Country Buffet. In her essay \u201c<\/span>Against Witness<\/span><\/a>,\u201d Cathy Park Hong argues that poetry has failed remembrance in this \u201cera of total recall.\u201d Accordingly, Asghar\u2019s 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, \u201cis the cost \/ of looking the other way.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n * * *<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n 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\u2019s National Book Awards\u2019 finalists, that have been on our radar for the ways in which they push\u00a0or transform\u00a0the boundaries of Americanness and American poetry:<\/span><\/p>\n American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin<\/i><\/b><\/a> by Terrance Hayes (Penguin, 2018)<\/b><\/p>\n Ghost Of<\/i><\/b><\/a> by Diana Khoi Nguyen (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018)<\/b><\/p>\n Eye Level<\/i><\/b><\/a> by Jenny Xie (Graywolf Press, 2018)<\/b><\/p>\n Oceanic<\/i><\/b><\/a> by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Copper Canyon Press, 2018)<\/b><\/p>\n Not Here<\/i><\/b><\/a> by Hieu Minh Nguyen (Coffee House Press, 2018)<\/b><\/p>\n We Play A Game<\/i><\/b><\/a> by Duy<\/b> Doan (Yale University Press, 2018)<\/b><\/p>\n The Buddha Wonders if She Is Having a Mid-Life Crisis<\/i><\/b><\/a> by Luisa A. Igloria (Phoenicia Publishing, 2018)<\/b><\/p>\n Bird of the Indian Subcontinent<\/i><\/b><\/a> by Subhashini Kaligotla (The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, 2018)<\/b><\/p>\n * * *<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n 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 <\/span><\/i>Twitter<\/span><\/i><\/a>, <\/span><\/i>Facebook<\/span><\/i><\/a>, or <\/span><\/i>Instagram<\/span><\/i><\/a> (@LanternReview).<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019ve been lucky to read and publish […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[1160],"tags":[214,1170,1177,1190,1173,1171,1180,1187,1181,1176,1179,1185,1175,1182,1172,1189,1184,1183,1174,385,1178,1188,1010,1186],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7819"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7819"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7832,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7819\/revisions\/7832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}