A breathing place is what poetry offered me in the back half of 2021. Sydney was in lockdown for many months – again – and it was easy to be restless. Easy for anxiety to stagger your breath. Poetry gave me different cadences to hook into. Some of which I’ve sampled here.

I make my way through the deserted city by Lucía Estrada
Translated from the Spanish by Olivia Lott

Dark the moment when my memory tries for a phantom dialogue reflected in stone, /in the vigil of the dispossessed. / Long, silent, / like the death not uttered by these streets.

Lucía Estrada is the author of ten books of poetry, including the award-winning collections Las Hijas del Espino (2006) and La noche enel espejo (2010). She is the two-time recipient of the Bogotá Poetry Prize, most recently in 2017 for Katábasis, which was also named a finalist for the 2019 Colombian National Poetry Prize.

Olivia Lott is the translator of Lucía Estrada’s Katabasis (2020, Eulalia Books), which is a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

The Incognito Lounge by Denis Johnson

Here at the centre of the world / each wonderful store cherishes / in its mind undeflowerable / mannequins in a pale, electric light. / The parking lot is full, / everyone having the same dream / of shopping and shopping/ through an afternoon / that changes like a face.

Denis Johnson (1949–2017) was the author of eight novels, one novella, one book of short stories, three collections of poetry, two collections of plays, and one book of reportage. His novel Tree of Smoke won the 2007 National Book Award. He told Kirstin Butler for The Millions: “My ear for the diction and rhythms of poetry was trained by — in chronological order — Dr. Seuss, Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, the guitar solos of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, and T.S. Eliot.”

NDN Homopoetics by Billy-Ray Belcourt

What to an NDN is the intrinsic goodness of mankind? Maybe justice is a lover who regurgitates the English language so it comes back sweeter. Canada, why are your elevators filled with mud water? What is it about a palm that makes a country feel like a garden? I dug and dug. I pulled out a bouquet of skyscrapers. I kissed each window softly. Is this not what an NDN does in a poem?

Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation and the author of This Wound is a World (Frontenac House, 2017), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize. He is a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar at the University of Alberta and lives in Edmonton, Canada.

Barcarolle by James Longenbach

Why were they playing Chopin / In their little boat, playing it softly, just for me? Remember // When we lived like forest creatures, / You and I, when all / We left behind were footsteps / Crushed in the wet grass? / When I opened my eyes // Sun-stirred water played / Across the ceiling; / You were asleep. / It felt like being / In the present, being alive.

James Longenbach is the author of six books of poems—including Earthling, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award—and eight books of prose. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Nation, and elsewhere. The recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors, he lives in Rochester, New York. ‘Barcarolle’ features in the book Forever whose poems are said to ‘wash over you like waves, lift you up and set you down back at the beginning of your life’.

Little Father by Li-Young Lee

I buried my father in my heart. / Now he grows in me, my strange son, / my little root who won’t drink milk, / little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night, / little clock spring newly wet / in the fire, little grape, parent to the future / wine, a son the fruit of his own son, / little father I ransom with my life. /

Li-Young Lee was born in Djakarta, Indonesia in 1957 to Chinese political exiles. Lee did not begin to seriously write poems until a student at the University of Pittsburgh, where he studied with Gerald Stern. Influenced by the classical Chinese poets Li Bo and Tu Fu, Lee’s poetry is noted for its use of silence and, according to Alex Lemon in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, its ‘near mysticism’ which is nonetheless ‘fully engaged in life and memory while building and shaping the self from words’.

This Happens by Darius Atefat-Peckham

~for my second mother, Rachie

from the tub as a boy, I’d / move too fast, swoon / as if with love, and collapse. // If my father hadn’t heard / the soft body hit, / like a tamed animal // I’d rise, shakily, / alone.

Darius Atefat-Peckham is an Iranian-American poet and essayist. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Barrow Street, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Florida Review, Brevity, and elsewhere. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora (University of Texas Press). He is the author of the chapbook How Many Love Poems, forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press.

Drawings of a Red-billed Pigeon by Sara Lupita Olivares

you can see only the shape of the red-billed pigeon / in the bathroom window, opaqueness / a distance the yard // repeats. the moon sinks its / persistence a syllable swelling / through the day.

Sara Lupita Olivares is the author of Migratory Sound (The University of Arkansas Press), which was selected as winner of the 2020 CantoMundo Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Field Things (dancing girl press). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Times, Gulf Coast Magazine, Denver Quarterly, Salt Hill Journal, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She currently lives in New Mexico where she is an assistant professor of English at New Mexico Highlands University.

The Breathing Place by Cal Bedient

I have never been so happy to be with anyone as I am with you in  /  this well defended house by the sea / You are as beckoning to me as the windows set like the six eyes of / the sand spider in my orange door

Cal Bedient is a co-editor of Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry & Opinion and the author of books of literary criticism on T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Robert Penn Warren, and others, and five volumes of poetry – most recently The Multiple and The Breathing Place, both from Omnidawn.

Midnights: La jetée by Michael Palmer

They will taste the salt / on each other’s lips // and discover the pain / of the salt light, // salt where the sculptor / once signalled with his hands // a little to the left, / a little to the right

Michael Palmer was born into an Italian-American family in Manhattan in 1943 and has lived in San Francisco since 1969. His book of poems, The Laughter of the Sphinx, appeared from New Directions in 2016. He has taught at numerous universities and has also served as an artistic collaborator with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company for close to fifty years. His most recent poetry collection, Little Elegies for Sister Satan, from New Directions as well, was published in May of 2021.

The High Path by Thomas A. Clark

trust the tangled path / the sea at your elbow /  it will lead you through / complex information / meadow-grass and bent-grass  /  to a fine sea view // in among the grasses  / are the manifold / spaces little places  / where intention is  /  no longer gathered / but ramified dispersed

Thomas A. Clark lives in a fishing village on the east coast of Scotland. Four books from Carcanet Press explore the landscapes and culture of the western highlands and islands; The Hundred Thousand Places (2009), Yellow & Blue (2014), Farm by the Shore (2017) and The Threadbare Coat (selected poems 2020). During the summer months, with the artist Laurie Clark, he runs Cairn Gallery, a space for minimal and conceptual art. http://www.cairngallery.space. Watch Thomas A. Clark read from, and discuss, his selected poems, The Threadbare Coat.

The Funeral by Felicity Sheehy

Their whole world had ended, / while somewhere ours continued, past the flat / voices and the shuffle around the room, past / the borders of this town, where the fields fill / with the flashlights of so many people / looking for each other, flooding the skies / here, floors and floors beneath the stars.

Felicity Sheehy’s chapbook Losing the Farm won the Munster Literature Centre’s international chapbook prize. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, The Yale Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Narrative, The Adroit Journal, Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She has received an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Jane Martin Prize, and scholarships from Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Community of Writers. She has received additional prizes and support from Narrative, the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, the York Poetry Prize, and the Ledbury Poetry Festival, among others.

be all yr sins remembered by Casey Smith

We’re hanging our heads out the windows we will never / crash the car / the muggy air curtsies all around us. / but i can’t stop meeting ophelia. i can’t stop meeting / her. every violet here withers.

Casey Smith is an MFA candidate at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. She is an assistant poetry editor at Grist Journal. Her poems have been published in Split Lip Magazine, Underblong, Longleaf Review, Passages Northand others. Her professional website can be found at https://caseysmithpoet.wixsite.com/home.

The White Bear by Andrew Motion

Without hesitation I knelt down / and stared into the trembling deep. // I saw him swim through darkness / with immense and steady strokes / the violence of his body / assuaged by phosphorescence / glowing throughout his pelt

Andrew Motion is professor of creative writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and co-founder of the online Poetry Archive. He has received numerous awards for his poetry and prose. As Britain’s Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009, he said: What’s the point of clearing a wider path to poetry? For me, the answer is essentially to do with poetry being primitive – a fundamental requirement of the human spirit.

Brightening by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

If brigade bells sang, / they sang in vain, for flames / were already spilling up the drapes, / erasing every hand and face /from their gilt frames, swiping / china and ivory knives, fox-furs and silks, / tugging precious stones / from each brooch’s grip.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a poet and essayist. Winner of the James Tait Back Prize for Biography and Irish Book of the Year 2020, ‘A Ghost in the Throat’ was described as “powerful” (New York Times), “captivatingly original”​​ (The Guardian), “sumptuous” (The Sunday Times), and a “masterpiece” (Sunday Business Post). Doireann is also author of six critically-acclaimed books of poetry, each a deepening exploration of birth, death, desire, and domesticity. Awards for her writing include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (USA), the Ostana Prize (Italy), a Seamus Heaney Fellowship (Queen’s University), and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, among others.

Summer Grass by Roo Borson 

the little girls lean continuously across a rusted / sign that says Don’t Feed The Swans / and feed the swans. The swans are reasoning beings; / the young cygnets, hatched from pins / and old mattress stuffing, bright-eyed, learning / what has bread, and what doesn’t. What doesn’t / have to do with this is all the rest:

Roo Borson has published fifteen books of poems, including Rain; road; an open boat, Cardinal in the Eastern White Cedar, and Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida, winner of the Governor General’s Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Griffin Poetry Prize. She has also won awards for her essays. With Kim Maltman, she writes and translates collaboratively under the pen name Baziju. She lives in Toronto.

The Bell System by Adam O. Davis

as if the self was nothing more / than a late-model sedan crossing // the city limit in search of a better / resale value. It’s funny, this franchise // of molecules that fizzes up in each / of us, like motels viral along the interstate:

Adam O. Davis is the author of Index of Haunted Houses (Sarabande, 2020), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize. His work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including The Believer, The Best American Poetry 2021, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and ZYZZYVA. The recipient of the 2016 George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, he lives in San Diego, California, where he teaches English literature at The Bishop’s School.

When We Were 13, Jeff’s Father Left the Needle Down on a Journey Record Before Leaving the House One Morning and Never Coming Back by Hanif Abdurraqib 

Jeff’s mother, that cigarette smoke dancing from her lips until it catches the breeze // from the cracked front window and glides back towards us a vagabond, searching for a throat to / move into and cripple while Neal Schon’s guitar rides out the speakers and I don’t know how / many open windows a man has to climb out of in the middle of the night in order to have hands / that can make anything scream like that. // nothing knows the sound of abandonment like a highway does, not even God.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His books include A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, and A Fortune for Your Disaster. He’s also the host of the podcast, Object of Sound.

Timid as Any Herd Animal by Derek Sheffield

/ Have the hammocks hold fast / and the bark remain in the dog. // Have the thinnest veil of dusk, / fog, or drizzle, call stillness / near, her sister, silence, here.

Derek Sheffield’s collection, Not for Luck, was selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. His other books include Through the Second Skin, finalist for the Washington State Book Award, Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, and, with coeditors Liz Bradfield and CMarie Fuhrman, Cascadia: A Field Guide through Art, Ecology, and Poetry (Tupelo, 2022). When he isn’t editing poetry for Terrain.org, Sheffield can often be found in the woods or rivers along the eastern slopes of the Cascades in Washington.