These poems offered warm lights and pools of delight in the second half of 2022.

‘At Springbrook’ by Sarah Holland-Batt

I carry in heartwood for the stove. / When I swing open its glass door / a greying bee falls from the grate. / Tufted with ash, it moves ponderously / as though each of its legs is trying to tune an instrument independently – / plucking the strings, sounding the notes. / The bee is not long for this world –

Sarah Holland-Batt is an award-winning poet, editor, and critic. Her first book, Aria, was the recipient of several literary prizes, including the Anne Elder Award, the Arts ACT Judith Wright Poetry Prize and the Thomas Shapcott Prize. Her second book, The Hazards, won the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. Her third book, The Jaguar, was published by UQP in May 2022.

‘Species’ by Tishani Doshi

When it is time, we will herd into the bunker of the earth / to join the lost animals – pig-footed bandicoot, giant sea / snail, woolly mammoth. No sound of chainsaws, only / the soft swish swish of dead forests, pressing our heads / to the lake’s floor, a blanket of leaves to make fossils / of our femurs and last suppers.

Tishani Doshi was born in the city formerly known as Madras in 1975. A poet and dancer, she has published seven books of poetry and fiction. Her essays, poems and short stories have been widely anthologised. She is Visiting Associate Professor of Practice, Literature and Creative Writing at New York University, Abu Dhabi. A God at The Door, was published in 2021.

‘This is what was bequeathed us’ by Gregory Orr

No meaning but what we find here. / No purpose but what we make. / That, and the beloved’s clear instructions: / Turn me into song; sing me awake.

Gregory Orr is the author of two books about poetry, Poetry as Survival and A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry, a memoir, The Blessing, and twelve collections of poetry, including How Beautiful The Beloved (which contains ‘This is what was bequeathed us’) and The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write. He taught at the University of Virginia from 1975 to 2019, where he founded the university’s Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing.

‘i’m going back to Minnesota where sadness makes sense’ by Danez Smith

i know something that doesn’t die can’t be beautiful. / have you ever stood on a frozen lake, California? / the sun above you, the snow & stalled sea—a field of mirror /

Danez Smith is a Black, queer, HIV-positive writer and performer from St. Paul, Minnesota. They are the author of Homie and Don’t Call Us Dead, which was a finalist for the National Book Award.

‘Held in the Arms of St. Francis & the Virgin’ by Jasmine Gibson

Consecrate me / Conserve me lover / In the sills of your love / in the cells of your palms / from the womb to cell / break me from the belly of ship

Jasmine Gibson is the author of the poetry collection Don’t Let Them See Me Like This (Nightboat Books, 2018) and the chapbook Drapetomania (Commune Editions, 2015). She is the co-author, with Madison Van Oort, of Time Theft: A Love Story (The Elephants, 2018). She lives in Brooklyn.

‘Ode to the L90’ by Tessa Rose

Warringah Mall / Where I bought my first / skin-tight pair of Levi’s / (low-rise, bootleg-cut). / Manly / Where I went to school and / learned to swim and / how to flirt and / how to make a bong / out of an apple. / Where I came across / a couple making love / on the esplanade, as I / walked home alone, one / very early morning. / Where childhood / and adolescence /were birthed and drowned,

Tessa Rose is a poet and performer. She has been published in Cordite Poetry Review and the forthcoming spoken word anthology Solid Air (University of Queensland Press). She has performed her work at Queensland Poetry Festival, COUPLET, Woodford Folk Festival, Noted Festival and other venues across Australia. She is one half of 24 HOUR GYM alongside Pascalle Burton, and occasionally writes and performs under the auspices of the Fanciful Fiction Auxiliary.

‘My Therapist Wants to Know about My Relationship to Work’ by Tiana Clark

New ping. A new tab, then another. / Papers on the floor, scattered & stacked. / So many journals, unbroken white spines, / waiting. Did you hear that new new? /
I start to text back. Ellipsis, then I forget. / I balk. I lazy the bed. I wallow when I write. / I truth when I lie. I throw a book / when a poem undoes me. I underline / Clifton: today we are possible.

Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition.

‘Carried from Hell’s Gate, Tasmania’ by Kerry Greer

A calf ebbs with the tide, sliding / towards the sanctuary of its mother. / The mother keens, soft notes washing / over the calf, like a last kiss soothing / its steepled, sacred face from afar. / They are grieving as they die.

Kerry Greer is a Western Australian poet and writer. She was awarded the 2021 Venie Holmgren Prize for Environmental Poetry. Her writing was Highly Commended in the Stuart Hadow Short Story Prize 2021, and the Poetry d’Amour Prize 2021. She was also shortlisted for the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize 2021 and the Calibre Essay Prize 2021. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Westerly, The Weekend Australian Review, Grieve 2021, and more. She is working on a collection of poems addressing the experience of widowhood and single parenting.

‘How to Let Go of the World’ by Franny Choi

I wade into a blanket of war and let its waves carry me out, out past the shoreline’s certainty. // In other words: I beach myself. / Other words: I leech bleakly. Breathe sleet, a wreath of it. I flinch at the leaves, anticipating their reek, the graves of reefs. I bleach and bleach and watch the chlorine slip clean from my teeth.

Franny Choi is a writer, teaching artist, and the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). She has received awards from the Poetry Foundation and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, The Journal, Rattle, Indiana Review, and others. She is a VONA alumna, a Project VOICE teaching artist, and a member of the Dark Noise Collective. Audio edited by Brigid Choi.

‘Crossing Half of China to Sleep with You’ by Yu Xiuhua

To sleep with you or to be slept, what’s the difference if there’s any? / Two bodies collide – the force, the flower pushed open by / the force, / the virtual spring in the flowering – nothing more than this /

Yu Xiuhua is a poet from Hengdian, in Hubei, China. She became well known in 2014 with her online poem ‘Crossing Half of China to Sleep with You’. In 2015, her debut book / first book-length collection in English, Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm, sold 15 thousand copies in one day. The New York Times named her one of the eleven most courageous women around the world in 2017. Last year saw the release of a documentary about her, Still Tomorrow, by the filmmaker Fan Jian, and the publication of another volume of poetry, We Forget That We Loved. ‘Her poems, among contemporary Chinese poems, are like putting a murderer among a group of respectable ladies,’ wrote Mr Liu, a Poetry editor.

‘The Change Room’ by Andy Jackson

This morning, walking almost naked / from the change room toward the outdoor heated pool, / I become that man again, unsettling / shape to be explained. / Such questions aren’t asked to my face. / Children don’t mean anything by it, supposedly, so I shouldn’t feel as I do, /

Andy Jackson is a poet preoccupied with difference and embodiment. His first published book of poems, Among the Regulars, was shortlisted for the 2011 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. His most recent poetry collection is Human Looking (Giramondo, 2021), shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry. As he notes on his website, ‘these autobiographical and biographical poems speak with the voices of the disabled and disfigured, in myth, art, history and the present moment’.

‘Eurydice, Turning’ by Rita Dove

but don’t need the dark to see her / younger than my daughter now, / wasp-waisted in her home-sewn coral satin // with all of Bebop yet to boogie through.

Rita Dove was U.S. Poet Laureate from 1993–1995 and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004–2006. In 1987 she received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her book Thomas and Beulah. She is currently Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

‘School Street’ by James Longenbach

From behind the wisteria came children, then grandchildren—/ The girls wore smocked dresses, dresses my mother / Had made, the boys had floppy hair. / The things we made / Ourselves seemed permanent, / But like the stars invisible, even the things / We made from words.

James Longenbach (1959-2022) was 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 appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Nation, and elsewhere. Longenbach was the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honours.

‘In the Village’ by James Longenbach

The sentences I’ve just written / Took it out of me. / I searched for the words, / And I resisted them as soon as I put them down. // Now, listening to them again, what I hear / Is not so much nostalgia / As a love of beginning. A wish / Never to be removed /

James Longenbach – see previous biographical entry for him above.

‘Eastwood’ by Leila Chatti

We wait for someone / to wonder where we are, find ourselves / waiting long into the dark. I think we like this part / best, the night falling over our shoulders / like a borrowed sweatshirt, still warm, / the blonde grasses whispering as we circle and circle / the unclaimed lot – knowing that we could be forgotten / but are not.

Leila Chatti was born in 1990 in Oakland, California. A Tunisian-American dual citizen, she has lived in the United States, Tunisia, and Southern France. She is the author of the debut full-length collection Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, and the chapbooks The Mothers (Slapering Hol Press), Ebb (New-Generation African Poets) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. She holds a B.A. from the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University and an M.F.A. from North Carolina State University, where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize.

‘On the Way to Oshagan’ by Lory Bedikian:

Forgetting why it was I stopped at all, / I walk back across the dirt, cracking /
one open. Its shell tastes of the same / salted seeds tucked by my grandmother /
into coat pockets for evening walks. / Like a small communion, I contemplate / the seed with my tongue and swallow. /

Lory Bedikian received her BA from UCLA with an emphasis in Creative Writing and Poetry. She earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon, where she received the Dan Kimble First Year Teaching Award for Poetry. Bedikian’s The Book of Lamenting won the 2010 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry. She currently teaches poetry workshops in Los Angeles.

‘The Only Cab Service of Farmington, Maine’ by Aria Aber

I shouldn’t / tell you this, but, he coughs—I miss / it sometimes. The provinces were so hot—/ it was like another planet. I will never / feel at ease here, between subalpine hills, gas stations advertising Nescafe and Dove. /

Aria Aber is based in Oakland, CA. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, The Poetry Review and elsewhere. She is the author of Hard Damage, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and a Whiting Award. She is currently a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.

‘Seasonal without Spring: Autumn’ by Andrés Cerpa

When I woke for school the next day the sky was uniform & less than infinite / with the confusion of autumn & my father / as he became distant with disease the way a boy falls beneath the ice

Andrés Cerpa is the author of Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy, and The Vault from Alice James Books. A recipient of fellowships from McDowell and Canto Mundo, his work has appeared in Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, Puerto Rico en mi Corazón, The Breakbeat Poets Vol 4: LatiNext, The Nation, and elsewhere. He holds degrees from the University of Delaware and Rutgers University Newark.

‘Owed to Your Father’s Gold Chain’ by Joshua Bennett

How the next week, you clasp your father’s gold / chain at the back of my neck, call me beautiful / in your inside voice, barely breaking a whisper, / as if you can’t hear the dawn roaring / its way through the bedroom window / just to catch a glimpse of us here, / barely mortal, shimmering at the cusp / of this strange & untamable world.

Joshua Bennett is the author of The Sobbing School — which was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He is also the author of Being Property Once Myself, Owed, The Study of Human Life, and Spoken Word: A Cultural History, which is forthcoming from Knopf. He has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He is a Professor of English at Dartmouth College.

[—What did you say? Lost empires,] by Marie-Claire Bancquart

Translated from the French by Jody Gladding

—What did you say? Lost empires, / old age, / indecipherable writing, catastrophes?— // And me? At the present moment, it’s this piece of soap / I care about. // I’m holding onto it / white, solid without being hard. // Many other bars of soap have worn away, / softened, grew thinner in my hands. // Now, / six forty-seven AM, in July, / I’m clutching this piece // thanks to it I feel alive / despite earthquakes and the fall of Babylon.*

Marie-Claire Bancquart was born in 1932 and lived in Paris for most of her life. As a child, she suffered from tuberculosis that affected her spine and confined her to a hospital bed. Unable to attend school, she became an avid reader and was particularly attuned to the smallest sensations, the physical body. She began writing poetry at an early age; her first novel, based on her childhood experiences, was published in 1960. She continued to publish poetry, novels, short stories, and literary criticism for the next sixty years. She and her husband, the musician and composer Alain Bancquart, collaborated on many projects and toured throughout the world together presenting their work. Bancquart taught French literature at the Sorbonne until her retirement in 1994. She died in 2019.

Jody Gladding is a poet and translator whose most recent poetry collection, I entered without words, was published in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets in fall 2022. She is also the author of the spiders my arms (Ashata Press, 2018) and Translations from Bark Beetle (Milkweed Editions, 2014). Her many translations include the forthcoming Second Star by Phillipe Delerm (Archipelago Books, 2023) and Lichens: Toward a Minimal Resistance by Vincent Zonca (Polity Press, 2023). She has received a French-American Foundation Translation Prize, Whiting Award, and Yale Younger Poets Prize. She lives in East Calais, Vermont where her work explores the places that language and landscape converge.

Marie-Claire Bancquart – the English version, Every Minute is First, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2024 and been awarded a French Voices Translation Grant.

Allegory by Diane Seuss

Whatever the north was, I miss it. / My life since has grown thick without it. / Thick, like sorghum syrup, with experience. / Heavy with memory’s tonnage, such a drag, such a load. / It has no place here. Be, or leave. / I wish I was less, a recipe composed of a single ingredient.

Diane Seuss was born in Indiana and raised in Michigan. Seuss is the author of the poetry collections Frank: Sonnets (2021), winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (2018); Four-Legged Girl (2015), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (2010), winner of the 2009 Juniper Prize for Poetry; and It Blows You Hollow (1998). Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Georgia Review, Brevity, Able Muse, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and the Missouri Review, as well as The Best American Poetry 2014. She was the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of English at Colorado College in 2012, and she has taught at Kalamazoo College since 1988. Seuss earned a BA from Kalamazoo College and an MSW from Western Michigan University.