July/August 2024

The American Poetry Review

The world’s most exciting poetry-reading experience.

The American Poetry Review32 min read
A Huxian’s Guide to Seduction Revenge Immortality
Once a year I give myself permission to indulge in real tenderness. I dip an overripe fig in honey and eat it with yogurt. Then I allow some man to worship me. I make him go down on two knees and pray. “Pray for what?” he’d whisper. “Pray for whateve
The American Poetry Review4 min read
Two Poems
I can’t understand, after years of reading, the relevanceof metaphysics. How does it account for the wants of my mind breaking apart my body? I prefer to think of poppies,the variety fated to bloom blood-red. Or, of planting poppies, any flowers in t
The American Poetry Review1 min read
The American Poetry Review
EDITOR Elizabeth Scanlon BUSINESS MANAGER Mike Duffy EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Thalia Geiger Hannah Gellman GENERAL COUNSEL Dennis J. Brennan, Esq. CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Christopher Buckley, Deborah Burnham, Jan Freeman, Leonard Gontarek, Everett Hoagland,
The American Poetry Review2 min read
Two Poems
after Stephanie Burt and Poetry Unbound It’s Friday night, dusk, and I bring myself to The Hudsonto breathe. I listen to a poem that is part-prayer: someonewill probably love you; and I watch the clouds sweep over the moon;the poem sweeps into fact,
The American Poetry Review2 min read
Relentlessly Grief-Stricken and Enjoying the End of Spring Flowers
Apocalypse meaning: a great disaster.This one is happening slowly (lobsters, a simmering pot).There is time to course correct,but group projects so often end in failure. I admit the end of spring flowers brings me joy in this city forest. When summer
The American Poetry Review5 min read
Dawn, Killary Harbour - PAUL HENRY, CONNEMARA, 1921
to remember which would require us to leavethis moment already deciding who we will carry with us across all that muted iceall that lonely light which is still just a paintingwhich is still just a mindmissing whoever it has to miss & if the hills dre
The American Poetry Review1 min read
Two Poems
One by onethey are jumping in. Is the water cold?—I call to them. Yes, the water is cold, they tell me. One by one. The only time I was frightened of my friendshe’d recovered from a long illness. Her eyes gleamed yellow from fever,her gums receded fr
The American Poetry Review3 min read
Five Poems
A stick buried in grass is fabulous. Who knows what this means? The sky isa basket woven from shadows more subtle than shadows of the earth. Thisis to say, things are done quietly in the sky sometimes, too. You can partthe ferns and peer into clearin
The American Poetry Review4 min read
Notebook Fragments
It’s April and all my friends are married. The Japanese maples, in their pots on the balcony, need to be weeded and pruned. The reds and yellows we associate with autumn leaves are there all the time, I read. But we only see them in dead or dying lea
The American Poetry Review15 min read
The Road Up Is the Road Down
Originally presented at Kenyon College and Naropa University, June 2023 A poem is a double work, I feel it as I never have before: that a poem gives us new eyes. A poem gives us two new eyes that seem the same but see differently: one sees the day, a
The American Poetry Review3 min read
Five Poems
What gluekept too much ink from sinking in,kept the surface from pulling that liquid beyond—at first gypsum then something madefrom lichen then gelatin thenstarch. Eventually bureaucrats ordered papertreated with the poison of certain berriesto prote
The American Poetry Review1 min read
Still Life with Lemons & Gin
Joanne stabbed her husbandwith a palette knife, a flesh woundwhen he rearranged the bowl of fruitlemons to the frontand called her painting bloodless. She’d filled a glass halfway with Gilbey’spositioning it to catch the lightnow fading at the gin’s
The American Poetry Review3 min read
Three Poems
It’s a glorious spring day in February. The utility company is clawing leadpipes out of the pavement while big magnolia blossoms tumble into thehole. At the doctor, I sit gingerly, trying not to wrinkle the butcher paper.I think of my grandmother, wh
The American Poetry Review2 min read
Another Architecture Cruise
I wait for what I know:curved tiles reflecting the river,a contextual style, the glittering glassof West Wacker Drive. We pass the port housesbuilt like boats along the water:a single round window painted green.The guide says, just wilderness. We dis
The American Poetry Review3 min read
Three Poems
soundtrack: untitled/fantastic instrumental, slum village can’t teach reading this instrument(al) anymore/than learning to breathe.heart learning to beat. by beat by beat. & here a honing in (this feeling)you remind me there’s no way to hear without
The American Poetry Review1 min read
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The American Poetry Review12 min read
At the Axis of Stillness & Motion
Arthur Sze has published eleven books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), selected for a 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Award; Sight Lines, which received the 2019 Nat
The American Poetry Review1 min read
Spring View
The nation is broken, but hills and rivers remain.Spring is in the city, grasses and trees are thick.Touched by the hard time, flowers shed tears.Grieved by separations, birds are startled in their hearts. The beacon fires burned for three consecutiv
The American Poetry Review2 min read
Five Poems
To read onthe train nowthat is somethingyou don’t see.People mostly cryinto their handsafter laughing sohard and forso long theystare off intospace. Somewonderat themselves inthe window, howtheir faces havechanged so muchand so slowly. It is not at a
The American Poetry Review1 min read
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The American Poetry Review1 min read
Two Poems
or a hedge apple in snowHow did we come to be in this dark closet, countless strands of tinsellashing the space betweenInventor (inventedI ask the nail technician for acrylics like the fluorescent ethanol in thecarpenter’s levelshanging against the f
The American Poetry Review4 min read
The Shadow Of The Dog
The poems I want to write at this moment in my life are not the kinds of poems I would have valued as a young man. When I was in graduate school, I read a book called Halflife by the poet Charles Wright, who was my teacher at the time. There’s nothin
The American Poetry Review1 min read
Four Poems
It’s a calm, crippling blue fall daypunctured by the tearing caw of a crow and there’s a waiting list to notdisappear into a futureof swirling vermillion foamin a creek of hairripped out in clumps. I’m laying on a pile of dry cardboardhaving forgotte
The American Poetry Review2 min read
In Which the World Is Not that Bad
let me live with no intention; i triumph at the mile-long hair in my shower; even in thunderstorms, more air is dry than not; there is no will that makes water cling to me the way you cling, but there is always the thought of water; i am telling you

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