Some of you tell me this newsletter’s weekly poetry feature has got you reading poetry for the first time in years. But you wonder where to go next.
I have an easy recommendation: “The Best American Poetry 2024.” This anthology, edited by Mary Jo Salter, includes work by 75 poets — some you probably know (Billy Collins, Ada Limón) and some you may not yet (Gabriella Fee, Richie Hofmann).
The poems were selected from the usual places like the New Yorker and the Paris Review, little journals like Smartish Pace and Matter, and even recently deceased ones like Gettysburg Review and Freeman’s. In her words, this is a dinner party that includes enough familiar faces to make you feel comfortable and enough intriguing strangers to keep you mingling.
Best of all, every poem in this collection has been selected by an extraordinarily fine and thoughtful poet. In her introduction, Salter writes, “I still find it almost impossible to come up with Universally Useful Criteria for evaluating a poem,” but reading the work she’s assembled here is a terrific way of broadening and understanding your own criteria.
Here’s a poem by Natalie Scenters-Zapico, a writer new to me:
Sentimental Evening
The pewter moon’s eyebrowed guise
circles a picture of my son. A Windex tear
falls to my son’s cheek, and I know
we will never fully know one another.
Message after message asking:
How is the breastfeeding going?
Let me tell you: Not great. Not great at all.
Everywhere advice to make the milk come:
plums, fenugreek, blessed thistle.
This morning each stream of water falling
from my showerhead was a knife ready
to gut me. The pewter moon’s smile
wants to eat me whole. Online strangers
tell me to love my postpartum body.
They say: You are tiger. You are zebra.
I am desperate to return to the numb feeling
of the surgical theater, the sound
of the doctor mispronouncing my full name.
In the mail a medical bill worth more
than a pickup truck arrives. It arrives before
the state gives my son a social security number,
a birth certificate, a sign of arrival.
Even at my most animal I am the price
of my bearded belly, the price of my crying
breasts, the price of being split,
excavated, vacuumed, and stapled shut.
This poem was first published in the New Republic. In the contributors’ notes and comments, Natalie Scenters-Zapico writes, “Much of ‘Sentimental Evening’ was drafted at a tray table on the back of hospital paperwork after I had an emergency C-section to deliver my son. I then revised it while struggling to breast feed and submitted it for publication still deep in my postpartum depression. I wrote this poem despite my own internalized misogyny telling me it was too sentimental.”
Excerpted from “The Best American Poetry 2024.” Mary Jo Salter, editor. David Lehman, series editor. Published by Scribner Poetry. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. ❖
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