The Best American Poetry

"Sex with a Famous Poet" [by Denise Duhamel]

Sex with a Famous Poet

 

I had sex with a famous poet last night

and when I rolled over and found myself beside him I shuddered

because I was married to someone else,

because I wasn't supposed to have been drinking,

because I was in fancy hotel room

I didn't recognize. I would have told you

right off this was a dream, but recently

a friend told me, write about a dream,

lose a reader and I didn't want to lose you

right away. I wanted you to hear

that I didn't even like the poet in the dream, that he has

four kids, the youngest one my age, and I find him

rather unattractive, that I only met him once,

that is, in real life, and that was in a large group

in which I barely spoke up. He disgusted me

with his disparaging remarks about women.

He even used the word "Jap"

which I took as a direct insult to my husband who's Asian.

When we were first dating, I told him

"You were talking in your sleep last night

and I listened, just to make sure you didn't

call out anyone else's name." My future-husband said

that he couldn't be held responsible for his subconscious,

which worried me, which made me think his dreams

were full of blond vixens in rabbit-fur bikinis.

but he said no, he dreamt mostly about boulders

and the ocean and volcanoes, dangerous weather

he witnessed but could do nothing to stop.

And I said, "I dream only of you,"

which was romantic and silly and untrue.

But I never thought I'd dream of another man--

my husband and I hadn't even had a fight,

my head tucked sweetly in his armpit, my arm

around his belly, which lifted up and down

all night, gently like water in a lake.

If I passed that famous poet on the street,

he would walk by, famous in his sunglasses

and blazer with the suede patches at the elbows,

without so much as a glance in my direction.

I know you're probably curious about who the poet is,

so I should tell you the clues I've left aren't

accurate, that I've disguised his identity,

that you shouldn't guess I bet it's him...

because you'll never guess correctly

and even if you do, I won't tell you that you have.

I wouldn't want to embarrass a stranger

who is, after all, probably a nice person,

who was probably just having a bad day when I met him,

who is probably growing a little tired of his fame--

which my husband and I perceive as enormous,

but how much fame can an American poet

really have, let's say, compared to a rock star

or film director of equal talent? Not that much,

and the famous poet knows it, knows that he's not

truly given his due. Knows that many

of these young poets tugging on his sleeve

are only pretending to have read all his books.

But he smiles anyway, tries to be helpful.

I mean, this poet has to have some redeeming qualities, right?

For instance, he writes a mean iambic.

Otherwise, what was I doing in his arms.

From The Star-Spangled Banner, Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. 

"In Which" by Denise Duhamel [by Nin Andrews]

I hate Christmas. Every December, the seasonal blues hit as soon as Thanksgiving ends. I wish I could fall asleep on the last weekend in November and wake up on January 2.  A friend of mine, who is in AA, suggested that I should try faking it until I make it. So, I have been dressing in a red sweater and green leggings and wearing a little red cap. I look like an aging Christmas elf. (I despise Xmas outfits, so I am going all-out.)  I even have a holly berry pin in my white hair and a blinky tree brooch on my sweater. If anyone looks at me funny, I smile and say, 'Tis the season. And if they ask how I am, I say, “Jolly, very jolly, thank you so much. Are you jolly, too?”  

Well, are you?

Right now, how could I (or anyone) not be jolly when listening to Maria Carey sing “All I Want for Christmas." Or Bobby Helms sing “Jingle Bell Rock” or Andy Williams croon “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” Or Michael Bublé,  “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas.” Who can resist singing along with them?  

And by golly I do feel almost jolly imagining a world in which I am someone else, someone who loves all the music and manic shopping and traffic and decorating and cooking and office-partying and fruit cakes and eggnog (I think fruit cake and eggnog should be outlawed) . . .   If I were someone else, I might even write poems about this other life/world in which I can become someone else. 

Which is exactly what Denise Duhamel does in her hilarious and brilliant new chapbook, In Which. Reading her poems, I feel less like a grinch and more like I am in the company of a kindred spirit. Oh, Denise, I think to myself as I read, your poems are a gift to the world. 

POEM IN WHICH I PURSUED MY DREAM OF DOING STAND-UP

by Denise Duhamel

When articles I read in 1980 demanded

a woman comic make fun of her appearance,

I went for it. I embraced my fat because John Waters

thought fat was hilarious. In fact, I ate so much

I doubled my size and wore small, unflattering

T-shirts to highlight my stomach rolls. I wasn’t afraid

to be raunchy or gross. I even farted

on stage, becoming a caricature of everything ugly

I dreaded inside me. I teased my frizzy hair to make it

even frizzier. I took my cues from Joan Rivers

and Phyllis Diller—On my honeymoon I put on

a peekaboo blouse. My husband peeked and booed.

I tried to repel men as much as possible

with my awesome, non-conforming physicality.

I didn’t care if I embarrassed my family.

I didn’t care anymore about diets or dates.

I ate whole cakes and didn’t even think

about throwing them up. I went to late night

open mics, wisecracking through the jeers and booing

until audiences got used to me. I took their abuse,

gave it right back. I wore down the drunks and soon

they were laughing, even snorting sometimes.

Though still controversial, I was on the cover

of Paper and Ms. while The Golden Girls

made its TV debut. By the time Roseanne Barr

came around, I’d already taken all up the space

in that roly-poly lane. I let her open for me anyway.

At the end of each of my Comedy Central specials,

I would invite her back into the spotlight

and we’d bump our humongous bellies.

Roseanne grew bored. She was a deep thinker,

growing more profound with each gig.

When Jane Austen came back in vogue

with the movies Clueless and Sense and Sensibility,

I started my own production company

and hired so many women—even skinny

pretty comics, ones I never imagined

could break through. My wide ass opened wide

doors for everyone. Finally I had boyfriends,

handsome and loyal and attracted to my big fat

bank account. But by the time Beyoncé reunited

with Destiny’s Child for the Super Bowl halftime,

my overeating and slovenly ways caught up

with me. When I had bypass surgery and lost

two hundred pounds, I knew my career in comedy

was over. Fans called me a traitor and my latest

boyfriend lost interest too—no more drunken parties

and freezers stocked with Haagen-Dazs

and Tombstone pizzas. I had to pivot so I straightened

my hair and changed my name to give myself

a second act. Roseanne had just won the Pulitzer

for her verse. I put my efforts into becoming a minor poet.

—from In Which
2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: October 16, 2024

Kwame Dawes’ Sturge Town was recently published by Norton. The book takes its title from a village in Jamaica—and uses it as an overriding metaphor for poems that travel from Ghana to the United States, stopping in one of the first free villages in post-emancipation Jamaica. Dawe’s poems sing with urgency—about crimes against black bodies, loss, addiction of a loved one, and the difficulties of religion. This is a book of mature wonderment and contemplation. All through these interior and exterior travels, Dawes poems are infused with light—wisdom, hope, and the actual sun.

https://poems.com/poem/light-home/

Congratulations, Kwame!

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: October 9, 2024

Yesterday Penguin published Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems: 1961-2023 by Margaret Atwood. This generous—624 pages!—book begins with Double Persephone, a 1961 chapbook by the then little-known Atwood. Famous, of course, for her novel The Handmaid’s Tale, you’ll find the same feminist mythmaking in the course of her poetry career. There are three “Previously Uncollected” sections of new poems which will enchant Atwood’s poetry fans. The final of the three of these sections contains the title poem and gives a call to poetry’s necessary reach.  And Paper Boat contains her classics like this:

[you fit into me]

you fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

Congratulations, Margaret!

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: October 2, 2024

Yesterday Graywolf Press published Hold Everything by Dobby Gibson. When I first read the book’s title I thought it referenced the movie of the same name from the 1920s which featured one of my favorite songs ”You’re the Cream in My Coffee.”

While I was wrong, the book does have a wonderful coffee connection. The title poem is a stunning sonnet sequence, each of which was drafted during the time it took Gibson to finish a cup of coffee. There is a breeziness, a caffeinated energy, as the poet engages with the pandemic, the frightening world news, and the death of his friend Dean Young.  The quick-witted voice never sacrifices the close attention to image, the wisdom in zooming out to see the big picture.  Here’s an example:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/09/02/poem-never-to-be-read-aloud-dobby-gibson-poem

 

Congratulations, Dobby!

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: September 25, 2024

Earlier this year Norton/Liveright published Skip Tracer by Jive Poetic. I will admit my unhipness when I confess Jive Poetic was a new voice to me—I wasn’t even sure if he was one person or a collective!  And while that admission is embarrassing, it also served me as I read this exciting book, a memoir-in-poems, as Jive Poetic “contain(s) multitudes” and explores identity/multiple identities. His book is formatted like a DJ’s set list. (Jive Poetic is also DJ…) Through sections that invoke cassettes, reels, turntables, 45s, and a bonus track, he invokes the poet’s family and ancestors, including his grandfather “Skip.” Jive Poetic writes in his introduction “there are beats when I am you and me, and we are all of us in the mix.” Now I can attest I’m a tiny bit hipper.  Now I can attest I’m a fan. You can hear him reading the first poem “Go Home” from the collection here:

And read a little about his process here:

https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/in-their-own-words/jive-poetic-on

Congratulations, Jive!

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: September 18, 2024

Sara Ries Dziekonski’s Today’s Specials was published this month by Press 53. The poems are situated in an all-American diner in Buffalo, NY owned and operated by her family—where Sara is a waitress and her father is a cook who almost missed his daughter’s birth because “When the call came, my father stayed/at the Holiday Inn kitchen/to fry fish for a party of seventeen.” The father “Super Dave” is a fascinating character, man of hardscrabble tenderness.  When he tells his daughter “You gotta pay attention” in the fast-paced short-order world of filling orders, she translates that advice to writing poetry. Today’s Specials serves up details galore—gumball machine, jukebox, the customers with bad hygiene (“The Urine Couple”), the sleezy customers, mourning customers, a customer who is a professor, Onion Eddie, Eggs Bennie Debbie, Old Fat George, Country Joe, Safety Pin Joe, Security Guard Richard…

Sara writes tenderly about the push and pull of the diner, big dreams of getting away and nostalgia for the family business in poems like this.

Family Diner’s Facelift

Antique cans swaddled in greasy garments of time,
boxed with the Norman Rockwells, penny candy jars
I’d Windex on slow afternoons when all the stainless steel
shined. Fresh paint where the gallery of past owners hung high
above the ice cream freezer: gone. Ghosts. The grill banished far
from workers’ stories that burn in memory of steel mills.
Soups, gravys, and corned beef hash—my father’s recipes
remain, his poems, written for 32 years with hard
spatula scrapes behind the counter. Today I request a refill
and stare at string lights where a payphone once rang dreams—
now still.

Congratulations, Sara!

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: September 11, 2024

Ayokunle Falomo’s Autobiomythography of was published yesterday by Alice James Books. This powerhouse of a book—with a powerhouse of a title—centers on the stories we tell ourselves and each other, the mythologies of our families, our struggles, our heritage. Falomo begins the first poem in his book “I was a boy once &/ I did not show the world my teeth…”  In the leaps that follow, he is ready to show us now—his grit, his humor, his vulnerabilities, his Nigerian sensibility—in poems that explore colonization and decolonization, the identities thrust upon him and those he chooses. The book is a wild inner-globetrotting which ends with the tender “Thank You Ancestors Who Loved Me.” Interspersed are a series of spectacular “self-portrait” poems like this one:

https://www.usi.edu/sir/ruth-awad-poetry-picks/self-portrait-with-thorn-necklace-and-hummingbird

Congratulations, Ayokunle!

https://www.usi.edu/sir/ruth-awad-poetry-picks/self-portrait-with-thorn-necklace-and-hummingbird

Congratulations, Ayokunle!

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: September 4, 2024

Michael Chang’s TOY SOLDIERS was just published as winner of the Action, Spectacle poetry prize. Once again, Chang is producing bold, unapologetically sassy poems with a nod to the New York School (“my copy of lunch poems, white orange & blue...”). TOY SOLDIERS contains a delightfully dizzying array of poetic references like “go smoke a doobie norman dubie.” Chang invites the world into their poems where you’ll find Katy Perry, Ron Padgett, H.E.R., Richard Gere, Allen Ginsberg, Janelle Monáe, Liza Minnelli, Sid Vicious, “Cagney & Lacey,” Paul Klee, Chubby Checkers, Chelsea Handler, Olivia Munn, Phil Collins and Meg Ryan. And you’ll be reminded of the flimsy news stories we eat like candy—like Amy Schumer accused of cyberbullying Nicole Kidman.

TOY SOLDIERS is chockful of Chang’s signature text abbreviations and quotes from a diverse variety of artists including Wallace Stevens, Randall Jarrell, Thom Gunn, Ai, Alfred Lord Tennyson, A. Van Jordan, John Wieners, Future, and The Cure to craft poems of sublime political awareness. Legal diction peppers their poems—defendants, plaintiffs, intellectual property, trade secrets, and res judicata. The book is worth its price for the prose poem “THE GLORIOUS GAIN,” a dishy (and frankly terrifying) look by the Supreme Court by an insider who’s clerked for two federal judges.

Chang can also serve up fabulously funky love poems like this:

SALON SONNET

take this into the bedroom

carry us to that boundary

the tabletop

a lazy susan of confusion

as if gnat or soft cheese

a furry wall

get out the knife

clothes & comebacks

r all i have left

plus the easy afterglow

of seeing u

which i now have

the ballet music

ringing ringing ringing

 

Congratulations, Michael!

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: August 28, 2024

Last week Bluff by Denez Smith was published. It is fitting indeed that Graywolf, based in Minneapolis, has shepherded this collection, which focuses on the city as a place of protest after the murder of George Floyd. In the sprawling, eight-page poem “Minneapolis, Saint Paul,” Smith brings us the unbearable news.  Though their poetry is powerful/brilliant, Smith doesn’t always try to make Bluff pretty—“it doesn’t feel like a time to write when all my muses are begging for their lives.” Smith’s honest about the limitations of what poetry can do and, like all poets, seems to even chastise themselves for writing it—“i’m a/ coward, a slave to slavery, it makes me a/ salary.” Or consider this chilling line—“they clapped at my eulogies. they said encore, encore.”

There is so much to admire in this searing manifesto of a book. Bluff, even while acknowledging the shortcomings of art, simultaneously affirms it.  Here’s “anti poetica”:

https://poets.org/poem/anti-poetica

Congratulations, Denez!

 

DENISE DUHAMEL's HVWC UPCOMING CLASS ON SEPT 7

In this class, we’ll put aside the sonnet and sestina and look to more quotidian modes for poems–think personal ads and dictionary definitions, emails and Amazon reviews. Be prepared to find poems in unlikely places! This is a generative workshop.

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: August 21, 2024

Joan Larkin’s Old Stranger was published yesterday by Alice James Books.  I first became a fan of Larkin’s after reading her exquisitely painful “Blackout Sonnets” from A Long Sound (1986).  It’s fascinating to me how the themes displayed in this early sonnet crown—alcoholism, recovery, rape, abortion—are revisited in Old Stranger, urgently, beautifully, almost forty years later. Her sonnets have loosened in terms of rhyme but not in terms of their power. Decidedly feminist, these poems are what readers need in these regressive times. Larkin also deals with mortality—hoarding, pain, canes—with aplomb and candor while remembering the indignities of youth.  Here is the sonnet that opens the book:

Girls Department

I stared at my shameful flesh in the three-way mirror.

Mother, my guide, my witness, pinched me between

her fingers, thinking aloud: could she work

with the skimpy seam allowance? Get it to fit?

My model-thin cousin Nancy sent me a box

of hand-me-downs: soft wool skirts, an orchid

sweater-set a size too small –– another girl’s raiment.

My sister meant well, Mother instructed,

then took me to Brigham’s for a treat: hot fudge

melted breast-like pyramids of peppermint-stick

ice cream, and I crunched the small clear candies.

I sang in a talent contest once, “Indian Love Call”

in a green tulle gown Mother grabbed from a bin.

She had an eye for a bargain. She took up the hem.

Congratulations, Joan!

\

DENISE DUHAMEL's HVWC UPCOMING CLASS ON SEPT 7

In this class, we’ll put aside the sonnet and sestina and look to more quotidian modes for poems–think personal ads and dictionary definitions, emails and Amazon reviews. Be prepared to find poems in unlikely places! This is a generative workshop.

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: August 7, 2024

Even the Least of These by Anita Skeen was published last month by Michigan State University Press and includes a series of stunning linocuts by artist Laura B. DeLind. The poems are situated during the covid-19 pandemic, a time in which Skeen deepened her relationship with the ten-line poem and wrote one a day, selecting the best for her collection.  Committed to this form, she has taught workshops on such and was open, in this book, to the twenty-line poem as well.  Many of the poems are observations of the natural world and its creatures—birds, cats, bats, ants, termites, beetles, woodchucks and chickens. “No Wheelbarrow, No Rain” gives a sly nod to William Carlos Williams.  In another poem it is a banana popsicle that is “so sweet and so cold.” Skeen turned 74 during the pandemic and writes a poem about it, as well as her grandchildren with the urgency of capturing her life, her own mother, and her childhood. There’s even a how-to poem called “Ten Lines,’ which begins “In the first one set the scene….” There’s a charm and ease to these poems while not shying away from the trauma of the pandemic or the lives lost.

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: July 31, 2024

Judy Brackett Crowe’s The Watching Sky was published by Cornerstone Press earlier this year.  The poems therein are those of an expert storyteller, full of details of rural America and the natural world. She tackles the perils of class and climate change with an especially good poem about a tornado. Crowe looks back on her life with awe and candor, a nostalgia rooted in a way of life that seems long gone.  We are lucky to have her document it all for us!  Here’s a sample poem:

Geography of a Cloud

Once on a long-ago winter’s day she drew

a huge map of her world on butcher paper,

using every crayon stub in the small

cedar box that held the bright clear colors

of her life, an immense cloud-shaped world,

endless, with hills and wide rivers,

stick people, kind people like Teacher

and her aunties and her friend Jane,

houses, horses, dogs, sunflowers

and hollyhocks. The torn blue edges

were the sky and whatever lived beyond

the fall-off places and beyond the sky—

roiling deserts, flat black seas, ice-bound lands—

triangle creatures with wiry whiskers

and many legs.

 

Later, hundreds of thousands of miles later,

bittersweet and periwinkle and Prussian blue

and flesh and magenta later, and thistle, salmon,

gold and silver later, after decades in the fall-off

places, she found herself in that cloud-shaped

map again, the colorful world still smelling

of crayon and cedar, of onions and summer,

and of the fields she’d looked down upon

from her childhood window in that long-ago

time, surprised to find her map so small

and so red, blue, and yellow strange.

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: July 24, 2024

This month, Graywolf Press reissued Claudia Rankine’s Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. The twenty years since its first publication are contextualized in a brilliant intro by Rankine.  While she was then engaging with terrorism, George W’s wars, and race riots, the book, sadly, holds to be as relevant today—even more so. “I stop watching the news. I want to continue, watching, charting, and discussing the counts, the recounts, the hand counts, but I cannot. I lose hope.” She is writing about the reelection of Bush, but she could as easily be writing about the pandemic or any of the other tragedies that have followed. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo. The personal is political and the political is personal. And Rankine is able to make it a lyric. It was interesting to read in her introduction that Richard Howard first identified the poems in Don't Let Me Be Lonely as “lyric.” I was mesmerized re-reading this first in her lyric trilogy.  It holds up—and I only wish it felt more like history than our ongoing present.

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: July 17, 2024

On July 9th, Norton published Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation by Emily Van Duyne. This is the best book I have read on Plath....and I have read them all. And so has Emily Van Duyne, who is able to build upon and refute earlier accounts of Plath’s life. Van Duyne confirms (with evidence!) everything you may have suspected about Hugh's abuse and control, and the ultimate shaping of his wife’s legacy as the madwoman/witch.  But Van Duyne also captures the light/wonderful parts of the Plath's legacy. Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation is an extremely well-researched account, which highlights misogyny in the literary world—and the world at large—and the way intimate partner violence is often ignored or excused.

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: July 10, 2024

For today’s offering, here’s Sandra Yannone’s gorgeously long, skinny, balloon string of a poem which was first published in SWWIM on May 17. The shape of the poem also invokes the emaciated bodies of that era—and her deft line breaks slow us down on this elegiac path.

 

At the AIDS Walk in My Pre-Gay Twenties

 

Years ago

now

 

I walked

among

 

the dying.

I was

 

already dead.

I was

 

a shroud

of skin

 

wrapped

around bones

 

no one

could touch.

 

This is

one version

 

of what

it means

 

to be

dead.

 

Around me,

often circling,

 

teetering

like metal

 

candelabra

angels,

 

were

too plenty

 

of the others

dying, who

 

in the moment

had outlived

 

1. Mostly

middle-aged

 

gay men

dying

 

into

their shadows.

 

We all walked

for miles,

 

for each other,

for liberation,

 

for purification,

for healing, for life.

 

The walks began

and ended

 

with swan boats

in the Boston

 

Public

Garden.

 

By the time

I crossed

 

the bridge

at the finish

 

line, under

a rainbow

 

of tethered

balloons,

 

more among me

were that many

 

steps closer

to death,

 

the air

exhausted

 

in their

lungs

 

labored

further

 

heaving,

sighing,

 

some pulsing

into oxygen

 

masks

while seated

 

in wheelchairs,

escorted

 

by lovers

and friends,

 

some who

would not

 

be

permitted

 

to witness

their beloved’s

 

final

grasps

 

for air

before

 

the lights

blew out

 

behind

their eyes.

 

But this day,

sunlight.

 

Every AIDS walk,

sunlight.

 

We would walk

into the sun

 

for miles

beaming

 

before

together

 

we

would burn

 

our skin

always

 

like flash

paper

 

ready

to combust.

 

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: July 3, 2024

The Lengest Neoi, by Stephanie Choi, was published earlier this year as a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize.  Its title is a play on the Cantonese phrase (Leng Neoi / “Pretty Girl”), subverting expectations of Asian American femininity via code-switching and “mistakes.” In the tender “Speech Derapy” the speaker enters therapy to learn to say her “th” sounds. Language and communication are always at the forefront. Choi also subverts—or, more aptly, enlarges—what we think of as poetry, making forms from crossword puzzles, emails, and voice messages, and text chains. She also pays homage to Marilyn Chin’s “My Name” and her grandmother who features prominently in the book.  Here’s the exquisite “Poem Written in My Grandmother’s Dress.”

https://blackbird-archive.vcu.edu/v21n3/poetry/choi-s/grandmothers-page.shtml

Congratulations, Stephanie!

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: June 26, 2024

This spring Clint Margrave edited the posthumous collection Requiem for the Toad: Selected Poems of Gerald Locklin. Locklin (1941-2021) published over a hundred books in his lifetime and Margrave distilled his career into a brilliant and representative 244 pages. Here’s what I wrote for the back cover…

REQUIEM FOR THE TOAD is a gift to iconoclasts everywhere. Irreverent, hilarious, and sometimes downright heartbreaking, Locklin had a voice like no other. Early in the book come these lines: “Do you love me?” I asked./“Love you? How could I love a toad?” And the rest of the book teaches us to do just that. From his musings on everyone from Snoopy to David Hockney, from Ernest Hemingway to the Beach Boys, from Sartre to his friend Bukowski, Locklin gives us zingers about life and mortality. Clint Margrave has assembled one helluva book. Locklin is the toad that never transformed into a stereotypical prince, but kiss these pages and he will be your Prince of Poetry! 

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: June 19, 2024

Peter Mishler’s Children in Tactical Gear spoke to my Mattel-obsessed heart. In 1997, I wrote Kinky, a series of poems in which Barbie becomes a vehicle of satire to explore consumerism, misogyny, and violence. Mishler has similarly taken Mattel/Hasbro/Target to task, via surreal metaphors—this time toy weapons—to a nearly apocalyptic landscape of sinister/capitalistic imagination. Winner of this year’s Iowa Prize, Children in Tactical Gear is a feat! You can hear Mishler read one of my favorites from the book “Sonnet (You Can Tell It’s Mattel)” here:

Congratulations, Peter!