body {
background-color: #f5f2ea;
}
div[class*=”ArticleRubric_root__”] {
color: #1929b0;
text-align: center;
font-family: “Logic Monospace”, monospace;
font-size: 14px;
font-style: normal;
font-weight: 400;
line-height: 14px; /* 100% */
letter-spacing: 0.5px;
text-transform: uppercase;
}
a[class*=”ArticleRubric_link__”] {
color: #1929b0;
}
h1[class*=”ArticleTitle_root__”] {
font-family: “Atlantic Condensed”, “Atlantic Serif”, “Atlantic”, “Bodoni”,
Times, serif;
font-size: 64px;
line-height: 68px;
font-weight: 300;
font-style: italic;
text-align: center;
color: #09060c;
font-feature-settings: “liga” off, “clig” off;
}
p[class*=”ArticleDek_root__”] {
font-family: “AGaramondPro”, “Adobe Garamond Pro”, garamond, Times, serif;
font-size: 24px;
font-style: normal;
font-weight: 400;
line-height: 32px;
text-align: center;
color: #09060c;
}
div[class*=”ArticleHero_byline__”] {
text-align: center;
}
h2[class*=”ArticleHeading_hed1__”] {
font-family: “Atlantic Condensed”, “Atlantic Serif”, “Atlantic”, “Bodoni”,
Times, serif;
font-size: 120px;
font-style: italic;
font-weight: 300;
line-height: 120px;
width: 100%;
display: flex;
align-items: center;
margin: 56px auto 0;
}
h2[class*=”ArticleHeading_hed1__”]:after {
content: “”;
display: block;
width: 100%;
height: 1px;
background-color: #000;
margin-left: 32px;
}
h3[class*=”ArticleHeading_hed2__”] {
font-family: “Atlantic Condensed”, “Atlantic Serif”, “Atlantic”, “Bodoni”,
Times, serif;
font-size: 64px;
font-style: italic;
font-weight: 300;
line-height: 68px;
margin-top: 28px;
}
h4[class*=”ArticleHeading_hed3__”] {
font-family: “AGaramondPro”, “Adobe Garamond Pro”, garamond, Times, serif;
font-size: 24px;
font-style: italic;
font-weight: 400;
line-height: 32px;
text-align: center;
margin-bottom: 68px;
}
@media (min-width: 976px) {
figure[class*=”ArticleLeadFigure_standard__”] {
max-width: 1280px;
}
}
div[class*=”ArticleBooksModule_firstBook__”] {
border-top: none;
}
div[class*=”ArticleBooksModule_book__”] {
padding: 20px;
border-radius: 8px;
background: rgba(9, 6, 12, 0.05);
border-bottom: none;
margin-top: 46px;
}
}
P
oetry in the 21st century is both ubiquitous and oddly peripheral. Verses are displayed on subway walls, recited on momentous occasions, and served up in giant fonts on social media, but rarely do they merit a book review or a position on end-of-year reading lists. Yet the medium evolves even when it isn’t the center of attention, and over the past 25 years, its authors have pursued astonishing new forms and reinvented old ones. The Atlantic has prized and published poetry since its founding in 1857. And so, a quarter of the way into this new century of cataclysmic change, we thought it was an apt time to consider how poets fit into the broader conversation—to document an emerging canon of the most significant verse of the century so far.
No list can be comprehensive or infallible, but we did not approach this one lightly. After considering various criteria, we landed on work that felt consequential. We were looking for poetry that had struck its readers, for whatever reasons, as unforgettable, enduring, and influential: maybe because it came as an unexpected gift from a friend or loved one, or in the form of a classroom discovery; maybe because it reframed the world in such a way that culture or society felt foundationally shaken. Maybe it was just because, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, it takes the top of your head off.
↓ Jump to the list here
To establish a consensus, we consulted with more than 450 people—poets and fiction writers, but also publishers, editors, and informed readers from a variety of fields—asking them to name 10 books apiece. Together, they cast nearly 1,000 votes and recommended more than 400 collections of verse. Finally, we limited the list to Americans: Asking 25 books to represent 25 years of artistic progress within the many traditions that feed into American poetry was difficult enough.
For all the variety that emerged in this process, the collections below have a striking amount in common. These poems share a sense of urgency that reflects the overwhelmingly stressful events swirling around them—matters of war, race, gender, politics, health, immigration, climate change, rule, and misrule. Many of them mix genres and media in ways that were rare before 2000. Building on 20th-century innovations within confessional and prose poetry, they have melded lyric verse with memoir and essay, poetry with prose, official documents with photographs, video stills, and paintings. These poets have not walled themselves off from a world that has grown more fragmented, hybridized, and image driven. They have let it in, and allowed it to enrich their work and open up new pathways for younger writers.
In the previous century, the poet Derek Walcott invoked the image of a broken vase that is reassembled with a love “stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.” His metaphor certainly encompasses this new canon, but it also describes an ongoing tradition. Poetry has always assembled and disassembled—and reassembled—in all kinds of magical and necessary ways. — Daniel Halpern and Walt Hunter
25
To 2040
By Jorie Graham
“Are we / extinct yet. Who owns / the map. May I / look”: Blending question and proposition, the opening lines of Graham’s To 2040 stake out the ambitious scope and elegiac spirit of the poet’s foray into a near future. Her 15th collection reflects on a natural world under siege, fading human memories of a once-bounteous Earth, and the poet’s own failing body. As in Graham’s earlier work, the changing terrain—both planetary and personal—demands fierce attention. Her signature long lines track the speaker’s mind as it registers difficulty and darkness: that “the quiet / before the storm is / the storm,” that “the claw full of hair” on a shower ledge is “such a surprise.” Lyric moments arrive in short lines and brief stanzas: “The fish the / water the sand the / needle in the pine. The here. Hear it / breathing.” Don’t expect a map. Instead, the poet summons readers to “look behind you, turn, look down as much as you can, notice all / that disappears.”
24
Don’t Call Us Dead
By Danez Smith
How fragile is the wall between life and death? Smith’s writing asks the question again and again. “every day is a funeral & a miracle,” one of the works in this collection announces with the confidence of a proverb. For the Black, queer speaker, the possibility of death is a constant companion: “hallelujah! today i rode / past five police cars / & i can tell you about it.” In that poem’s first stanza, Smith introduces an unsettling image: “on the bad nights, i wake to my mother / shoveling dirt down my throat / i scream mom! i’m alive! i’m alive! / but it just sounds like dirt.” This is not the account of a natural demise, but Smith relays the harrowing sense that its untimely arrival was inevitable. Life is not just a miracle in the biblical sense, then, but a commodity often denied to the people once sold as cargo themselves. With a clear reverence for both the living and those who have passed on, Don’t Call Us Dead weaves together history, intensely personal revelations, and Smith’s audacious visions of a safer future for us all.
23
The Shadow of Sirius
By W. S. Merwin
Merwin implores us to see that “the past is not finished / here in the present / it is awake the whole time.” The poet’s recollections include the texture of his mother’s hand at the piano, the image of an old dog running in the hills “like an unmoored flame,” the graciousness of a roofer named Duporte, now long dead. But the act of remembering always takes place amid natural as well as personal history: Merwin’s poetry has an ecological awareness that he sharpened through decades of work restoring and conserving palm trees in Hawaii. His careful stewardship of local flora helps make these poems’ descriptions—of the passing days and returning seasons; of birds and trees; of his wife, Paula, and the life they made together—tangible. That same tactile quality is what makes these verses’ sadness at the finality of loss so pointed.
22
Nox
By Anne Carson
The uncontainable grief animating Nox is mirrored in its presentation: not a bound book, but a sinuous, accordion-folded pamphlet spilling out of its box, simulating the notebook that Carson assembled after the death of her distant brother, Michael. “WHO WERE YOU,” Nox cries out. That anguished scribble appears among photographs, handwritten notes, and typed thoughts. Beside these are cards defining and investigating Latin words; Carson, a classicist, is at the same time attempting to translate a poem by the Roman poet Catullus about his brother, who also died far from home. This magpie’s collection of ideas and images conveys that there is no clear, unbroken story to tell about a brother whom Carson hardly knew as an adult. She is aware that these emotions have been felt before, but that doesn’t diminish her sorrow. She pulls on the thread that connects her to Catullus and a community of mourners as old as human history, one that we all belong to or will eventually join.
21
Life on Mars
By Tracy K. Smith
Smith, a former poet laureate of the United States, is deeply concerned with history and place. Yet she begins Life on Mars by imagining a completely new, futuristic world, in which humans sail along “in the haze of space” among chrome aesthetics and “clean lines pointed only forward.” In this science-fiction universe, “history, with its hard spine & dog-eared / Corners, will be replaced by nuance.” The trappings of the genre allow Smith to conjure a life unmoored from what came before—but briefly: It turns out that space isn’t all that far from home. Smith soon starts writing about her father, an engineer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, and orbits the massive, superdense hole left by his death, while clinging to moments of beauty and a kind of agnostic optimism. In one poem, the victims of high-profile murders write postcards to their assailants from some unknown hereafter. In another, which imagines her father’s “ride beyond the body,” Smith muses hopefully that “he is only gone so far as we can tell.”
20
One With Others
By C. D. Wright
In a town Wright calls Big Tree, Arkansas, in the late 1960s, a group of Black schoolchildren were arrested and detained in a dry swimming pool for staging a walkout from their all-Black school. Wright, who was born in the region, stitches together found materials from locals, reconstructing “the memories summoned and branded into their histories” to form a kind of poetic documentary. She creates a particularly vivid picture of V, a white woman whose full name was Margaret Kaelin McHugh—someone who “woke up in a rage, eight days a week” and was so horrified by the event that she later joined a civil-rights march to Little Rock. In response, she was violently expelled from her family and community. One With Others is an experimental collage of voices that becomes a groundbreaking testament—a record of small-town racism and an elegiac biography of a flawed, courageous individual.
19
Postcolonial Love Poem
By Natalie Diaz
Since 1754, when Benjamin Franklin published a political cartoon imploring the American colonies to “JOIN, or DIE,” the rattlesnake has been “a classic American character in a classic American font,” as Diaz puts it in her poem “Snake-Light.” Franklin’s image referenced folklore that suggested a cut-up snake would be reanimated if its parts were reunited before sunset. But in Postcolonial Love Poem, the brutality committed in the name of our nation’s founding has not healed. Diaz, an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Community, refracts our country’s origin story through the blood of its chosen sacrifices, the rattlesnake just one among many. The Mojave poet’s collection is awash in scenes of conquest, depletion, and profound yearning; animals perish, rivers dry up, people burn with lust for one another in the absence of other sustenance. Yet each of the poems feels alive, pointing to the fact that our foundational myths can still be reconsidered—and that Indigenous people are still here to rewrite them.
18
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
By Ross Gay
Sweetness recurs in Gay’s collection, in the form of abundant fruit—figs, pears, berries—and in the dominant emotion of these poems: joy. Here, even death is transformed into the syrupy juice of a stone fruit dripping down a chin. Gay describes sprinkling his father’s ashes at the base of a tree and then finding the dead man’s spirit transferred into its bounty, “almost dancing now in the plum, / in the tree, the way he did as a person.” The poems are redolent of spring, full of verdant growth and birdsong. Perhaps such happy poetry shouldn’t be so unusual, but Gay’s odes to such everyday pleasures as sleeping in his clothes or drinking water from his hands bring a rare satisfaction. “Friends this is the realest place I know, / it makes me squirm like a worm I am so grateful,” he writes in one poem, and this sentiment captures it all, both the cheerful squirming and the gratitude simply for being alive.
17
Bright Dead Things
By Ada Limón
The best way to describe Limón’s poetry, perhaps, is saturated: Emotions run through it undiluted and her language is simple, yet full to bursting. Bright Dead Things is laced with these qualities. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,” she writes in one of several poems about the death of her stepmother. Repeatedly in these pages, Limón plays with scope and blunt imagery to produce moments of humanistic insight. The physicality of illness, rendered almost dryly and at industrial scale, becomes strangely moving: “Her job, / her work, was to let the machine / of survival break down, / make the factory fail.” A detail about a partner’s preference for “a lot of washcloths, / the small, cheap kind / for every day you’re alive” turns the most domestic of predilections into a memento of a life lived in tandem. Limón’s great gift is her bracing comfort with being earnest. “I’m thirty-five and remember all that I’ve done wrong,” she writes at one point, reminding us that her plainspoken observations are a form of generosity.
16
Look
By Solmaz Sharif
Using the Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms to deliver a fierce critique of America’s War on Terror, Sharif deploys terms such as hostile environment and diversion in surprising ways. Sometimes these reclamations have nothing to do with war; they crop up, for instance, in reflections on a dinner party, or during a swim in a friend’s father’s pool. The appropriated words, distinguished in the text in small caps, shed light on the euphemistic, sterile language used to describe the atrocities of combat. Sharif’s poems also examine how violence can carve out gaping holes in language. A series of seven poems in the middle of Look appear as doctored letters from a woman to her husband, who is being detained in Guantánamo. These verses of love and pining are made more devastating by the absences they contain; their redactions reflect the blank space the speaker’s husband left behind. Sharif demands that her readers—especially Americans who live thousands of miles away from the destruction—stare directly at the costs of war.
15
Slow Lightning
By Eduardo C. Corral
Slow Lightning evokes the U.S.-Mexico border and the difficulties of undocumented life as if they exist on a liminal plane; deserts, snakes, lovers, and cacti recur throughout, as does the notion of living in between. One poem, dedicated to Frida Kahlo’s painting The Broken Column, moves between eagle-eyed analysis of Kahlo’s artistry and musings on the perfect shade of red. Like Kahlo’s work, Corral’s verse is shaped with a painterly eye: His lines are more impressionistic than narrative, as if he’s stringing together images with thin, wispy brush strokes. Nothing is static here: Humor is invoked to mask suffering. “Sapo shits behind a cluster of nopales,” Corral writes in a poem about two friends crossing the border, “& shouts out our favorite joke, No tengo papeles!” (“I don’t have papers.”) Sometimes lines are peppered across the page, instead of beginning by the left margin; other times a whole poem is turned sideways. English sentences slip into Spanish. The result is a collection that tells no tidy stories, dropping readers instead into a swirling, shadowy dream world.
14
The Tradition
By Jericho Brown
In The Tradition, Brown catalogs the ills of American society—police brutality, mass shootings—and immerses the reader in the physical pain that they cause, bringing up images of wounds dressed with tar and bullets tucked in brain folds. His precise and spare language leaves little room for error, a credit to the poet’s power. Appearing sporadically in the collection are a series of poems called duplexes—a form Brown invented as a way of “gutting” the traditional sonnet by mixing in the blues and the Arabic ghazal. Each duplex is composed of seven couplets in which the first line of each pair echoes and twists the second line of the previous one: “Men roam shirtless as if none ever hurt me. / Men roam that myth. In truth, one hurt me.” Often, the last line of the poem also folds back into the very first. Through this construction, Brown hints at the cyclical nature of American progress: Stepping forward, in the duplex, is always accompanied by a step back.
13
Man and Camel
By Mark Strand
This book starts with a series of fables that a grandmother might tell to a tired child: There’s a king who no longer wants to rule; a man who goes to pick up a cake and never comes home; a polar explorer who encounters a spectral figure he seems to know; a camel who sings. These are followed by a concluding set of personal meditations that riff on the seven sayings of Christ on the cross. Each of these somnolent vignettes immerses us in a world from which the meaning seems to have escaped just a short time ago, leaving behind a somber landscape of tantalizing symbols: “If the moon could speak, what would it say? / If the moon could speak, it would say nothing.” Death and loss color the tone and texture of the poems, but Strand still gives his visions a cryptic, enthralling beauty. Take the final poem’s descent to a moonlit sea: “a place of constant beginning that has within it / what no eye has seen.”
12
Olio
By Tyehimba Jess
Olio—the word refers to the second half of a minstrel show, a variety act that eventually became known as vaudeville—features more than a dozen real and fictional Black musicians, all of whom are the first generation of their family not to be enslaved. These artists, including Scott Joplin, the ragtime piano player, are caught at the intersection between Black art-making and white profiteering. Jess’s songbook contains sonnets, interviews, letters, pages to unfold and tear out, and forms of the poet’s own invention, such as the “duet” poems that stage two voices in parallel columns of text. Olio’s virtuosic spectacle is a performance put together as carefully as any of its characters’ work. As a whole, it examines art’s sometimes-uneasy, ambiguous relationship to freedom.
11
Stag’s Leap
By Sharon Olds
By 2012, when Olds published this collection about her husband leaving her, she’d already been divorced for more than 10 years. Yet the marriage had lasted more than 30, meaning she had a lot left to unpack. Stag’s Leap traces the long arc of her own healing, vacillating among disbelief, shame, nostalgia, and gratitude. Olds is remarkably generous to her ex: “When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up,” she writes in the title poem. “Even when it’s I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver.” But she’s gentle with herself, too, holding her heartache up to the light with nonjudgmental curiosity. Olds comes away with a profound, and widely applicable, reflection about the impossibility of truly knowing someone at all—and the sometimes-foolhardy bravery required to try anyway. These poems are a perfect example of what Olds does best: She makes you blush, then laugh, then cry.
10
frank: sonnets
By Diane Seuss
Sonnets impose a welcome constraint on poetry, which Seuss takes as a challenge, stretching the form to its limits across 127 poems. In languid sentences, Seuss manages to fit a full life into her book, collecting snippets from her midwestern childhood and her youthful romps in New York City. Her poems squint and fearlessly examine death: She writes of her father’s tumor, her son’s life-threatening struggles with addiction, and the early demise of a cherished friend. These events lead Seuss to think on her own mortality, yet her ontological probing is balanced by an awe for the minutiae of modern human life. She might describe a house as “covered in the pollen / of Cheetos dust.” She devotes as much reverence to poetic abstractions as to quotidian details such as Q-tips, Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, or “chips, dip, pizza rolls.” Over time, she comes to view the end with more wonder than terror. As she writes in the book’s final sonnet: “When it happens I don’t want to be afraid I / want to be curious.”
9
Deaf Republic
By Ilya Kaminsky
At the beginning of the play-in-verse that largely makes up Deaf Republic, soldiers enter a square in the fictional town of Vasenka, in an unidentified country perhaps inspired by Kaminsky’s own childhood in Soviet Ukraine. People have gathered to watch a puppet show, and as soldiers attempt to disperse the crowd, a deaf boy is shot. The next day, the townspeople adopt deafness in protest; they refuse to hear the soldiers, and they develop their own sign language, illustrated in drawings throughout the collection. “The deaf don’t believe in silence,” Kaminsky, himself hard of hearing, writes. “Silence is the invention of the hearing.” Soldiers “arrive in Vasenka to ‘protect our freedom,’ speaking a language no one understands.” And yet there is love, joy, tenderness—a newlywed couple welcoming a baby, the baby learning to walk. Bookending the two-act play are two poems set in the United States, where Kaminsky lives now as a citizen—and where many, too, wrestle with the power and protection found in silences, chosen or imposed.
8
Time and Materials
By Robert Hass
Before this collection, much of Hass’s work focused on concrete, everyday details: seasons, scents, sex, changing light, singing birds. Time and Materials is both different and not. Hass is still concerned with the immediate, but also with how the small scenes he’s mastered are the building blocks of even the most lofty and abstract concepts. In one poem, he marvels at Vermeer’s famous painting The Milkmaid—how incredibly alive those “thin strips of paint on three hundred year old canvas” are—and then flits to describing a lover: the vein in her neck, the small hairs on her lower back. He is creating something like a portrait. His point isn’t only to separate major ideas into their constituent pieces; rather, he wonders at how the world manages to be so much greater than the sum of its parts. Perhaps he’s defending, too, writing that interests itself not only in “time” but in “materials”—the stuff from which existence is built.
7
Faithful and Virtuous Night
By Louise Glück
Faithful and Virtuous Night is the culmination of Glück’s long and lauded career: a collection of poems by a woman in her early 70s, looking back at life with the clarifying vision that time can bring. What Glück sees first is childhood, its innocent joys, “sheets printed with colored sailboats,” birds and insects, summer days. Then, as the loop of years closes, she also sees old age, its frailties and confusions, its finalities—“It came to me one night as I was falling asleep / that I had finished with those amorous adventures / to which I had long been a slave.” Many of the poems shimmer as if illuminated by moonlight, dreamy and ruminative. She is taking account of the ephemerality of human existence, and in one poem, an airplane ride becomes a metaphor for an entire life. Near its end: “I will be brief. This concludes, / as the stewardess says / our short flight. / And all the persons one will never know / crowd into the aisle, and all are funneled / into the terminal.”
6
Crush
By Richard Siken
Infatuation is one of life’s glorious mysteries: At peak intensity, it can spin out of control, teetering from beautiful to frightening. This might be the double meaning of Crush, Siken’s poetry collection about longing: Like a volcano, desire is awesome but destructive. Siken describes it at times as a source of stigma, self-hatred, or material danger. “The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater / because he is trying to kill you / and you deserve it,” he writes, “because you wanted to touch his hands and lips.” But the only greater threat than love’s power is the possibility that it’s not powerful enough—that it can’t stop time, or overwrite humankind’s mundane cruelties. Siken is a patron saint for those who feel deeply, and he lays it all out, raw but tender, in the first poem: “Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake / and dress them in warm clothes again … Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. / These, our bodies, possessed by light. / Tell me we’ll never get used to it.”
5
Whereas
By Layli Long Soldier
“Everything is in the language we use,” Long Soldier notes in Whereas. “For example, a treaty is … a contract between two sovereign nations.” But treaties between the United States and Native nations failed to recognize the equal footing inherent to that definition, she reminds us. In the first part of this meticulous collection, Long Soldier defines and redefines words in English and Lakota, approaching both tongues with modesty and immense care. In the second, she offers a point-by-point response to a 2009 governmental “Resolution of Apology to Native Peoples,” mirroring its “whereas” statements, which, as she demonstrates, claim to establish facts but instead obscure them. She uses erasure to excise words, either to reveal their emptiness or to build truer sentences, resulting in lines such as “I recognize that official ill-breaking of the Indian”; at another point, she interposes her father’s contrition to show you what a proper apology looks like. “I climb the backs of languages, ride them to exhaustion,” she writes with wry self-recognition. What she mostly does, though, is bring dead language back to life.
4
Native Guard
By Natasha Trethewey
The title poem in Trethewey’s book, named for a unit of Black soldiers called into Union service during the Civil War, transports readers back to November 1862, when the regiment was guarding Confederate captives on a Mississippi island. Even while heading into combat, Trethewey’s formerly enslaved narrator is concerned with keeping alive lessons from the past: “I thought to carry with me / want of freedom though I had been freed, / remembrance not constant recollection.” More than a century later, in the mid-1960s, Trethewey was born on the mainland, about 12 miles from that same Union fort. Native Guard is at once an elegy for these often-forgotten Black men and an intimate meditation on how the Civil War and the legacy of slavery shaped Trethewey’s early life. The book travels back and forth in time, sometimes in the span of one poem, and the author opts to converse directly with the soldiers or with her late mother, whose interracial marriage was still illegal at the time of Trethewey’s birth. Native Guard rejects the comfort of linear storytelling, offering a more honest, visceral account in its place.
3
Night Sky With Exit Wounds
By Ocean Vuong
Vuong’s collection depicts scenes of obliterating violence and juxtaposes them with the deep, human desire to survive. Night Sky With Exit Wounds moves across years and the globe, traversing the sidewalks of Saigon and the cornfields of America, always pairing brutality with mundanity: Pigeons peck at bread near a bombed bakery, monarch butterflies fly through a prison cell. Vuong approaches language without pretense and treats it anew each time. He delights in surprising turns of phrase, branching into different worlds, often within the same poem or even the same line. Specific words—tongue, snow, holy, body, country, colt—repeat and re-form themselves among poems, taking on multiple meanings or calling back to earlier moments. His work reminds us that beauty can come from suffering, and that, sometimes, the two blend together.
2
American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin
By Terrance Hayes
Hayes wrote this collection shortly after Donald Trump’s first electoral victory, and nearly every page is imbued with his emotional response as he catalogs his anger, fear, ambivalence, and even, at times, love. Each of these 70 poems is titled “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin,” and each uses its stark, metered lines to contend with the country’s present and historical bigotry. In some of the sonnets, Hayes confronts the “assassin,” a figure who takes many forms—white supremacists such as Dylann Roof, or the men whose faces appear on the money he carries. “You will never assassinate my ghosts,” he writes. The book also includes gentler verse; in one sonnet Hayes writes about the “things I love in the face / Of James Baldwin … The sashay / Between left & right / eyebrow, for example.” In another, he notes with quiet pride that he learned to cut his own hair after his father left. But even these poems feel like they’re on the edge of violence, almost bursting out of their contained form. His collection is a powerful record of a turning point in American history and an argument that the insidious “assassin” of the poems can look like anyone—even ourselves.
1
Citizen
By Claudia Rankine
Many parts of Citizen, Rankine’s “American Lyric,” might not initially register as poetry: video stills, paintings, photographs, long sections of prose. But they function as poetry because they distill a universe of history, experience, thought, and feeling into a taut whole. Rankine presents future writers with a menu of techniques for turning the media of the moment into poetry that addresses both the urgent and the eternal. When describing hostile, racist comments or police brutality, she uses the second person to expand the lyric form, traditionally personal and confessional, into a means of holding an array of stories, many (or maybe most) of them not her own: “You are not sick, you are injured,” she says, invoking racism’s effects on the body while focusing on those doing the harm. Between these episodes are interludes of airier verse that soars or sighs. At first, the “you” of the book holds her tongue in response to many slights, seeking solace in, for example, a tennis match—only to see Serena Williams lash out over a bad call after years of forbearance. The poet, like the player, ultimately repudiates the silencing impulse: “The world is wrong. You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you.” Tension builds and then explodes. But beauty also abounds—moonlight, rain, a partner’s touch, and the pleasure of a few words, perfectly arranged.
The post The Best American Poetry of the 21st Century (So Far) appeared first on The Atlantic.
