September/October 2019

The American Poetry Review

The world’s most exciting poetry-reading experience.

The American Poetry Review8 min read
AUSTRALOPITHECA1 & STARMAN2
The countdown to you begyns with me, deere Starman, when I wander, dumbly, deep into a space hospittable to Hunger. Now, all’s desert. No milk in syte. Just pitifull sand, what shushes as it slydes through your hande to rejoin itself. I’d join myself
The American Poetry Review4 min read
Three Poems
Don’t go to discover your roots, Ladybug says. If you want to look for roots, go and look at a tree.Another day at a cafe, avoiding. Pretending to— Why did you come here Tell me whyIf you want to die go ahead and die do it quicklyIf you want to be de
The American Poetry Review5 min read
The Ladder To Heaven
The hastily assembled angel climbedThe ladder God had many times proposedThe prophets build the prophets never built itThe ladder to the sky and Heaven in the skyThe prophets never built it knowing God Was testing them but also teasing themSince all
The American Poetry Review9 min read
MOSTLY JUST A SCREAM AN INTERVIEW WITH HALLE BUTLER On capitalism and The New Me
For the past ten months, I have lived in San Francisco. I work in Silicon Valley. Capitalism swirls around me: Long work weeks, robotic men and women with their faces in the blue glow of their screens on the train, rampant homelessness among the weal
The American Poetry Review4 min read
Three Poems
Santo Jesus, did you have a jeweled number?Did you play spin-the-bottle in your day?What colors and configurations of glass? I imagine there were no remedies for cleft palatesbut that people loved their penned animals:brushed their fur and picked the
The American Poetry Review1 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Ode To Our Unnamed Moon
MOON and its dark star of calamity.MOON like moths: twilight- and night-flying white moths.MOON with half-suicidal/half-sexual affect. Unimpressed, Islamic nations won’t standardize a lunar calendar.Should we bother to name it soon? A Copernican prin
The American Poetry Review25 min read
TWO REVIEWS AND A SPECTRAL INTERLUDE Heredities, Flood Song, and Incantations APR Books
Would we trust other ghosts? —Dawn Lundy Martin I was so excited to hear that J. Michael Martinez and Sherwin Bitsui had poetry collections coming out in 2018. Martinez’s Museum of the Americas was selected as a winner in the 2017 National Poetry Ser
The American Poetry Review4 min read
Dresser
This dresser’s wood has held some air in it—a dresser of air—and the air holdssomething about what it was to be alive sixty years ago:the kitchen brighter than its garbage,the hanging kitchen ornaments almost sarcastically still againstthe strength o
The American Poetry Review3 min read
Three Poems
Big boy blue, when you were borndid you weigh ten pounds, or a dozen? And were youthe color of a summer skytill your big lungs took your firstFebruary first breath? The fire,this morning, looks like hair, growingfast motion and writhing. When you wer
The American Poetry Review4 min read
Two Poems
Here in my hand a cone from the beautiful eastern white pine sitsan offering from the tree planted thirty years ago after earth softened upcome spring enough to dig a hole roughly twice the size of the burlapball around the root of it. The cone measu
The American Poetry Review2 min read
Three Poems
before I was one I heard every soundas a sound that had never been heard,before I was one I saw every lightas a light separate from dark, colorhidden in a place I had not been.Before I was one I used feet to wakenin water, to pedal through air,hands
The American Poetry Review4 min read
Five Poems
Why is it drowning? Why unpinnedfloaty locks, inset with fallenleaf&filth as if any buoyant trash were jewel? Why painted pale—not pale and bloated? Why more adoredminnow-lipped than when she breathed air, spoke? Why love wesuch dank ophelia? Why rat
The American Poetry Review37 min read
A Herd Of Wild Elephants Matters More: Storytelling With The Tarot
Last year’s Tarot cards were the High Priestess and Justice.1 The world was full of sadness and sharp edges and it was time to own up to our truths, individually and collectively. This year’s cards are the Empress and the Hanged One—an odd pair and i
The American Poetry Review2 min read
Harvest
I am thinking terrible thoughts.Dozens dead again and I am thinkingabout what types of humans they were—the gunman and the fallen. YesterdayI was so happy to be greeting fall at last.You wore a sweater with holes in itand we had dinner with your aunt
The American Poetry Review2 min read
First Editions from Winners of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize
selected by C. D. Wright ”Alicia Jo Rabins’ poems bring together the spiritual, the surrealist, and the erotic. Their wild imagination and fierce passion are aroused by hunger of the soul, and they use poetic intelligence as a desperate hammer to bre
The American Poetry Review2 min read
Become a Friend
Dear Reader, We are grateful for the support that you, a Friend of APR, have shown the magazine. We hope you will join us again now, as we enter our 48th year, to keep The American Poetry Review going strong. So far in 2019, we have published five ou
The American Poetry Review27 min readDiscrimination & Race Relations
Awake In The Scratchy Dark
Twelve years ago, I adopted a young baby in Vietnam and made myself a firm but vague promise not to “raise him white.” But what did that mean? To figure it out, I started to educate myself about race, trying to see how I, a white mother, might not me
The American Poetry Review3 min read
Eight Poems
The wind in swells through the wild rye rolls.The bright sky dulls. Over the hills,Their green backs ringed with blue-Bells sunset-rung, flaps a wingy shadow west-Ward. A jay. Poor bird that no netMet nor gin it didn’t love. Good luck,You luckless sc
The American Poetry Review2 min read
Dear Memory,
What have you done with my keys? I blame youthough it’s hard to hold a grudge these daysbecause I usually don’t rememberwhy I was angry in the first place.I look at a person sure she’s done me wrongthough the inciting incidents are lost. Former stude
The American Poetry Review17 min read
FLICKERS APR Books
If cycles of taste in American poetry didn’t have their own propulsion and life span, neither to be appraised in eras, one would now express a prayer of thanks. But we may not be out of the period of poetry virtue signaling for years, because few of

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