- “Death and Taxes” – Urayoan Noel
- “The Truth” – Tim Dlugos
- “Improvisation on Them” – Linda Susan Jackson
- “The Tree of Knowledge” – Shane McCrae
- “Letter to My Father” – Martin Espada
- “In Perpetual Spring” – Amy Gerstler
- “Carpet Bomb” – Kenyatta Rogers
- “Money” – Philip Larkin
- “Redacted from a Know-Your-Rights Training Agenda” – Cynthia Dewi Oka
- “Shards” – Aline Murray Kilmer
- “The semantics of flowers on Memorial Day” – Bob Hicok
- “On Swearing” – Gary Dop
- “Poem in Which I Only Use Vowels” – Paola Capó-Garcia
- “Questions” – Rachel Richardson
- “The Mortician in San Francisco” – Randall Mann
- “The Lyric in a Time of War” – Eloise Klein Healy
- “San Benito” – Chip Livingston
- “A Display of Mackerel” – Mark Doty
- “Study Guide of the Naturalization of the Mouth”- Maryam Ivette Parhizkar
- “Kissing My Father” – Joseph O. Legaspi
- “Introduction to Mycology” – Chelsea Rathburn
- “Why Bother?” – Sean Thomas Doughtery
- “My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears” – Mohja Kahf
- “The S in ‘I Loves You, Porgy'” – Nabila Lovelace
- “The God Who Loves You” – Carl Dennis
- “José Dominguez, the First Latino in Outer Space” – Dan Vera
- “Lemon and Cedar” – Melissa Stein
- “Some Interpersonal Verbs, Conjugated by Gender” – Alexandra Petri
- “The Prophetess Sojourner Truth Discusses the Two Different Versions of Her Most Well-Known Speech, One Nearly Unknown and One Very Beloved Yet Mostly Untrue” – Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
- “Field of Skulls” – Mary Karr
- “She Walketh Veiled and Sleeping” – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- “The Loneliness of the Military Historian” – Margaret Atwood
- “Losses” – Andrew Motion
I love that imagery of #3 of “braids myths in her hair”
#5 hurts. It’s political, but doesn’t feel overtly so. I’m struck by all of the imagery of bedraggled screaming prophets
I really like the idea of #9 being just some redacted poetry in a training manual somewhere.
#10, again I continue to be surprised by really old 1920s poetry which just feels super modern. The image of the moth is an interesting one right after #9.
#11 – I don’t know why I keep being drawn to these war poems.
Side story: I remember one day in elementary school on Veteran’s Day, I went “Happy Veteran’s Day!” to my dad because I knew he served in the Taiwanese army (drafted right after school like Singaporeans nowadays) and my grandpa had served in Chiang Kai-Shek’s airforce. He gave me a puzzled look and asked me why I said that, saying “I’m not a veteran here”. I was very confused by this and it took me a while to figure out what the difference is. Incomprehensibility of nationalism in the mind of a child.
#13 – I don’t like this poem very much and am only sharing because I’m sorta disappointed that this poem isn’t just AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
#14 – not really a fan – it’s a pretty cold take. I need to continue pressing on the idea of what it means for a company to make money off of idle questions. I also love the idea of Search as a harvest goddess
#16, despite the name, is not really a war poem, but is really sort of beautiful and reminds me of me with its parentheticals
While writing this post up, I found that #20 was tweeted out by Aimee Nezhukumatahil as one she really liked, who I have talked about as a poet that I have found out I really like from doing this anthology series. Kinda reassuring that we have similar tastes ^_^
#23 does a really good job of describing the tension between two cultures
I really like how #24 takes what could be a degrading use of dialect and spins it into something else.
I’m really shocked by the history that #29 talks about
I really like #31 as a companion piece to “She walks in beauty”
I’m pretty sure I had posted #33 before, but I can’t find it. I like the simple transition from Petraeus to the TV
On a meta level, since both of my daily sites try to send out thematic poems for the days, I appreciate that you can see the various holidays pass by — tax day, Memorial Day, D-day, etc. in the poems.
Old favorites
- “The Gods Among Us” – C. Dale Young
- “The Gift” – Li-Young Lee
- “A History of Sexual Preference” – Robin Becker
- “Still I Rise” – Maya Angelou
- “Howl” – Allen Ginsberg
Snippet from an author’s note – “‘Improvisation in the Age Beyond Mechanical Reproduction.’ I took some maniacal, non-mechanical notes, improvisationally revising as I unfaithfully transcribed.”
