Contributors’ Notes
Hussain Ahmed is a Nigerian poet and environmentalist. His poems and translations are featured or forthcoming in
Poetry,
AzonaL,
Sara Backer’s first book of poetry,
Such Luck (Flowstone Press, 2019), follows two poetry chapbooks:
Scavenger Hunt (dancing girl press, 2018) and
Bicycle Lotus (Left Fork, 2015). Her honors include the 2019 Plough Poetry Prize competition, eight Pushcart nominations, and fellowships from the Norton Island and Djerassi Resident Artists Programs. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, lives in New Hampshire, and reads for the
Maine Review. Point,
Marianne Boruch’s tenth book of poetry is
The Anti-Grief (Copper Canyon Press, 2019). She has written three essay collections about poetry, most recently
“Imagine you must survive without running,” Ada Limón writes in one of
The Carrying’s (Milkweed) early poems, and for a while I can imagine nothing but that. But then, a few pages later, she writes, “Perhaps we are always hurtling our bodies toward/ the thing that will obliterate us . . .” and I think, yes, I imagine that is also true. On and on this book goes, making me imagine the world in one way and then another. Consider her poem “American Pharoah,” in which the speaker is quite literally sick and tired but is forced to leave the house to see some horse “not even race, but/ work.” She’s a grump, the poem’s speaker, just like I am so often grumpy and tired and sick of it all. And so too is “some horse racing bigwig” who is certain this horse must be overrated. Isn’t so much of what this world sells us overrated? The blooming trees and the dogs and the dandelions and the tomatoes and the dreams we have of the people we love or the people we hope to l
‘Democracy Poem #1,’ by June Jordan: American Life in Poetry
Today 12:00 PM
Voters wait in line to cast early ballots in October 2020 in Philadelphia. Jessica Griffin/The Philadelphia Inquirer
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By Kwame Dawes | American Life in Poetry
June Jordan died in 2002, an American child of Jamaican immigrants whose remarkable poetry is collected in “The Essential June Jordan,” a new collection published by Copper Canyon Press. This eloquent fist of a poem reminds us of what remains at stake in this longstanding and necessary conversation that America continues to have with itself.
Democracy Poem #1
in line
of paper
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry
He is the author of
The World That the Shooter Left Us (Four Way Books, 2022);
More Than Watchmen at Daybreak (Nine Mile Books, 2020);
The Gospel According to Wild Indigo (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018);
The Crossed-Out Swastika (Copper Canyon Press, 2012);
More Than Peace and Cypresses (Copper Canyon Press, 2004);
Beautiful Signor (Copper Canyon Press, 1997), which won the Lambda Literary Award;
Soul Make a Path Through Shouting (Copper Canyon Press, 1994), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and received the William Carlos Williams Award; and
The Mud Actor (Henry, Holt & Co., 1982), which was a National Poetry Series selection.
Cassells is the recipient of a 1995 Pushcart Prize, the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poets Award, and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has worked as a translator, film critic, actor, and teacher.