Best American, lit mags, and the merry-go-round

I’m now allowed to announce that my poem “Sex Talk” will appear in Best American Poetry 2025, chosen by Terence Winch. I had absolutely no idea it was under consideration and have never been in one of these anthologies before–didn’t think I ever would be. The December email from Mark Bibbins was a bolt out of the blue. Thanks to both of them and to series editor David Lehman for honoring a poem by someone they’ve never met. For noticing it in the first place, amid the flood!

I know that “grabbing the brass ring” is a cliché, but I have a vivid memory of the real experience. My mother used to take my sister and me to a tiny amusement park with a carousel. I loved mounting a brightly painted outer horse, not the fixed-in-place ponies but one that rose up and down, for maximum drama. It made me feel strong to rise in the stirrups each time I passed the dispenser, lean out at fullest stretch, snag a silver ring, and collect them on one finger. Then, once in a great while, gold! The shocked joy of opening the Best American invitation felt the same, although deeper and more lasting. I knew even as I wrote it that “Sex Talk” was a poem in which I stretched out in a new way, although that didn’t mean I was confident others would see what made it a breakthrough for me. Some did, I guess! Thanks to editor Mark Drew who helped me find the ending and accepted it for the final issue of Gettysburg Review, to Poetry Daily for reprinting it, and to others who reposted or wrote me notes about the poem. It’s not only joyful but kind of sobering when something you write actually does become, as you hoped, an instrument of connection. As if poetry does have power in a nonsensical merry-go-round world.

“Sex Talk” is one of the poems in Mycocosmic that I was able to write and publish only because my mother had died–a little too exposing of both of us otherwise. Tomorrow would be her eighty-fifth birthday, so I’d like to carve out a little time to think about her without the impingement of a to-do list. My life right now is a cat’s cradle of different strands that are hard to keep track of: organizing a couple of Shenandoah 75th anniversary events next week; heavy publicity work for the new book just a month before its launch; grant applications I’m still laboring on (although I guess the NEA in prose is off the list unless I drum up something “patriotic”); student advising during a registration period; work I’m doing to improve my health; the cognitive burden of tracking current events and trying to figure out how to be a decent person amid them. And, as always when I’m teaching, my mind is full of poems, assignment-building logistics, student writing, and just reading students’ faces in a daily way to determine what they need. In my “Modern Poetry’s Media” course, we’re deep into international modernism, comparing the poems printed in our course texts with their original appearances in little magazines. Tomorrow I take the students to Special Collections to see rare books and old correspondence, including Shenandoah letters from Ezra Pound (a big influence on one of the first editors, who was trying to make sure the journal was not parochial) and Langston Hughes (we actually published a couple of his poems quite early on). I’m also directing a terrific student honors thesis on racial integration in Shenandoah’s early days, pre-Civil Rights Act, and following the amazing finds my student digs up as she plows through old volumes. Life is brightly painted, but whirling fast.

Please admire my pretty launch party flier below, with info on the bottom right about how to reserve your copy, if you’re local (it helps a small business to get a sense of how many to order). My full spring events list is here with a few changes and additions.