The 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology Read online

  * * *

  I was that speck in the multiplier of myself

  déjà vu, an early stage, what I have learned, new langu-

  age held in the nowhere of my blood up against the page

  Yusuf Saadi

  Pluviophile

  “There are whispers in the letters,” writes Yusuf Saadi in poems that search everywhere for mystery, for magic, for beauty. And beauty speaks back, renews itself (and us) in these pages. Where other poets find moon, Saadi sees “the moon’s kneecup”; where others see mere daffodils, Saadi asks: “Do daffodils dissolve in your / unpractised inner eye?” This is the poet who is unafraid of play: “Outside of Kantian space and time, do you miss dancing / in dusty basements where sex was once phenomenal?” This, too, is the poet unafraid of the daily grind, of “writing poetry at night / with the rust of our lives.” Pluviophile is a beautiful, refreshing debut.

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  Phenomenology of Night

  i.

  * * *

  From cloudferries,

  the angels

  cast lines into the night

  to reel prayers

  from our human hearts—

  threads pulling

  so desperately

  the clouds keel.

  * * *

  ii.

  * * *

  An angel unhooks

  a worm of light,

  heaves

  an unripe orison

  overboard to crawl

  back inside us—

  until it blooms

  with distress,

  rises of its own

  sincerity.

  Made in Bangladesh

  How to suck blood from this blood-sucked

  image? A garment worker’s needle is suturing

  the scene: she sews a thousand polyester hearts

  while her Singer croons, a schoolgirl breasts

  the clock-less walls, Dhaka’s illit-

  erate mothers thread an English

  logo, and a factory soldier stalks the aisles—

  extendo lolling at his hip.

  * * *

  Nights ago, the garment worker drowned

  her newborn in the toilet: half-submerged

  in bloody water it groped the umbilical cord

  like a rescue rope. The mother snipped the line

  with fabric scissors. She stood on a red mirror,

  whispered all survival poems are washed in blood.

  Sonnet by a Forgotten Twix Wrapper

  Petalled and split, our foil innards reflect

  the ants who excavate for final crumbs.

  In nightmares we remember thumb and index

  vice grips reeking Bud Light, sex

  and subway poles. Conjoined sleepers shrouded

  in the TV’s halo: champing on the parted

  biscuits, (lovey on their sugar rush), evolving

  such efficient jaws. Do their impatient tongues

  perceive our frigid factory floors, conveyor

  belts, and pitch-black crates that crossed

  the ocean? Did they taste the cocoa’s dreams

  between their lustred teeth? Now we soliloquize,

  though prey to seagull beaks, and sunbathe on

  the asphalt when the maelstroms grant us mercy.

  Is the Afterlife Lonely Too?

  Outside of Kantian space and time, do you miss dancing

  in dusty basements where sex was once phenomenal?

  * * *

  How sunlight threads in morning frost, breath pluming

  in knots between you and the snow-marbled fields?

  * * *

  When depression knocks, do the dead hide inside

  poems, in the corridors between stanzas, curling fetal

  * * *

  in a b’s womb? (Are you here, now?) When the dead speak,

  do words signify perfectly with presence? Does each

  * * *

  sentence sound like a symphony? Or appear in the mind’s

  eye in 4k imagery? Have you ever walked across the surface

  * * *

  of a star? Are they as lonely as they look in my city sky?

  Do you dream of microwaves beeping? Or reading Kafka

  * * *

  whose words are black scars? What do the dead think about

  after the afterglow, if no one’s breathing? Don’t you miss

  feeling, feeling, feeling? And failing, the soul search that

  follows, from which you promise yourself to be reborn?

  The Poets

  victoria chang’s prior books are Barbie Chang, The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles and is the program chair of Antioch’s low-residency M.F.A. program.

  * * *

  valzhyna mort is the author of Factory of Tears and Collected Body. Her work has been honoured with the Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry, an Amy Clampitt Residency, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine, and the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. She is a recipient of the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation and a National Endowment for the Arts grant in translation projects. Born in Minsk, Belarus, she writes in English and Belarusian.

  * * *

  srikanth reddy’s previous book, Voyager, was named one of the best books of poetry in 2011 by the New Yorker, the Believer, and National Public Radio; his first collection, Facts for Visitors, received the 2005 Asian
American Literary Award for Poetry. Reddy’s poetry and criticism have appeared in Harper’s, the Guardian, the New York Times, Poetry, and numerous other venues; his book of criticism, Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry, was published in 2012. A recipient of fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, he is currently professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.

  * * *

  tracy k. smith is the author of four collections of poetry, including Wade in the Water and Life on Mars, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Smith served as the twenty-second Poet Laureate of the United States. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in New Jersey.

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  changtai bi, born in Tianjin, China, is a poetry translator from China who is currently a university teacher. He was responsible for the first draft of the English translation of Selected Poems of Yi Lei.

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  yi lei, born Sun Gui-zhen in Tianjin, China, in 1951, was one of the most influential figures of Chinese poetry in the 1980s. Sent to the countryside to work on a farm in 1969, two years later she became a reporter for the Liberation Army and a staff member of the newspaper the Railway Corps. Yi Lei studied creative writing at the Lu Xun Academy and earned a B.A. in Chinese literature from Peking University. In 1991 she moved to Moscow, where she lived and wrote for a number of years. A recipient of the Zhuang Zhongwen Literature Prize, Yi Lei’s work has been translated into English, Japanese, French, Italian, and Russian. She died in 2018.

  * * *

  joseph dandurand is a storyteller, poet, playwright, and member of Kwantlen First Nation located on the Fraser River about twenty minutes east of Vancouver. He resides there with his three children. Dandurand is the director of the Kwantlen Cultural Centre, artistic director of the Vancouver Poetry House, and author of three other books of poetry, I Want (2015), Hear and Foretell (2015), and SH:LAM (The Doctor) (2015). Dandurand was Vancouver Public Library’s 2019 Indigenous storyteller in residence.

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  canisia lubrin is a writer, an editor, and a teacher published and anthologized internationally, including translations of her work into Italian and Spanish. Lubrin’s debut poetry collection, Voodoo Hypothesis, was named a CBC Best Poetry Book, longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award. Her work has been nominated for, among others, the Toronto Book Award, Journey Prize, and bpNichol Chapbook Award. The 2019 Writer in Residence at Queen’s University, Lubrin holds an M.F.A. from the University of Guelph.

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  yusuf saadi won the Malahat Review’s 2016 Far Horizons Poetry Award and the 2016 Vallum Chapbook Award. At other times, his writing has appeared (or is forthcoming) in magazines including Brick, the Malahat Review, Vallum, Grain, CV2, Prairie Fire, PRISM international, Hamilton Arts & Letters, This, and untethered. He is also an executive editor at Sewer Lid magazine. He holds an M.A. in English from the University of Victoria.

  The Judges

  Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union, in 1977, and arrived in the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. He is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press) and Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press) and co-editor and co-translator of many other books, ­including Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (HarperCollins) and Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (Alice James Books). His work received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, and it was also shortlisted for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Neustadt International Literature Prize, and T. S. Eliot Prize (U.K.). He has worked as a law clerk for San Francisco Legal Aid and the National Immigration Law Center. More recently, he worked pro bono as the Court Appointed Special Advocate for Orphaned Children in Southern California. Currently, he lives in Atlanta, GA, where he teaches at Georgia Tech.

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  aleš šteger was born in Ptuj, Slovenia. He works as an editor, translator, and initiator of artistic and cultural events, and translates from Germany and Spanish. He has translated or co-translated books by Pablo Neruda, Ingeborg Bachmann, Gottfried Benn, Peter Huchel, Olga Orózco, César Vallejo, Ko Un, and Walter Benjamin. Šteger is among the most translated Slovenian authors, and his works have been published in the New Yorker, Boston Review, Neue Züurcher Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, TLS, and Lettre International. He has received numerous national and international prizes and honours, and stipends and fellowships. Šteger is a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts, the German Academy for language and literature, and a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Arts, and of the Academy of Science and Literature in Mainz, Germany.

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  souvankham thammavongsa is the author of four poetry books, winner of the ReLit Prize and Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and the author of story collection How to Pronounce Knife (McClelland & Stewart). Her writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the Paris Review, the Atlantic, Granta, and other places. She has been in residence at Yaddo and has performed her work at the Guggenheim Museum. The New York Times said of her, “A talented new voice emerges.” She was born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, and was raised and educated in Toronto.

  Acknowledgements

  The publisher thanks the following for their kind permission to reprint the work contained in this volume:

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  “My Father’s Frontal Lobe,” “Victoria Chang,” “Language,” “My Mother’s Lungs,” “Tears,” “Appetite,” and “Form” from Obit by Victoria Chang are reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.

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  “Genesis,” “Washday,” “New Year in Vishnyowka,” “A Song for a Raised Voice and a Screwdriver,” and “Nocturne for a Moving Train” from Music for the Dead and Resurrected by Valzhyna Mort are reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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  “V,” “VI,” “VIII,” “IX,” “XIV,” and “XVI” from Underworld Lit by Srikanth Reddy are reprinted by permission of Wave Books.

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  “Furtive,” “Red Wall,” “As Clear and Thus as Virtuous as Glass,” “In the Distance,” and “Heavy Rain” from My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree by Yi Lei, translated by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi, are reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press.

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  “The Shame of Man,” “Street Healer 1,” “I Don’t Know When I Am Going,” “Songs of the Mountains,” “The Sturgeon’s Lover,” and “Days into Days” from The East Side of It All by Joseph Dandurand are reprinted by permission of Nightwood Editions.

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  “here—beginning the unbeginning,” “ain’t the monstrous always intimate,” “Dream #27,” “someone’s eyes,” “where I have found my good sense,” and “I was that speck in the halogen confusion of myself” from The Dyzgraphxst by Canisia Lubrin are reprinted by permission of McClelland & Stewart.

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  “noise,” “Phenomenology of Night,” “Made in Bangladesh,” “Sonnet by a Forgotten Twix Wrapper,” and “Is the Afterlife Lonely Too?” from Pluviophile by Yusuf Saadi are reprinted by permission of Nightwood Editions.

  The Griffin Poetry Prize

  Anthology 2021

  The best books of poetry published in English internationally and in Canada are honoured each year with the $65,000 Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious and richest international literary awards. Since 2001 this annual prize has acted as a tremendous spur to interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets writing in English and works in translation. And each year the editor of The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology gathers the work of the extraor
dinary poets shortlisted for the awards, and introduces us to some of the finest poems in their collections.

  This year, editor and prize juror Souvankham Thammavongsa’s selections from the international shortlist include poems from Victoria Chang’s Obit (Copper Canyon Press), Valzhyna Mort’s Music for the Dead and Resurrected (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Srikanth Reddy’s Underworld Lit (Wave Books), and Yi Lei’s My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree, translated by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi (Graywolf Press). The selections from the Canadian shortlist include Joseph Dandurand’s The East Side of It All (Nightwood Editions), Canisia Lubrin’s The Dyzgraphxst (McClelland & Stewart), and Yusuf Saadi’s Pluviophile (Nightwood Editions).

  In choosing the 2021 shortlist, prize jurors Ilya Kaminsky, Aleš Šteger, and Souvankham Thammavongsa each read 682 books of poetry, from 14 countries, including 55 translations from 28 languages. The jurors also wrote the citations that introduce the seven poets’ nominated works.

  The Griffin Trust

  * * *

  Mark Doty

  Carolyn Forché

  Scott Griffin

  Sarah Howe

  Paul Muldoon