The Best American Poetry 2020, Part II

I thought it was time to read another batch of poems. Many of the poems in this set shared themes of grief or illness. Victoria Chang's long narrow prose poem "Obit" echoes the shape of a tombstone. She writes of visiting her mother's gravesite after a stranger has been buried nearby:

                                      ...Before this other
stone appeared, my mother's stone was
still my mother because of the absence
around her. The appearance of the new
stone and the likeness to her stone
implied my mother was a stone, too, that
my mother was buried under the stone
too. ...

Ama Codjoe's "Becoming a Forest" at first feels like just a vivid imagining of the title--"in my marrow/the blood of sap, the rungs of pinecones"--but becomes more freighted with meaning: "...a cry, to be anything buzzing with blood/or wings, anything alive, including grief, because/isn't that ... what my long ago dead dreamed,/ tossed in their short allowance of night?"

William Brewer writes of peeling an orange on a airplane but connects it to Agent Orange, to herbicides and industrial waste and his father's cancer. Timothy Donnelly writes of his own cancer treatment, juxtaposed with news headlines of 2018, especially war-related violence in Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, countries where the United States' foreign policy decisions directly or indirectly contribute to the death toll. Amidst this juxtaposition, there is this (perhaps even sublime) moment:

...I dropped a fossilized trilobite in the toilet

and it cracked in half. Millions of years of structural integrity
finished just like that. ...

In his contributor note, Donnelly elaborates: "The point isn't, of course, to compare personal suffering with suffering that takes place on a much greater scale and with far more complex implications, but rather to reflect on how both kinds of suffering will happen simultaneously, with the former sometimes distracting our attention from the latter in a way that is no less problematic for being kind of inevitable. The poem tries to widen its circumference in order to accommodate as much knowledge as it can, even to the point of documenting items of no apparent consequence, but it does so in the hope of keeping everything it remembers, even the merest debris of a life, from folding into oblivion. I have come to think of this as one of the two most important tasks a poem can set out to do."