Breaking into Blossom gathers modern and contemporary poems that use a wide array of techniques and approaches to ending the poem: endings that crescendo and exhort, double back or taper down, those that reverse expectation, embody paradox, or enact their logic in their formal DNA. In their introductory craft essay, co-editors Luke Hankins and Nomi Stone grapple with questions of closure, wholeness, pleasure, power, universalism, subjectivity, discord, exclusion, resistance, surprise, and bewilderment. Finding fracturing points in their own conversation while considering the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of different kinds of endings, the editors consider such questions as the value of epiphany, what kinds of endings might be likelier to be commodified, how the poem and the mind keep going beyond the page, and more. Hankins and Stone also offer a taxonomy of ending types to think with. This groundbreaking anthology includes poems about mystery, love, dread, cruelty, violence and war; poems of motherhood; of disability; of masculinity; of queerness; of baldness. Poems of transforming bodies and Black joy and failure and hope. The poems sometimes break into blossom; other times, they just break. Or they leave us in wonderment with their quiet buds unfolding into the world.
Introduction: Aesthetics and Ethics in Poetic Closure
Edible, Danusha LamÉris
A Blessing, James Wright
Author’s Prayer, Ilya Kaminsky
Lake Echo, Dear, C. D. Wright
Meditations in an Emergency, Cam Awkward-Rich
A Small Needful Fact, Ross Gay
Black Site (Exhibit 1), Philip Metres
Archaic Fragment, Louise GlÜck
Door in the Mountain, Jean Valentine
Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds, John Murillo
The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart, Jack Gilbert
Encounter, Czesław Miłosz
The Supple Deer, Jane Hirshfield
Vixen, W.S. Merwin
Nate Brown is Looking for a Moose, Matthew Olzmann
Lost Body, Jordan Rice
Conjoined Twins, Yehoshua November
Song, Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Ethics, Linda Pastan
The Strength of Fields, James Dickey
Relax, Ellen Bass
love & the memory of it, Jay Hopler
Broken Sestina Reaching for Black Joy, Tiana Clark
From Blossoms, Li-Young Lee
At Pegasus, Terrance Hayes
Full Summer, Sharon Olds
Men’s Sexual-Trauma Support Group, JosÉ Antonio RodrÍguez
Theories of Revenge, Paul Guest
My Faith Gets Grime Under Its Nails, Sarah Ghazal Ali
As Our Bodies Rise, Our Names Turn into Light, Charles Wright
Mummy of Lady, Thomas James
The Jungle, Carrie Fountain
Now, Denis Johnson
Quae Nocent Saepe Docent, Ross White
Stairs and Windows, Cole Swensen
Sleeping with the Dictionary, Harryette Mullen
The Language, Robert Creeley
The Way, Rae Armantrout
The Layers, Stanley Kunitz
Willful, Cleopatra Mathis
ICU, Spencer Reese
1994, Lucille Clifton
The Gift, Sarah Holland-Batt
Get Up, Please, David Kirby
Good Bones, Maggie Smith
Buen Esqueleto, Natalie Scenters-Zapico
Trace Evidence, Charif Shanahan
Threshold, R. S. Thomas
Ode to Dalya’s Bald Spot, Angel Nafis
Ask Me, William Stafford
Metamorphosis, Ruth Stone
Canary, Rita Dove
Meditation at Lagunitas, Robert Hass
Beauty, B. H. Fairchild
Winter Stars, Larry Levis
Those Winter Sundays, Robert Hayden
Taking it, Vievee Francis
Incident, Natasha Trethewey
In the War: You and Houses, Mosab Abu Toha
Detail of the Rice Chest, Monica Youn
The Burning of Giordano Bruno, Frank Paino
Facing It, Yusuf Komunyakaa
Grief Work, Natalie Diaz
Etiology, Linda Gregg
Psalm, Wisława Szymborska
Orchids are Sprouting from the Floorboards, Kaveh Akbar
Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith
Telemachus, Ocean Vuong
Kingdom Animalia, Aracelis Girmay
In a Low Voice, Slowly, Carl Phillips
High Romance, Diane Seuss
The Ferry, Nathan McClain
enough food and a mom, francine j. harris
To My Husband, Wendy Cope
Farewell, Agha Shahid Ali
Try to Praise the Mutilated World, Adam Zagajewski
Search for the New Land, Morgan Parker
And I Was Alive, Osip Mandelstam
O Small Sad Ecstasy of Love, Anne Carson
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota, James Wright
Love’s Last, Christian Wiman
Duplex, Jericho Brown
Object Permanence, Nicole Sealey
Provision, Morri Creech
You Can Take Off Your Sweater, Paige Lewis
Door in the Mountain, Jean Valentine
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Ross Gay
[2] (from The Book of Mercy), Leonard Cohen
Mother and Child (The Road at the Edge of Field), Jorie Graham
The Glory FaÇade, Keith Flynn
Acknowledgments & Permissions
About the Editors
