Every year to celebrate Poetry Month, we select 32 poets to battle it out in a competition for the ages: Poetry Madness. This year, we decided to do things a little differently: instead of choosing the players ourselves, we asked four awesome poets — Saeed Jones, Andrea Gibson, Robert Lashley, and Hajara Quinn — to each nominate eight of their favorite contemporaries to compete for the title of Best Poet of All Time (for the year). Who will emerge victorious? Read about the contenders here and then go to our Poetry Madness page on April 8 to vote for your top choices.
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| Andrea Gibson is a queer/genderqueer poet and activist whose work deconstructs the current political machine, highlighting issues such as gender, sexuality, patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, classism, illness, love, and spirituality. Gibson is a cofounder of Stay Here With Me, an online website and community focused on suicide prevention. Gibson has published three books of poetry, released six full-length spoken-word albums, and is the editor of We Will Be Shelter, an anthology of social justice poetry published by Write Bloody Publishing. |
Here are Andrea Gibson's picks for Poetry Madness 2015:
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Hieu Nguyen
Author of This Way to the Sugar
"A brilliant, queer, heart-punched unghosting, This Way to the Sugar is a breath-giving collection of desire, grief, trauma, tradition and wise wise wonder from one of the most honest poets I have ever witnessed on a stage."
See his work here.
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Claudia Rankine
Author of Citizen: An American Lyric
"Stunning, shattering, and crucial, Citizen unpacks race relations in America, fueling a facing inward and outward, questioning constructed definitions of freedom, and interrogating the assumption that what is lived through is always survived."
Learn more about Claudia Rankine here.
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Derrick Brown
Author of Our Poison Horse
"Romantic, hilarious, grit-beautiful and hungering for the sweet spot, Derrick Brown is a lunatic for the good light, and Our Poison Horse is one of my favorite of his thus far. I want every poet I know to read this book."
Check out more of his work here.
Follow him on Twitter @derrickbrown.
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Natalie Diaz
Author of When My Brother Was an Aztec
"Hauntingly intimate and fiercely political, When My Brother Was an Aztec is an unapologetic collection of grief-brave insight on addiction, love, reservation life, poverty, and compassion… this book wrecked me for the better."
Read her poem "No More Cake Here."
Follow her on Twitter @NatalieGDiaz.
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Jeffrey McDaniel
Author of Chapel of Inadvertent Joy
"Yet another book by Jeffrey McDaniel that made me want to steal every other line. Coaxing the awe out of the ordinary, Chapel of Inadvertent Joy is heartbreaking, darkly sweet, insightful, and awesomely weird."
Read his poem "The Quiet World" here.
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Rachel McKibbens
Author of Into the Dark and Emptying Field
"Into The Dark and Emptying Field shocks, stuns, and creates language that goes beyond the confines of predictable imagery and delves into the brutal unpeeling of the monsters within every person, exploring the grotesque reality of ethical malleability. This book knocked me over."
To read her poems, go here.
Follow her on Twitter @RachelMcKibbens.
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Megan Falley
Author of Redhead and the Slaughter King
"Redhead and the Slaughter King is one of the most fearlessly tender, tough-graced, feminism-fueled collections that has ever had me running through my house screaming, 'This book is SO GODAMN GOOD!' Annihilating my ideas of risk in writing, and reaching deep into my familial heart, it is the first piece of art that has managed to pull me back home."
To read her poems, go here.
Follow her on Twitter @megan_falley.
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Danez Smith
Author of [insert] Boy
"(insert) Boy is one of the most powerful, necessary and exquisite books I have read in my lifetime. Body as prayer as bruise as revolt, this book is painful to read... but more painful not to."
Follow him on Twitter @Danez_Smif.
"On Grace" by Danez Smith
You know how when Usain Bolt runs
& you want to cry it's so beautiful? That.
How could we not be a song? I hum
this man in my bed all night, my mouth a loose choir
& his body a gospel & I don't mean like a song
I mean gospel like a religion or like a testimony
etched in gold. How could we be only a song?
I lay men down for what some call me a faggot for
but I call it worship, I see his wood & bark
Amen Amen Amen. I call out God's good name
in the midst of the first miracle — the black body.
Look at him, at us. Were the mountains not named
after some dark brotha's shoulders? Didn't the wind learn
its ways from watching two boys run the spine of a field?
Bless the birch-colored body, always threatening to grow
or burn. Bless the body that strikes fear in pale police
& wets the mouths of church girls & choir boys with want.
Am I allowed to say I praised my pastor most without the robe?
I have found God in the saltiest parts of men: the space between
the leg & what biology calls a man, the bottoms of feet, life's slow milk.
I watch the Heat play the Warriors & I am overcome by a need
for tears & teeth. I stopped playing football because being tackled
feels too much like making love. I pause in the middle of the street
watching the steady pace of the men on corners selling green
& all things dangerous & white. I watch the hands exchange money
& escape, the balancing act of hips & denim. This awful dance of poverty,
but the dancers? Tatted & callous ballerinas, henna dipped stars.
Do you know what it means to be that beautiful & still hunted
& still alive? Who knows this story but the elephants & the trees?
Who says the grace of a black man in motion is not perfect
as a tusk in the sun or a single leaf taking its sweet time to the ground?
For Tim Seibles, Ross Gay, Kevin Simmonds & Pages Matam