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.
Luke Hankins is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Radiant Obstacles and Weak Devotions, as well as a poetry chapbook, Testament (TRP, 2023). He is also the author of a collection of essays, The Work of Creation, and a volume of translations from the French of Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, A Cry in the Snow & Other Poems. With Nomi Stone, Hankins is co-editor of Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems. He is the founder and editor of Orison Books, a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives. Poet and anthropologist Nomi Stone is the author of three books, most recently the poetry collection Kill Class (Tupelo, 2019), finalist for the Julie Suk Award, and the ethnography Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire (University of California Press, 2023), first prize in the Middle East Studies Award from the American Anthropological Association and Honorable Mention of the Middle East Studies Association's Albert Hourani Prize. With Luke Hankins, Stone is co-editor of Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems. Winner of a Pushcart Prize and a Fulbright fellowship, she was most recently a Postdoctoral Researcher in Anthropology at Princeton and she is currently an Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Texas, Dallas.
Introduction: Aesthetics and Ethics in Poetic Closure Edible, Danusha LamEris 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 GlUEck 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, Czeslaw Milosz 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, JosE Antonio RodrIguez 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, Wislawa 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 FaCade, Keith Flynn Acknowledgments & Permissions About the Editors
"It goes without saying that Luke Hankins and Nomi Stone have curated a star-studded anthology of writers-from Ilya Kaminsky to C.D. Wright and Ross Gay-who cultivate an aura of surprise and wonder as their poems draw to a close. But to stop there would be to greatly underestimate Hankins's and Stone's powers as editors. What I find so compelling about this anthology-in addition to the masterful craft of the writers gathered here-is the project's ethical and philosophical underpinnings. Here, Hankins and Stone set forth an ethics of poetic closure, as well as a detailed and practical taxonomy of all the myriad ways a poem can 'break into blossom.' Hankins and Stone reveal a poem's aesthetics as being inextricable from its ethics, and this nuance makes for an incredible teaching tool. This volume is an achievement, a beacon, and a masterclass. Bravo!" - Kristina Marie Darling, author of Look To Your Left: A Feminist Poetics of Spectacle and Daylight Has Already Come: Poems
