The Best American Poetry 2015 Read Free

militant Islam. Back in November 2011, the magazine had hadthe unmitigated gall of mocking sharia [in French charia ], religious rule based on ancient Muslim principles unmodified by anything resembling a Reformation, an Enlightenment, or an Ecumenical Council. The cartoon on the cover of the issue entitled Charia Hebdo threatened “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing!” 5 Five years earlier, the weekly reprinted the Danish cartoons of Mohammad that had aroused the ire of cutthroat jihadists. Surprisingly many publications in America and abroad did not have the guts to do so. The editors of Charlie Hebdo , including the legendary figures known as “Charb” (Stephane Charbonnier) and “Cabu” (Jean Cabut), were among the twelve individuals killed in the attack of January 7. For the right to say what they thought they paid with their lives.
    On the very night that the Paris massacre dominated the news waves, with Parisians in the streets holding up signs saying “Je Suis Charlie,” I heard a New York Times columnist go on CNN and tell newscaster Don Lemon that “We in journalism should try to avoid giving offense.” It struck me as a very odd thing for him to say. Isn’t giving offense, provoking discussion, stirring the pot, airing your views, part of the deal? A former press secretary to President Obama drew a distinction to the effect that while the press has the right to insult a religious leader, it may show bad judgment to wave a red flag in the eye of a stampeding bull. This is too halfhearted a defense of the freedom of speech and press, both of them under constant assault. In contrast, consider what “Charb” said, paraphrasing a line sometimes attributed to Emiliano Zapata, hero of the Mexican Revolution: “I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees.”
    *  *  *
    Sherman Alexie is writing the best poetry of his life. That is my opinion, but I am not alone in holding it. Sherman’s work was chosen for the last four editions of The Best American Poetry : by Kevin Young (2011), Mark Doty (2012), Denise Duhamel (2013), and Terrance Hayes (2014), in addition to his inclusion in The Best of the Best retrospective volume that Robert Pinsky edited in 2013. Alexie mixes colloquial diction and formal virtuosity; he uses forms—a narrative sequence of numbered sentences, a prose sonnet, a ghazal—to restrain and paradoxically to accentuate the power of raw emotion that his poems deliver.
    Sherman’s reputation goes far beyond the precincts of verse. Heis celebrated for his fiction— The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian , The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. His prose has won him PEN prizes and a National Book Award. Smoke Signals , the movie he wrote, won accolades at the 1995 Sundance Festival. Just recently Time magazine rated The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian as the “all-time” top young adult book above Harry Potter , Charlotte’s Web , The Phantom Tollbooth , and Judy Blume. 6
    But poetry has a special place in Alexie’s prolific portfolio. It can be said of Sherman that poetry saved his life. An alcoholic trying to recover control, he went off the wagon on March 11, 1991. He binged; he behaved badly. But it was the last time he has had a drink. The next day he went to the mailbox and found a letter from Dick Lourie of Hanging Loose Press accepting a manuscript of Alexie’s poems for publication. “There was a sign,” Sherman says.
    Sherman undertook the task of editing this volume with great zest and he devoted himself tirelessly to scanning online journals, more of which are represented this year than ever before. In fact, more poems were chosen from the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day feature, skillfully edited by Alex Dimitrov, than from any other source. More magazines are represented altogether; fewer poems come from wide-circulation journals or