What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. In Books We’ve Loved, our editorial board members reflect on a book that has been particularly meaningful to them in the last year. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem from the book and an excerpt from the essay. 
Kevin Young
What music
the dark makes.
The evensong

of frogs like monks
in the dusk
making the cedars

their abbey, us
not their god
but believers who cannot read

yet still see, in the stained
light around them,
the story of how

we came to be.
In the alligator's
grimace you can see

who we be
no longer—
the shark's stomach

tells us where
she's been
& when—the bezoars, the endless

sets of teeth like gravestones
that tumble out
& get replaced

by more. Stare
at the effaced graves—
this gaping grin

of the earth, mounds
once a wound
in the ground now

almost healed—
or, earth red
as the gills

of a fish, flaring,
yanked from the deep
after a long struggle—

begging to breathe.
from the book STONES / Penguin Random House
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What Sparks Poetry: 
A Short List of Books Ilya Kaminsky Loved in 2021

"Kevin Young's music can be erotic, it can be surreal, it can be serious, revelatory, or playful, or all of this at once: 'Where the train once rained / through town / like a river, where the water // rose in early summer / & froze come winter— / where the moon // of the outhouse shone / its crescent welcome, / where the heavens opened // & the sun wouldn't quit— / past the gully or gulch / or holler or ditch // I was born.' Stones is a gorgeous book. No one writes like Kevin Young. Frankly, no one can."
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The 2022 PEN America Literary Awards Longlists

"PEN America is honored to announce the Longlists for the 2022 Literary Awards. Our Awards are juried by panels of esteemed, award-winning authors, editors, translators, and critics. Finalists for all Book Awards will be announced in January 2022."

via PEN AMERICA
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