“The secret wish of poetry is to stop time,” the late poet Charles Simic once wrote. Each of The Yale Review’s most-read poems of 2024 confronts this impulse in distinct ways. Fady Joudah’s “[...],” Camille Rankine’s “In Truth,” and m. nourbeSe philip’s “The Poets Awoke” all speak to language’s inability to slow or halt the atrocities that unfolded this year in Gaza, Lebanon, and other places. Elisa Gabbert’s “Here Lies Dust,” Hua Xi’s “Handfuls,” and Tomás Q. Morín’s “When the Dog Bites” seek to capture the uncanny feeling of time passing. Richie Hofmann’s “Young People,” Jessica Laser’s “The Afterlife,” and Catherine Barnett’s “Nicholson Baker and I” are small acts of commemoration, freezing and dilating moments of eerie intimacy between two people. In Donauta Watson’s aptly titled “Memories Don’t Live Like People Do,” this urge to commemorate results in a kaleidoscopic account of the writer’s Brooklyn childhood in the style of Joe Brainard’s 1970 memoir, I Remember. The final paragraph ends with a list of the dead, whose names the poem won’t let the world forget.
—the editors
“Here Lies Dust” by Elisa Gabbert
“I was eleven when my father / was forty-four. Now I am. / A throwaway joke that kills.”
“Young People” by Richie Hofmann
“Nothing more erotic than being in the same room / Not interacting—”
“[...]” by Fady Joudah
“How will I go on living / with orchestras that conduct my thirst? / It’s been done before.”
“The Afterlife” by Jessica Laser
“I could take out the recycling / and die if I don’t / run into him. I could sit / in the garden and die / if he doesn’t walk by.”
“Handfuls” by Hua Xi
“I toss a handful into the air. / A handful of nonspecific stuff. / What is this that my hands are tossing?”
“The Poets Awoke” by m. nourbeSe philip
“The poets awoke / The poets awoke one morning / The poets awoke one morning to find . . .”
“When the Dog Bites” by Tomás Q. Morín
“It’s not always about fleas. / Sometimes an itch / is an itch is an itch.”
“Nicholson Baker and I” by Catherine Barnett
“At dinner I was seated next to him, / with whom I might have fallen in love / were he not married and living in Maine.”
“Memories Don't Live Like People Do” by Donauta Watson
“I remember when Bogle dead, I remember the Pepper Seed and the Butterfly, I remember Maverick a do the Bruk Up, my introduction to 90tz steeped in the bwoys dem a dance.”
“In Truth” by Camille Rankine
“I thought there was a truth / we could agree on: what is / loss, what is calamity.”