by Allisa Cherry
January 23, 2024
Allisa Cherry grew up in a rural community in an irradiated desert in the southwest of the United States. She has since relocated to the Pacific Northwest where she teaches workshops for immigrants and refugees transitioning to a life in the US and recently received her MFA from Pacific University. Her poetry has received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations and can be found in High Desert Journal, West Trade Review, The Maine Review and Rust + Moth. Work is forthcoming at The Columbia Review.
Raised by Wolves: Fifty Poets on Fifty Poems; Graywolf Press; 136 pgs.; $18.00.
Even the most casual readers of poetry must be, to some extent, familiar with Graywolf Press and its illustrious stable of authors. Founded by Scott Walker in 1974, and including at its very foundation such heavy hitters as Tess Gallagher, Jane Kenyon, Linda Gregg, and William Stafford, their impact in the arena of literature has been profound. From 1994 to 2022, under the direction of Fiona McCrae, Graywolf continued to not only recognize and support such massive talents as Msary Jo Bang, Nick Flynn, Kaveh Akbar, and Diane Seuss but also worked tirelessly to create space for the visionary poetics of authors like Matthea Harvey, Layli Long Soldier, and Claudia Rakine. Five decades on, and with Carmen Gimenez at the helm, Graywolf Press has released Raised by Wolves: Fifty Poets on Fifty Poems, an anthology to celebrate the past 50 years filled with pulse-fingering and taste making in publishing. But this anthology is no nostalgic backward-glance. As Gimenez assures us in the introduction, “The beauty of Graywolf is that hunger and drive to challenge the present and the future of literature and our imaginations, and our striving to serve writers, readers, and communities remains unabated.” (xiv) Raised by Wolves does not merely document its first 50 years in publishing, it also serves as a rallying reinforcement of Graywolf’s mission.
The poetry world loves pattern and structure, so the tidy concept at the heart of Raised by Wolves shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Here, 50 poets talking about 50 of their favorite Graywolf poems, spanning the last 50 years. Perfect. Slim enough for a satchel and ordered alphabetically by each poet’s surname, this anthology is deceptively simple. But once the reader gets into it, they may find themselves surprised by the scope of its content. This is a space large enough to span the distance between Rainer Maria Rilke and Sally Wen Mao. A space that contains so many intertextual references, we discover poets Blake and Dickenson keeping company with Melvin Dixon, Assoto Saint, and Essex Hemphill. If this all reads as a little “name-droppy,” know that it’s by design. Raised by Wolves is an exhibition of important writers contextualized in the larger genealogy of poetic tradition.
Additionally, these poets are not just speaking with each other. They are also deep in conversation with the chaos of the times in which we read them. Tarfia Faizullah’s “Because There’s Still a Sky, Junebug” with its terrifying lines “Because/ there is still a head-scarfed girl/ who sucks the sugar/ from a ginger candy/ before she explodes–I look up” (22) could have been written this morning. Liu Xiaobo’s “For Su Bingxian,” memorializes Zhao Long, who was shot to death for protesting in Tiananmen Square, an event many American readers likely followed on the news in 1989. And, as we approach the end of the 2nd year of Ukraine’s battle to survive Putin’s invasion, we are invited to revisit Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, of which Catherine Barnett writes “Varieties of ecstasy woven into…Deaf Republic deepen the lament, sharpen the protest.” (49)
The thrill of this collection lies not only in the muscular relevance of each poem, but in the opportunity to get to read why and how it is important to another poet. In brief, almost intimate essays, masters of their own craft illuminate the poems as if co-conspiring with the reader to arrive to the heart of the matter. To get to read poets of great substance, such as Tracy K. Smith, putting their finger right on what may feel like an inarticulable quality of poem like Linda Gregg’s “Too Bright to See '' is as much of a gift as the poem itself. When Gregg writes, “It is a real beauty that I lived/ and dreamed would be, now know/ but never then,” (35) the reader might feel the voice, with its wobbly syntax, is speaking a complex truth about time and its nonlinear nature. Yet Smith is able to clarify this sensation perfectly for the reader in her accompanying essay when she writes, “Linda Gregg’s ‘Too Bright to See’ bears witness to the metaphysical disorientation of living inside of time.” (36) One of my favorite poems in the anthology, “Sea Sonnet'' by Alice Oswald, is a difficult read. Or rather, it is remarkably easy to read but difficult to understand how it is working so hard on me. But after spending time with it, I get to read Mary Szybist’s wonderful response to the poem, in which she describes “Sea Sonnet'' as “a love poem and an almost love poem, an experience of language almost as dizzyingly unsteady and alive as…real relating” (78) and I was able to connect to my own desire for and resistance to connection.
Raised by Wolves is an example of how diverse styles and voices can work in concert to speak to the moment in a way that feels permanent, and to generate space in which new voices can participate in poetry's long lineage. Graywolf’s overarching vision requires a diverse and multitudinal approach, but there is a through-line in this wonderful anthology and that is the earned authority of each voice, a quality identified and cultivated by Graywolf’s editors, earning the press its reputation as one of the most trustworthy poetry publishers in the United States. Every anthology has to grapple with certain limitations. They sometimes find themselves up against a pretty narrow window of relevance. They are often needled and nagged by what was omitted as much as they are shored up by what is included. Raised by Wolves is able to skirt these neuroses by understanding and establishing clearly what it is: a finely-constructed showcase that successfully manages to celebrate Graywolf’s history while looking forward to the press’s ongoing commitment to push poetry forward into new, sometimes difficult, always exciting territory.
©2024 Iron Oak Editions
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Sustaining Momentum: Celebrating Graywolf Press’s First 50 Years with Raised by Wolves: Fifty Poets on Fifty Poems
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