Top 5 LXI: Poetry

Recently I've started giving books of poetry as thank-you gifts to clients. Here are five excerpts that caught my eye before I wrapped them.

1. though I have / botched this, bungled that, the errancies / reveal it would not be better if things happened / just as I wished (Arthur Sze, “Doppler Effect,” in his Sight Lines, 2019
2. A poet says there is something alive / about the desert. Blistering childhoods breed / a certain strain of resilience. (Su Hwang, “Duende Essays,” in her Bodega, 2019)
3. Well, if we burnt, it was at least New York / Everybody in New York is in a sitcom (Derek Walcott, “In the Village,” in his White Egrets, 2010)
4.  Oh let us make / the invisible visible / if only to prove / our poetry (Erica Jong, “Visible/Invisible,” in her The World Began with Yes, 2019)
5. You are forever swinging between this being and another, one being and another. There is a word for it crawling in your mouth each night. Speak it. (Carolyn Forché’s “Ancapagari,” in her Gathering the Tribes, 1976)