Cosmos helped me find the joy of not-knowing, the bittersweet delight of bewilderment.

I never saw any of the things I had lost again, which cemented the meaning of the new things, fake though it was, and perhaps created the necessity for remembering them by heart; and thereafter, I suppose, I was like someone living with a forgery and choosing or wishing to believe it to be the original.

    I have spent hours checking the sun-
stunted shiso for iridescent beetles,
    bodies tufted with fine hairs
like the down on a dandelion seed,
    spent years wondering what it meant
to be her or her parents, uprooted,

Now the reader
can step inside the story the way we step

without our bodies into memory

Culturally, the literature of war began to shape itself specifically around the male experience, meaning that women’s narratives off and on the battlefield were quietly suppressed. Finally, while men turned to poetry in droves, women more often turned to personal essays, diaries, and memoirs, their own poems reinforcing their status as sympathetic bystanders, participants only insofar as they aided or observed male agency.

He felt then that Grigori could have done him any kind of harm without the slightest bit of remorse. Grigori, his own brother, could have kept hitting his head against the wall until there was nothing left on his little shoulders but a meaty pulp. He was seven or eight then, and they were older and stronger. Back then, strength seemed to be the only justification anyone needed to do anything.

If 1863 was a year in which perverseness and disobedience characterized American life, one could certainly say the same of 2020. At my Thanksgiving table, I’ll be offering gratitude that this year is quickly coming to an end and that another, hopeful year is beginning, with promises of a vaccine to heal us and a new administration in Washington that promises to do the same.

When I was seventeen I couldn’t love

My father like his child

Whom I had been when I was three  I am a blank where I should be

Looking back over those twenty-seven years, with their twenty-nine winners (the prize was shared again in 2019) and 161 shortlisted books, I’m impressed anew with the high quality of most of the books that won, and many of those that did not.

When Themistokles first considered going into politics, he went on a walk along the strand, or Phaleron, with his father, Neokles, to discuss his ambitions. Neokles pointed to some rotting ships and said, “You see those ships? That’s how Athenians treat their politicians when they have no further use for them.”