M nourbese philip quotes about change

“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.

M nourbese philip quotes about change and success

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 me