Illustration by Roman Muradov

Nearly a hundred new poems appeared in The New Yorker in 2015. These included some of the last work by Philip Levine and C. K. Williams, who died this year, as well as a previously unpublished poem written by John Updike when he was twenty-one years old.

Below, we’ve assembled some highlights from our year in poetry. Subscribers may read these poems in full by following the links, and may access the full poetry archive here.

The poet is the king of Rome, New York, with one foot in a boat and

one against the snowy shore of reason.

Wondering if, like a boy, she could go there for a season.

If I retinol. If I marathon.

If I Vitamin C. If I crimson

my lips and streakish my hair.

If I wax. Exfoliate. Copulate

beside the fish-slicked sea.

Fill me I’m cold. Fill me I’m halfway gone.

Would you crush me in the stairwell?

Could we just lie down?

Everything

we know well

lightens and escapes us, and isn’t that

when we escape? So, just as

Old and Middle English clūd

meant rock or hill, but now

means cloud, really I mean

in exactly the same way that stone

got over being stone

and rose, we rise.

The sniper girl is her favorite role because

it’s like taking pictures. “The beauty, the beauty!”

her voice volleys spookily from behind some rocks

as she picks off one of my men after another.

Sometimes the photographer shoots herself.

I know she must have her own personal baggage—

later I find her sobbing in the bamboo grove.

I tell her it’s O.K., these wars only last three days.

“What will you do when it’s all over?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Plan the next one.”

In a certain town in New Jersey not far from where I am now existed a

farmer who was also a Jew

who’d eluded the second war murders by leaving for the States with

nothing in his wallet or satchel

but a hammer and saw and a handful of nails and worked his way

through the shit-pit of Europe to here ...

We have the town we call home wakening for dawn

which isn’t yet here but is promised, we have

our tired neighbors rising in ones and twos, we have

the sky slowly separating itself from the houses

to become the sky while the stars blink a last time

and vanish to make way for us to enter the great

stage

of an ordinary Tuesday in ordinary time.

I wasn’t a math star, but one or two of my new friends were.

I liked to work into casual conversation

fusillades of words like nexus and tensor.

The counsellor from the department of recreation

said I had the voice of an angry thirty-year-old.

Don’t be afraid, the gunfire

is only the sound of people

trying to live a little longer. Ocean. Ocean,

get up. The most beautiful part of your body

is where it’s headed. & remember,

loneliness is still time spent

with the world. Here’s

the room with everyone in it.

Your dead friends passing

through you like wind

through a wind chime.

Just imagine the hours you’re

not squandering away,

or the antlike minutes frittered

with a tentative fiancé.

Your whole body agrees you’d

rather lie here like a snail

in my arm’s crook, nude

and oblivious of all e-mails.

Communal, egalitarian, levelling its occupants, gathered for

an occasion.

Rarely will it hold the sitters captive. Its precariousness invites

walkouts, even when secured by an admittance fee.

Repositionable, it favors assorted geometries of attention: the frontal

and single-focussed, the shifting and radial.

“Thank you

for being my best friend,” and my voice

warbles like the first bird of the morning.

Oom pompa noo suc—you fish your side

of the river, I’ll fish mine, you said

it meant—and I can see us, decades,

fishing both sides of the river,

together, sharing the catch.

Ha ha the skies extending what are they still

Gray and wet and green cool grass

Yet crowded in fog as was or have such

Things then heated up there since

the light

a richer color now

wrong to regret

the reddish undertones of day

wrong to regard them

as a kind of ripening

If you don’t learn

how many bodies the doctor

places his fingers into

in a single day, yours will always

be the only. Inside

the coughing man’s lung the surgeons

found a fir tree. The dark interior

of a lung or a leaf bud, imagined

long enough, becomes a wilderness.

... pointing

to a remnant column he said

ke me kwe ne ta ayo a be i yo e te ki?

do you recall what used to be here?

having just arrived from

overseas

& wearing boots covered

with ochre grains of distant

battlefields he reached down

& crushed several into small

clouds

that sped over the sidewalk

as i nodded yes

You forgot

to call your family

& now you’re ready to write an

explicit

bible of love.

The ripple

of experience is the

only beauty here.

After Providence, Connecticut—

the green defiant landscape, unrelieved

except by ordered cities, smart and smug,

in spirit villages, too full of life

to be so called, too small to seem sincere.

Too late. Juliet Constance managed to get her hem wet

but they seized her and stripped her down to the whalebone corset

—flummoxed. While the townspeople watched from dinghies offshore,

on that hand-over-hand surf, helpless, they later swore

her whalebone corset wouldn’t budge.

House like an engine that churns and stalls.

House with skin and hair for walls.

House the seasons singe and douse.

House that believes it is not a house.

The thirty-six-weekers are not stored in glassware.

A perfect pair, girl and boy, are on separate cookie baking

sheets,

wrapped in sterile pads, their swaddling blankets.

They are not desiccated, withered, mummified,

quick-frozen, frost-nipped, or sealed in wax.

They look like leatherette dolls in mid-kick stop-motion

animation,

as if they’d only now stopped breathing.