“mouth full & dripping with language”: The 2022 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry

Abstract

“mouth full & dripping with language”: The 2022 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry Amy Fish (bio), Krystal Howard (bio), and Carol-Ann Hoyte (bio) Winner: Elhillo, Safia. Home Is Not a Country. Make Me a World, 2021. Honor Books: Grimes, Nikki. Legacy: Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 2021. LaRocca, Rajani. Red, White, and Whole. Quill Tree Books, 2021. Luby, Brittany. Mii maanda ezhi-gkendmaanh/This Is How I Know. Illustrated by Joshua Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley, Translated by Alvin Ted Corbiere and Alan Corbiere, Groundwood Books, 2021. In her introduction to The Best American Poetry 2021, Tracy K. Smith writes, “poetry—the best poems of this rough year—courageously named so much of what I felt myself to be witnessing and enduring. . . . [and] reached me as offerings of desperately needed hope and endurance” (xxiii). As the judges this year explored the many works published for young readers, we were struck by the way these picture books, poetry collections, and verse narratives bore witness to the difficulties and beauties of the world. Each of the books the judges chose engages in a kind of witnessing of the past and its impact on the present. The winner and honor books for this year feature the experiences of young people of color coming to terms with their familial and cultural histories and engaging with their fore-mothers, [End Page 315] grandmothers, and mothers. “One of the many things I love about poetry,” U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón writes, “is that it’s slippery; it can move in between worlds, it doesn’t have to offer clarity or hope or vision, it only has to make us pay attention to the world.” While many of the works for young readers that we surveyed this year did provide hope in a traditional sense, many did not but instead brought to light painful memories and histories to be witnessed by readers. Limón goes on to say that, “Right now, when so much of the world is full of chaos and suffering, poetry can ground us again and remind us that beauty and wonder and imagination matter. We need to be reminded that awe is essential to our human lives.” Embodying not only endurance, these works invoke awe through their language, music, and imagination.1 Our winner this year is Safia Elhillo’s debut verse novel for young readers, Home Is Not a Country. A fresh take on the YA verse novel, Home Is Not a Country employs the fantastic to explore struggles with race, identity, and culture experienced by the young protagonist Nima. In a recent essay, “Searching for the Words to Describe Myself,” Elhillo, who self identifies as an Arabophone Black person, describes Nima as “a hyphenated American whose origins are a country not named in the book, but which I base on Sudan. The book’s cover art is a photograph of the Sudanese-Somali ceramicist Dina Nur Satti, a Black woman.” An early poem in the verse novel, “My Name,” weaves English and Arabic as Nima attempts to describe herself: nima well really it’s ni’mamispronounced at school to sound likethe middle of the word animal or stretchedinto a whining neema no letter in englishfor the snarling sound that centers my nameits little growl ع (15) Affectionately nicknamed “nostalgia monster” (14), Nima immerses herself in songs and photographs from her parents’ youth while feeling increasingly alienated from her own life and identity. By wishing herself away, Nima conjures the ghost of her alternative self, Yasmeen. While Nima wears her own skin with painful awkwardness—“muttering & burdened by the shadow of an accent/that i cannot manage to make charming” (9)—Yasmeen is a glamorous fantasy, “mouth full and dripping with language/. . . ./jewel of the neighborhood & somehow/a little taller than me/like there are extra bones in her spine” (12–13). This specter self whisks Nima into a city resembling Khartoum during the early days of her mother’s pregnancy—a pregnancy that could result in the birth of either Nima or Yasmeen. In Nima’s fantastical journey, confronting the past means reckoning with alternative futures...