To Write of This Country and Reckon with America through Contemporary Women Poets
By Thayer Wescott | The Third Voice
At the start of the twenty-first century, American poetry finds itself responding not to a unified national narrative, but to its unraveling. The assumptions that once shaped the American poetic tradition, individualism, mythic frontierism, the sanctity of self-expression, are being reconsidered in light of histories long ignored. In the work of these contemporary women poets, we find an Americanness but also the emergence of new forms through which belonging, nation, and voice might be imagined. These writers, each distinct in background and approach, offer us a composite portrait of a country reconciling with its own multiplicity.
Exile, Intimacy, and Fragmentation in Hala Alyan’s Poetry
Hala Alyan, a Palestinian American poet and clinical psychologist, writes from the dislocations of exile and the intricacies of intimate life. Her work, including The Twenty-Ninth Year and Atrium, explores fractured geographies of body, nation, and memory. The Twenty-Ninth Year is more autobiographical and confessional in tone, while Atrium often leans into the surreal and fragmented, reflecting the splintered consciousness of displacement. Alyan’s poems are polyvocal, drawing on dreamscapes, rituals, and linguistic shifts to mirror the psychological complexity of her subjects. Her poetic terrain is at once diasporic and deeply personal, shaped by longing and layered with historical and political undertones. In her poem “I Dream of the First Day I Can Leave This House,” she writes, “Brooklyn, I’m sorry. I’ve said it before. I know.” The line is an invocation of home that is as much emotional as it is geographic.
Devotion and Distance in the Poetry of Leila Chatti
Writing from the space between cultures, Chatti explores the quiet tensions of faith, identity, and visibility. A Tunisian American poet, she brings to her work a deep attentiveness to the interior life, particularly in a society where spiritual expression is often sidelined or misunderstood. In the poem “Eid in America,” she offers an image that lingers:
“In America I carry my God / like a warm stone, / in my mouth.”
This quiet declaration becomes central to her poetic vision. Rather than dramatizing belief, her poems tend toward intimacy and precision, asking how sacredness might persist in secular landscapes. Without seeking to explain, she writes from within, allowing the weight of ritual, memory, and longing to speak for themselves.
The Language of Desire and Resistance in the Work of Natalie Diaz
A Mojave poet and former professional athlete, Diaz writes with a charged physicality that conveys both sensual intensity and emotional endurance. In her Pulitzer Prize–winning collection Postcolonial Love Poem, desire becomes a form of sovereignty, entwined with histories of colonization and survival. “I’m doing my best not to become a museum / of myself,” she writes, fully aware of the objectifying gaze often placed upon Indigenous identities. Her poetry does not ask to be interpreted but insists on being encountered. The land in these poems is not background but presence, holding memory, resistance, and the language of inheritance.
Between Languages and Lineage in the Work of Safia Elhillo
Safia Elhillo’s poetry occupies the liminal space between languages, identities, and inherited silence. A Sudanese American writer, she often blends Arabic and English to articulate the complexities of belonging to more than one place. In The January Children and Girls That Never Die, Elhillo explores the legacy of colonialism, the weight of gendered expectation, and the search for home in the aftermath of dislocation. Her poems unfold as dialogues, sometimes between languages, sometimes between past and present selves, offering readers a poetics of reclamation grounded in tenderness and formal innovation. In the poem “self-portrait with no flag,” she writes, “i don’t know where i’m from but i’m here / and not sorry.” The line captures her sense of being American without being claimed.
Ceremony and Memory in the Work of Joy Harjo
Harjo’s poetry is grounded in the enduring presence of ancestral knowledge and the refusal to confine history to the past. As the first Native American to hold the title of U.S. Poet Laureate, she brings both visibility and responsibility to her role as a cultural voice. In An American Sunrise, she revisits the forced migration of the Muscogee people, emphasizing continuity where others might see only rupture. “I return to who I was before the breaking,” she writes, marking a return not to innocence, but to rootedness. Her poems carry the cadence of oral tradition and the structure of ritual, calling back what official histories often leave behind. Through her work, land and language emerge not as passive inheritances, but as active participants in memory and survival.
Bearing Witness in the Work of Sheema Kalbasi
Writing from the threshold between exile and settlement, Iranian American poet, literary translator, historian, and researcher Sheema Kalbasi crafts a lyric rooted in memory, displacement, and resilience. Her poem The Passenger, featured at the World Trade Center Memorial, captures this sensibility: “Now, many years have passed
While I maintain the high standard of punctuality
In America, my home away from home.” Kalbasi’s work bears witness to what endures across borders and generations. As the translator of Iranian women’s poetry in The Poetry of Iranian Women and Seven Valleys of Love, and the author of Echoes in Exile and Spoon and Shrapnel, Kalbasi writes with rare precision, emotional clarity, and a resonant lyric intelligence that places her among the essential voices of contemporary poetry.
Ordinary Acts and Unfinished Questions in the Poetry of Ada Limón
The work of Ada Limón finds its power not in the dramatic or the heroic, but in the quiet persistence of daily life. Survival, in her poems, is embedded in gesture, in attention, in the fragile connections between people and the natural world. In collections such as The Carrying and The Hurting Kind, Limón brings a clear and steady gaze to the body’s vulnerabilities and to the emotional textures of ordinary experience. “What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry / grief?” she asks. The question remains suspended, its uncertainty part of the poem’s strength. Rather than seeking resolution, Limón allows these moments to unfold on their own terms, offering a poetics of presence grounded in patience and care. She is the current U.S. Poet Laureate (as of 2024–2025), a role that underscores her literary prominence and the resonance of her voice in the national landscape.
The Lush Lexicon of Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s poetry draws from the natural world to explore themes of belonging, mixed heritage, and wonder. Of Filipino and Indian descent, she brings a joyful precision to the lyric, often infusing her work with botanical and zoological imagery that deepens emotional resonance. In collections such as Oceanic and Lucky Fish, her poems celebrate hybridity without sentimentality.
Her bestselling essay collection, World of Wonders, furthers this poetic ethos by rooting personal memory in natural observation. In her poem “On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance,” she writes of growing up in America: “No one ever told me / it was beautiful to be / mixed-up.” Her voice is one of gratitude and curiosity, reminding readers that attention is a form of care, and that identity can flourish through connection rather than fracture.
Claudia Rankine and the Lyric Interrogation of Everyday Life
Claudia Rankine has expanded the scope of the contemporary lyric by dissolving the boundaries between poetry, essay, and visual media. In Citizen: An American Lyric, she constructs a sustained meditation on race, representation, and the power of language to both reveal and obscure. “The past is a life sentence, / a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow,” she writes, reframing history as something active and unresolved. Her work does not focus on grand acts of injustice but on the steady accumulation of racialized encounters in daily life.
Through careful attention to the structures of perception and speech, Rankine exposes the ordinary as a site of violence and insists that the reader confront what often remains unspoken.
Chelsea Rathburn and the Country Shaped by Unresolved Histories
Chelsea Rathburn writes with quiet clarity about the American South, motherhood, and the tensions of living in a country shaped by unresolved histories. As the poet laureate of Georgia, her poems often reflect her deep ties to the region, offering a voice that is at once intimate and socially aware. In her collection Still Life with Mother and Knife, Rathburn explores both personal and public reckonings, from postpartum experience to Southern legacy. In the poem “Instructions for Time Travel,” she reflects on regional inheritance: “Here, grief grows in the trees.” Her work makes space for vulnerability within national landscapes, recognizing that what is inherited is not only land or story, but the silence that surrounds both.
Tracy K. Smith and the Echoes of History
The poetry of Tracy K. Smith moves with ease between the intimate and the vast yet always remains grounded in the lived realities of human experience. In Wade in the Water, she weaves together voices from historical sources such as Civil War letters and African American spirituals, crafting a layered reflection on memory, grief, and survival. “History is not the past. / It is the present,” she writes, reminding us that what has come before continues to shape what is. Smith attends to the voices often silenced or overlooked in official narratives, offering her poems as both elegy and invocation. Her work reaches across time, seeking a common language of recognition and care.
The Architecture of Identity in the Work of Monica Youn
With a background in law and a sharp poetic sensibility, Youn explores the ways identity is shaped by external systems and internal contradictions. Her work bridges legal critique and lyrical form, dissecting the frameworks that define voice, agency, and belonging. In Blackacre, she writes, “I was not born. I was poured / unceremoniously / into a mold,” capturing the forceful imposition of form upon the self. Rather than celebrating the myth of the self-made individual, her poems reveal the institutional pressures that inscribe subjectivity. Her approach is both intellectually exacting and emotionally resonant, offering a poetics that resists ease while inviting deep reflection.
Collectively, these poets redefine American poetry as a space shaped by rupture, reckoning, and reinvention rather than uniformity. They replace singular myths with layered truths and inherited language with voices forged through migration, memory, faith, and resistance. Rather than repairing a fractured national narrative, they write from its edges and silences. The result is not a static map, but a dynamic archive of belonging, witness, and self-defined voice.