Home: 100 Poems

Back in the summer of 2020—a time when no one was feeling particularly joyful—I made my way through Joy: 100 Poems, a collection edited by Christian Wiman. It was a discordant experience at the time, and a necessary one. Sometimes, poetry is sustenance.

Turns out that during that same summer, Wiman was putting together Home: 100 Poems (Yale University Press), the anthology I’ve just started. “If it’s true that only those who lose a home know what one is, in recent months many of us have learned a burning corollary: nothing tests one’s attachment to home like being confined in it,” Wiman writes in the introduction.

Ask 100 people what home means to them and you’ll get 100 different answers: “a house, a country, a language, a love, a longing, a grief, a god.” When a word can mean anything, that’s a problem. But it also signals there’s something worth exploring. “A word whose meanings are so various and contradictory means something is deeply—and still—at stake.”