Camille T. Dungy, America, A Love Story

 

as if an etymology my love

the word still means threshold.
I am standing at your—
I place my feet and body on—
the place where I can come
or I can go—threshold
meant a raised ledge to stop
the hay that covered a floor
from spilling out and scattering
each time someone opened
the door. hold the thresh inside,
my love. when we bed down,
let us bed down on this haysoft
floor. think of it—a syllable
is a threshold to a word—
just as a windowsill—just as
a door—love is one syllable—
sleep, hope, dream, death, no,
yes, all, one—words are openings.
every word—some with many
ledges. I place my mind and body
at your—sweep around the doorsill
carefully—my love

The latest from Colorado poet and critic Camille T. Dungy is America, A Love Story (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2026), a powerful collection of poems that provides a table of contents listing single poems and poem-clusters, arranged in untitled sections counterpointing with occasional stand-alone pieces. The book-length suite of America, A Love Story is exactly that: a heartfelt declaration and examination of a complicated country and culture, and a history of aggression, devastation and racism that still ripples across the landscape of generations. “America,” she writes, as part of the brilliantly-devastating opening poem, “This’ll hurt me more,” “there is not a place I can wander inside you / and not feel a little afraid.” Writing of childhood, her father and grandmother, the use of the switch and of her father being pulled over by the police, the second page of the same poem offers: “Of course my father fit the description. The imagination / can accommodate whoever might happen along. / America, if you’ve seen a hillside quickly catch fire, / you have also seen a river freeze over, the surface / looking placid though you know the water deep down, / dark as my father, is pushing and pulling, still trying / to go ahead. We were driving home, my father said. / My wife and my daughters, we were just on our way / home.” This is a book of consequence and heart, and the cruel nature of love itself, articulating a detail of people and movement, history and storytelling with an attention to intimate detail. Amid the story of the neighbourhood women amid a shared stray cat in the poem “True Story,” a piece that tells far more than I’ll offer here, she writes: “One woman believed, as Issa believed, / that in all things, even the small and patient / snail, there are perceptible strings that tie / each life to all others.”

There is such a delicate way that Dungy articulates her narrative collage around the idea of love, of America, including an America that will impact her children, and all that might lie ahead; of the ties, and even the traumas, that bind people together, offering poems from a variety of sides and perspectives, coming together to form a coherent shape around how she understands and approaches her love, her America, from the best elements to the worst, and what all that requires and declares, demands and articulates. “I’d thought that this would be a reflective time,” she writes, to open the poem “The Ticket,” “but parenting is a now-centered endeavor. / I may have to think about tomorrow, / but then again, I have to think about assuring tomorrow / will happen right now. / Yesterday is over. Yesterday things happened / that impact us now. / This part of my life is running in the present tense.” In poems reflective, unflinching and meditative, purposeful and empathetic, Dungy has achieved a remarkable collection around a particular moment of time, in that immediate, impossible and perpetual now.