What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. In Books We’ve Loved, our editorial board members reflect on a book that has been particularly meaningful to them in the last year. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem from the book and an excerpt from the essay. 
I don't mean the midnights I steal at fifteen, floating air & fuel down Dixie Hwy,
under the streetlamp's orbed glare        invisible                    after I slip
my 1988 Cutlass Supreme Classic from my father's driveway. & this isn't code between
my phantom love & I for when                we meet                    in a shadow
near the Downs & I vanish behind his illegal tint. I don't mean the dips we take, the smoke
in twisted wisps                                         hovering                    near quiet lips
sheets of white brick beneath the floorboards. Nor the time we get lost & disappear
into the dark part of morning                 hours cuffed              on a curb
for refusing to let them search our bodies for a wickedness that isn't there, how they came
& went that time, unable                          to touch us                like unclean beings
wandered into the wrong realm. A girl I can't remember, is what I mean. Look: me behind
the wheel in a brown boys'                      radiant                       procession
of candy paint. Each one the same age, then, as his ghost now. My baby cousin a reckless
angel next to me                                        going dumb               shotgun
on the bench seat of my Oldsmobile when he still had teeth in his head, still had yet to touch
flame to the underbelly of a spoon.       With the boys            my sex
became neutral—a gear I shifted into before throwing open the long coupe door, swinging
my legs to place both feet on                  the risk of                   pavement
West Coast sound bubbling into a night otherwise country & silent, save the slow crunch of tire.
I mean, I had to get out, leave                the whip                     with no direction.
from the book HORSEPOWER / University of Pittsburgh Press
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What Sparks Poetry:
Amaud Jamaul Johnson on Joy Priest's Horsepower

"Her poetic line stretches out like a horizon barely visible over the steering wheel. Of course, if you've never burned a tank of gas, cross-hatching city streets on a late spring Sunday afternoon, braiding the voices of Al Green or Smokey Robinson through the ribbons of heat rising from the asphalt, this book is an invitation to joyride."
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"A Poem is a Powerful Tool": Somali Women Raise Their Voices

"When Hawa Jama Abdi was eight years old, she got lost in a forest and found herself in the path of a hyena. In her place, many would have run, some would have frozen – but Jama Abdi, the blind daughter of Somali pastoralists, kept her cool, and composed her first poem."

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