2020: Poetry’s Year in Prose

By most counts, this hasn’t been a year to look back on fondly. For poetry readers, though, 2020 has offered its share of solace, courage, and empowerment. Since January, the Poetry Foundation has published more than three dozen longform features highlighting some of the year’s great new books. Included in the reading list below are a provocative critique of “Native lit;” fresh assessments of Sylvia Plath and John Berryman; appreciations of iconoclasts such as Dodie Bellamy, Bruce Boone, and Dennis Cooper; tributes to Wanda Coleman, Lucille Clifton, and Juan Felipe Herrera; a profile of Don Mee Choi, winner of this year’s National Book Award for poetry; incisive essays about Heiner Müller, Garous Abdolmalekian, Friederike Mayröcker, Idea Vilariño, and other poets in translation; an interview with Marilyn Chin, winner of the 2020 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize; and much, much more. We hope you'll discover something that piques your interest here.

Happy holidays. And happy reading.

— The Editors 

 

“The Bard of Capitalist Realism”
On Sean Bonney’s prophetic wrath.
By Ed Simon
(published January 13, 2020)

“Names of Love”
Danez Smith’s Homie is a testament to the joys and tragedies of friendship.
By Brontez Purnell
(published January 16, 2020)

“Make It New, Again”
Hannah Sullivan on failure, form, and paying attention to the ordinary.
By Lily Meyer
(published January 27, 2020)

“The Watcher”
For Eliza Griswold, poetry and journalism are about paying attention.
By Jillian Steinhauer
(published February 10, 2020)

“Music in the Blood”
New books by Amaud Jamaul Johnson and Rowan Ricarod Phillips rewrite the scripts of Black kinship.
By Elias Rodriques
(published February 17, 2020)

“Mutual Need and Equal Risk”
Dodie Bellamy’s life in the margins.
By Nicole Rudick
(published February 24, 2020)

“Love Lies Bleating”
Elaine Kahn dumps the myths of romance.
By Ruby Brunton
(published February 24, 2020)

“Country Kink”
Arielle Greenberg left the city—and opened her marriage.
By Rachel Rabbit White
(published March 9, 2020)

“Native Lit is Dead”
New books by Natalie Diaz and N. Scott Momaday are an occasion to rethink a meaningless label.
By Nick Martin
(published March 16, 2020)

“Real Cooking”
For Ntozake Shange, food writing offered another way to envision Black migration and survival.
By Mayukh Sen
(published March 23, 2020)

“Broken Pieces”
Cynthia Cruz’s poetry describes the violence of poverty.
By Cody Delistraty
(published March 30, 2020)

“Poetry From Below”
Mark Nowak on his “people’s history of the poetry workshop.”
By Phil Christman
(published March 30, 2020)

“We Cannot Be Created for This Sort of Suffering”
Joyelle McSweeney’s double volume is a prophetic testament of grief.
By Nick Ripatrazone
(published April 13, 2020)

“Long Division”
Don Mee Choi crosses historical and linguistic borders to document a country riven by war.
By E. Tammy Kim
(published April 20, 2020)

“Out of the Clouds”
Bruce Boone, a pioneer of New Narrative, is not ready for his close-up.
By Megan Milks
(published April 27, 2020)

“Enemy in the Mirror”
Heiner Müller—poet, playwright, and informant—embodied the divisions of postwar Germany.
By Holly Case
(published May 4, 2020)

“The Weight of Certain News”
Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian makes his English-language debut in a translation that’s both beguiling and frustrating.
By André Naffis-Sahely
(published May 11, 2020)

“Heart First Into This Ruin”
In her unsettling and candid poems, Wanda Coleman challenged the rot of American racism.
By Lizzy LeRud
(published May 11, 2020)

“After the Hard Living”
Noelle Kocot, a poet of ecstatic doom, finds herself in high spirits.
By Justin Taylor
(published May 25, 2020)

“Wild Girl Poet”
A conversation with Marilyn Chin, winner of the 2020 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
By Sally Wen Mao
(published June 16, 2020)

“They Were Here”
At the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, photographer Robert Giard created an extraordinary record of gay and lesbian writers.
By Allen Ellenzweig
(published June 24, 2020)

“Grid Logic”
Susan Howe’s cut-up histories recombine fragments, lists, and quotations into poems that often resemble visual art.
By John Vincler
(published June 29, 2020)

“Moments Like Tiny Razors”
Zoë Hitzig’s debut, Mezzanine, explores a late-capitalist purgatory.
By Kathleen Rooney
(published June 29, 2020)

“Confusion Is the Truth”
Dennis Cooper’s poetry explores obsessions—sex, death, and language—that later appear in his influential novels.
By Jeff Jackson
(published July 13, 2020)

“Thinking Is a Sickness of the Eyes”
Alberto Caeiro, Fernando Pessoa’s imaginary shepherd-poet, lived a supposedly simple life in the country. He was more complicated than he seems.
By Tyler Malone
(published July 27, 2020)

“Make Each of You a Superstar”
John Giorno’s posthumous memoir describes how he remade poetry in the image of rock music.
By Andrew Strombeck
(published August 3, 2020)

“Talk It Out”
In Finna, Nate Marshall celebrates the power of Black vernacular.
By J. Howard Rosier
(published August 10, 2020)

“Listen, Bro”
A new translation of Beowulf brings out the epic’s feminist power.
By Jo Livingstone
(published August 31, 2020)

“A Rascuache Prayer”
Reflections on Juan Felipe Herrera, my homeboy laureate.
By Luis Alberto Urrea
(published September 14, 2020)

“Lighting Out”
At 84, Marge Piercy has mortality—and Donald Trump—on her mind.
By Lily Meyer
(published September 28, 2020)

“Cry Until You Laugh”
Ruth Stone channeled grief into poems of dazzling originality and wit.
By Kathleen Rooney
(published September 28, 2020)

“Station to Station”
Eduardo C. Corral’s Guillotine maps desire and death along the US-Mexico border.
By Raquel Gutiérrez
(published October 5, 2020)

“Unspeakably Miserable For the Most Part”
Reading John Berryman’s letters.
By Rick Moody
(published October 19, 2020)

“The Intolerable, I Guess”
A new biography goes deep on Sylvia Plath.
By Elisa Gabbert
(published October 26, 2020)

“On the Road with Bruno K. Öijer”
The Swedish poet on his travels in the American counterculture.
By Johannes Göransson
(published October 26, 2020)

“Mourning in America”
For Pamela Sneed, the events of 2020—death, disease, protest—feel like the 1980s all over again.
By Tiana Reid
(published November 9, 2020)

“I Erase You. You Are Erased.”
The first major English-language translation of Idea Vilariño, one of Latin America’s most revered poets, is a body of work that emerged from a tempestuous love affair.
By Esther Allen
(published November 16, 2020)

“A Heaven of the Book”
Friederike Mayröcker elegiac poems record the mind and body in extremis.
By Ryan Ruby
(published November 23, 2020)

“Go Back and Fetch It”
To understand Lucille Clifton’s power, you must start with her command of Black kinships and histories.
By Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
(published November 30, 2020)

“Shall We Gather at the River?”
Lewis MacAdams was one of California’s great conservationists. But his book-length epic poem, The River, may be his most enduring legacy.
By André Naffis-Sahely
(published December 14, 2020)