Reading List: October 2016

The Reading List is a feature of Poetry magazine’s Editors’ Blog. This month contributors to the October 2016 issue share some books that held their interest.

Kaveh Akbar
I have the great luxury at present of being at a place (a creative-friendly PhD program!) where I get to spend most days just reading poems, nearly to my heart’s content. Because of my work with Divedapper, the poet-interview website I founded, I get sent a lot of review copies, and I truly delight in endeavoring to read them all. I’m using the term “endeavor” here the way a child might say she “endeavors” to try all the ice cream flavors at her local ice cream store. It still feels like I’m getting away with something, like I’m risking brain freeze, or that at any moment, I’ll get yanked out of the fantasy back into the real world. Anyway. Here are a few new(ish) releases I’ve particularly loved recently, with sample lines from each:

Carolina Ebeid, You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior
“what is this art if not the hunt / for meat, the animal lanced / & hauled across the tundra”

francine j harris, play dead
“and we were not winter. all dark and thick and full of mouth. // We were not wonder. all dark and thick. our mouths / got us kicked.”

Zeina Hashem Beck, 3arabi Song
“One has to dress / for this earth. You still haven’t seen my wings.”

Max Ritvo, Four Reincarnations
"I am missing everything living / that won't come with me / into this sunny afternoon"

Anaïs Duplan, Take This Stallion
“Today, at the park, / I watched a kid fall off the swing. Everybody loves / the sunshine. His mother ran / to save him but he was already / growing daisies all over his body”

Fanny Howe, The Needle’s Eye
“The evidence of a successful miracle is the return of hunger.”

Joshua Bennett
Lately, I have been thinking and writing quite a bit about boats, the open sea, ocean floor, and what happens when black writers turn to all three as a means of imagining other, freer worlds. This line of inquiry began as a lyric essay concerned with the role of sharks in twentieth century African American poetry. Therein, I mostly focused on poets writing about the transatlantic slave trade, and the long-held notion that enslaved persons were thrown overboard with such frequency—think here of the famous case of the slave ship Zong (the subject of an M. NourbeSe Philip text by the same name) in which 133 black human beings were cast into the ocean as a means of collecting insurance money—that it ultimately altered the migratory patterns of sharks and other seaborne predators. In an attempt to trace this sort of thinking in the archive, I have been reading & re-reading Marcus Rediker’s History From Below the Water Line: Sharks and the Atlantic Slave Trade, Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage” (“Sails flashing to the wind like weapons,/sharks following the moans the fever and the dying”) and Melvin Tolson’s poem, “The Sea-Turtle and The Shark.” I first encountered the Tolson poem in Camille Dungy’s fantastic anthology, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, which is a critical text, I think, for anyone interested in mapping points of intersection between contemporary environmental justice movements & the literary arts.

I’m also increasingly interested in Afro-diasporic visions of Atlantis, or some utopian elsewhere akin to it, in the twentieth century, and so I carry August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean with me everywhere, and tend to read it alongside the “Afrolantica Awakening” chapter of the Derrick Bell classic, Faces at the Bottom of the Well. Aracelis Girmay’s recent release, The Black Maria—the title of which, it bears mentioning, comes from the name given to dark plains on the moon that early astronomers mistook for oceans—contains one of the more strikingly beautiful poems I have read in some time, “Fourth Estrangement, With a Petition for the Reunion of Jonathan & George Jackson.” Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother is always timely, but especially so in a moment where I am hearing more and more folks—including those currently organizing the largest prison strike in our nation’s history—talk about mass incarceration, as well as the ongoing, public killings of black persons by police officers, as the afterlife of chattel slavery. Finally, and to return more explicitly to water, I keep hearing lines from Rickey Laurentiis’s Boy With Thorn when I go to write: “(I suffer, I am that man anonymous in the waves).” I read that passage & see a thread running through the entire tradition, unthinkable modes of living & dreaming & becoming-together taking hold not only in the seemingly infinite blackness of the bottom of the sea, but so many other locales both real and imagined, spaces we have been trained to turn away from, un-see, call an emptiness or nothing at all.

Rosebud Ben-Oni
For some reason, as temperatures cool, I read three or four books of prose at the same time, as I tend to find intriguing parallels among them no matter how unrelated the texts might seem. This October, I’ve returned to Penguin Classics The Sagas of Icelanders, the deluxe (nearly-800-pages edition), which I’d begun last April and took a break from over the summer. It’s fascinating to read familial narratives as both history and lore. Great seafaring warriors like Egil Skallagrímsson are also poets and farmers in a new, almost uninhabitable land that fostered an oral culture which, as Robert Kellogg writes in the introduction, “had no use for government archives ... no contracts or records, deeds or proceedings that had any existence other than in the memory of witnesses.” Reading the Sagas is an investment of one’s time, but these stories still resonate in modern Iceland, such as the legend that Egil’s grandfather was a hamrammr (‘shape-shifter’), or as some believe a werewolf, since his name Kveldulf means “night wolf” in Old Norse.

Kip Thorne’s The Science of Interstellar is also an investment of one’s time unless you are currently studying tidal gravity, collapsed wormholes, and gravitational slingshots. I’ve seen Interstellar a few dozen times now, and I never get tired of watching it; this book enriches the joy of that experience, even though a few pages sometimes eat up an entire hour. In lighter fare (lighter meaning without a quick lesson in quantum mechanics), I’m reading Danish author Peter Høeg’s Smilia’s Sense of Snow, which was recommended by a friend, and rereading Don DeLillo’s White Noise, which I’d first read fourteen years ago, and find both relevant and revelatory in 2016,  given its pre-Internet take on consumerism, media, academia, reality television and even human behavior itself.

Marianne Boruch
I’m been reading a wonderful, unnerving book, dipping into it all summer and now fall, a collection that returns me to earlier reads, then new pieces too since this is, after all, a New and Selected though I have to say, the old poems read new—they are that good. Thus part of the pleasure is my déjà vu all over again, as the Yogi Berra put it. But part is that she, perhaps for years as lapsed as I am, clearly shares a Catholic childhood and adolescence with me. The hilarity of that surreal experience, that peculiar growing up, is all over this work. And warms it.

I’m speaking of Lucia Perillo’s Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones (Copper Canyon, 2016). So many poems to be cherished, funny and sobering, all the way from her wily first collection, its title poem’s “I quit med school when I found out the stiff they gave me / had book 9 of Paradise Lost and the lyrics to ‘Louie Louie’ tattooed on her thighs,” to her sixth collection, On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths where one finds “Cold Snap, November,” a lament, winter frosts coming too late and salmon dead, not hell-bent, on arrival. The speaker asks the dying dahlias to “shock paddle” her heart though she is all apology “for being less turned on by the thing than by its going.” Which makes me suddenly realize our love of the doomed must be a self-love. But the end of that piece really hits: an aching for snow, at last, “the fallen stuff that makes the mind continuous / with the meadow it sees.” Is that not great? As profound as Stevens. Meanwhile, the new poems in this book begin with words from Randall Jarrell whom Perillo honors and echoes with her feel for the dramatic lyric and her fine ear attentive to worlds past and present. “But inside me something hopeful and insatiable,” she quotes him in the epigraph, “A girl, a grown-up, giggling, gray-haired girl—gasps: ‘More, more!’” And happily, Perillo’s more keeps coming.

Throughout, this poet by instinct and training (once a Ranger in the National Park Service) is drawn to the natural world without melodrama or sentimentality. Instead, a matter-of-fact deep knowledge and empathy kicks in. Among the new poems “The Great Wave” asks us to “sing while we can, / before … dropping our bones into the shale.” Is it possible? Perillo taps Whitman for luck (“Look for me under your bootsoles,” etc,) and creatures long gone or almost: the golden toad, the leopard frog, the shrub-ox, the stag-moose, on and on. The list is a mantra, abrupt and ancient.

PS: From her fifth book: “My quarrel with the Old Masters is: they never made suffering big enough—”

Hopeless + wry = poignant = brave = human. I love this work.

Ken Chen
I wanted to mention two magical, impossible books that have influenced me a lot this year (and which I still need to explore deeper): Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!. Take a look at this scan from Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse, probably the most energetic poetry book I’ve ever encountered. (It’s almost more an experience than a text.) Adnan reimagines the Lebanese Civil War, which was actually a proxy war between Israel, Iran, and the United States, as a malevolent solar religion that emanates shamanism, science fiction, and massacre, the first of which Adnan deals with being Native American genocide. But The Arab Apocalypse is not poetry of witness, does not carry a legible message of political protest, or seek to unite a people—the book simply projects the war’s trauma into an infinite, fantastically grotesque scope. An elemental text punctuated by visual gestures and ululations (“HOU HOU!”), the book explodes with an unstoppable wonderfully excessive momentum. Originally published by The Post Apollo Press in 1980, the book was recently reprinted in Nightboat’s collection of Adnan’s work in 2014, but the large format pages of the original better convey the book’s gestural tableau.

All of the text in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! originally appeared in the court case Gregson v. Gilbert, which considered the massacre of almost 150 slaves but never disputed the legality of what it saw as disposing of one’s property. This statement of artistic process suggests a more rationalized, legal poetry, but the Trinidadian-Canadian former lawyer Philip has critiqued reason and reason as tools of Western colonialism. Zong! engages with but also scrambles the Western tradition: If you read the scan below, you’ll see that the text engages with the King of Spain, Dante, Virgil, and the first murder of Cain and Abel. Philip often slices single words into their component letters (“hide” becomes “hid            e” and “soup” becomes “so    up”). Sometimes it seems like she’s invented a new way of achieving multiple meanings in a text. Other times, she transforms words into sounds. Zong! is a book of utterances, sometimes written in African languages, sometimes sung, other times seemingly misheard or illegible. If The Arab Apocalypse is a book that seemingly too vitalistic to be close read, then Zong! seems to simultaneously demand and head-off close reading at its most obsessive point. Once you have burrowed into the materiality of her language, you find yourself swallowed up by her sea of words, words that all originated from but never represent head-on the catastrophe of the American slave system.

Both of these books depict massacres, but never hold out faith for salvation via lyrical transcendence. Instead of the purity of some sort of Neoplatonist unity, they present an infinitely varied materiality of language and throb with occult menace. While the books may seem perhaps scarily intellectual or iconoclastic to some readers (in the scan I’ve quoted, Adnan writes: “when the bordello opened its door” “they found the sun fucking”), more than most poetry books I’ve read, The Arab Apocalypse and Zong! are primary experiences, impossible to read if you want to insulate yourself with detached close reading. (Both books have almost no punctuation to analyze!) Adnan and Philip heap up so much material that you almost read them beyond authorship. And so without seeking transcendence, they engage with the traumatic history of American empire while also summoning the flooding inundations of the seemingly infinite.

Patrick Cotter
After the death of Tomas Tranströmer, the most compelling Swedish poet for an English-language readership has to be Håkan Sandell. I have enjoyed his poems in masterful translations by Bill Coyle over the years, in journals here and there, and now, finally, I have got my hands on a substantial selection of Sandell’s impeccably crafted poems of high moral seriousness and contemplative narratives—in Carcanet’s edition Dog Star Notations. I’m also lucky to be reading, from the same publishing stable, Thomas McCarthy’s latest collection, Pandemonium. Although lauded by the likes of August Kleinzahler and the late Dennis O’Driscoll, McCarthy, in recent decades, has been almost a delectable secret, appreciated by a select few for his many volumes from the late Anvil Press of London. Now he has a new publisher for his best collection yet, one which contains his hallmark cadenced, metaphor-rich verse. This book strikes me as his most wide-ranging collection to date in subject matter and marks a major upping of his game. I believe this will be a breakout book for him, the one which garners the wider readership and major prizes he deserves.  A constant companion for me for the past year has been Michael Symmons Roberts’s Drysalter. I carry it about me like an actual psalter, a volume to be turned to daily for spiritual sustenance from a deity gifted with the gift of bestowing creativity. Whenever I feel my own poem in progress needs an injection of mature sturdy tone, I turn to the music of this book as to a tuning fork.

Calvin Forbes
I was reading Nicolas Kristof’s recent column “Would You Hide a Jew from the Nazis?” in the New York Times and Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock” leapt back into my mind. Several lines from that poem are ingrained in my memory, including “The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.” A song by Sweet Honey in the Rock, “Would You Harbor Me,” also called to me.

I often return to the Scottish poet W.S. Graham’s “Listen. Put On Morning.” Like a first love, it still reels me in. I first read it in the early 1970s and loved its sound, its music, and the way the lines swayed down the page. I realize only now, and it has little or nothing to do with my recent visit to Scotland, that the community Graham describes with quiet emotion is similar to the one I grew up in Newark, New Jersey. But why did it take me so many years to figure this out?

A poem by Stephen Spender stays with me too. Spender’s poem “The Truly Great” has been a part of my consciousness since I first read it, but when I recently pulled Spender’s Selected Poems from my bookshelf (where it stood right next to my Wallace Stevens) and, only after rereading it for the nth time, did I remember it never mentions Mozart by name! Was it because of the movie “Amadeus”?

The book that I am reading now that I know will delight me well into the future is Wind Playing with a Man’s Hat by the Welsh poet John Barnie. I admire the poems for their formal inventiveness, playful yet serious tone, and depth of feeling. What more can I ask for in a poem? Except to have written such a poem myself!

S.J. Fowler
Offering me the chance to write this has made me realize I barely finish books anymore. I read chunks and snippets of lots of things at once. I mostly read non-fiction but no one here wants to hear about that I’d imagine. With poetry and text I’d consider poetry I’m always sniffing around for things to nab, so that’s a very different kind of reading, often splicing and lifting, robbing the tombs of the dead and snaffling the aesthetic of contemporaries. It’s a great moment for British modern poetry (what others might call avant-garde), I think, and I’m deep in Tom Jenks’s Spruce (Blart Books) and The Tome of Commencement (Stranger Press), Vahni Capildeo’s Measures of Expatriation (Carcanet), Stephen Emmerson’s Family Portraits (If P Then Q), and Denise Riley’s Say Something Back (Picador).

Beyond the U.K., I tend to look to mainland Europe, and I’ve got Architectures of Chance by Christodoulos Makris (Wurm Press), Zuzana Husarova’s Liminal (Ars Poetica), and Max Höfler’s wies is is (Ritter) on the go.

I’ve also been at Enitharmon Press’s new selected Mayakovsky, entitled Volodya, edited by Rosy Patience Carrick. It’s extraordinary, and has led me back to a load of Russians I’d been given years ago, Fyodor Sologub’s The Little Demon, A Novel Without Lies by Anatoly Mariengof—a memoir about Sergei Esenin and how loopy he was, Leonid Andreyev’s The Red Laugh, poems by Gumilyov, Khlebnikov, I’ve been trying to pick up threads all over.

I’m also putting final touches to a book of asemic poems and artworks due out next year and that’s thrown me back into Henri Michaux’s amazing Untitled Passages (Merrell), as well as Christian Dotremont, Constant and Asger Jorn, supreme poets all, huge for me anyway, all were in the CoBrA group. That’ll do. Thanks for asking.

Daisy Fried
Some recent enthusiasms:

In House of Lords and Commons, Jamaican-born Ishion Hutchinson delivers poems in voices by turns drifting, expansive, and muscular. These narratives, full of landscape, action and gesture, make their own rules and feel simultaneously literary and idiomatic, wide-angled and close up. In “After the Hurricane,” the storm “walks a silence, deranged, white as the white helmets / of government surveyors looking into roofless // shacks” and also “passed through Aunt May’s head, upsetting / the furniture, left her chattering something…” Hutchinson has a kind of hard political wit: “the cane cutters did not get their salary,” he writes in “Fitzy and the Revolution.” “Better to crucify Christ again. / Slaughter newborns, strike down the cattle…”

Joan Hutton Landis’s second book of poems, A Little Glide, is formal and improvisatory, unsparing and compassionate. Landis, in her mid-eighties, is as interested in contemporary mores as in memory. “Ortolans” is set in Beirut at a party of wealthy western ex-pats and delivered with a sense of shaky complicity. The titular songbird is served to guests while the poet remembers feeding nuthatches and chickadees as a child in New Jersey, then fantasizes skewering “the lips of two eaters / so the dead birds line up in gullets, / pullet after pullet.”

My only regret about Kenneth Goldsmith’s Capital, a rich collage of quotes from memoirs, newspapers, government documents, emails, and other texts relating to New York City, is that it is too fancy (golden, large, hardcover, boxed) to store in the bathroom with our best browsables. Like its inspiration, Walter Benjamin’s Paris-focused The Arcades Project, Capital is a fantastic browse made manageable by its division into—the best word might be movements—with titles like “Panorama,” “Coney Island,” “Sex,” “Unrest” and “Harlem.” The effect is of a library of complex verbal symphonies. Goldsmith’s transposition and remixing is homage, lyric, and political act.

Lisa Gill
Survival requires literary intervention. I maintain a weekly quota of PubMed and international porphyria research, to which I credit my physical survival. I also carry a saddle-stapled version of “Verses on the Faith Mind” by the Third Zen Patriarch, a poem I’ve been working to integrate into my cells for years. It opens, “The Great Way is not difficult / for those not attached to preferences.” Sometimes what’s difficult is reading: I’ve lost the ability for months at a time. Of late, thankfully, I listen to books simply because I have a partner who reads to me. We just finished the first five-hundred-page volume of Journey to the West, a 16th century Chinese novel and Buddhist parable. When “Monkey” decided tending celestial horses was beneath him, he broke my heart. Now that we’re into volume 2, I bask in the glow of nine times reverted cinnabar. Sometimes I interject contemporary work but am unreliable: I’ll edit on the fly, or worse, get choked up and cry, as I did with Barbara Robidoux’s Sweetgrass Burning. My flawed participation in our antiquated habit recalls St. Augustine’s Confessions, when he witnesses St. Ambrose read silently—without moving his lips! Whether with ears or eyes, reading forms the cornerstone of all my relationships. My oldest friend Mitch Rayes has provided private translations of the Chiapas poets Jaime Sabines and Rosario Castellanos on demand—for two decades—to snap me out of my less fruitful reveries. Castellanos is fierce, and Sabines, well, he “cure[s] Neruda’s hemorrhoids.” Laughter matters. As does resonance. Castellanos knows: “All we can do is dream, die, / dream that we do not die / and sometimes, just for a moment, open our eyes.” This week I opened my eyes and read in complete silence and a single breath Raymond Luczak’s new book, The Kiss of Walt Whitman Still on My Lips. Yes and oh...

Henry Gould
My affair with poetry seems more like that of novelist than poet. It’s a very long engagement, and I’m drawn to books that seemingly feed into The Project. So I spent a lot of time this summer with Elias Canetti’s heavy boulder, Crowds and Power. This has got to be one of the darkest, grimmest, most damnable anatomies of human nature ever written. Yet Canetti’s unblinking stare of horror at the roots of evil leaves me feeling strangely hopeful: someone has gone to the very depths and come back to report.

Have also been getting lost in a Russian meadow—Ivan Goncharov’s comic novel (and heartbreaking romance) Oblomov. “My sadness is luminous,” wrote Pushkin; a good epigraph for Goncharov’s balance of wistful charm and Shakespearean irony.

And Italy, too. It’s been that kind of summer. In the middle of Iris Origo’s lucid biography of Giacomo Leopardi—a tragic, pathetic character, and one of the greatest poets who ever lived. Someone could do an interesting essay on Leopardi and Wallace Stevens, focused on their painstaking, finicky devotion to grammar and lexicon.

Then there’s France. When poet Yves Bonnefoy passed away this summer, I read the obituaries, and then turned to the poems. Have begun translating a few of the simpler ones, and putting them on my blog (HG Poetics). The first requirement for a decent translation is love—a sense of affinity, affection, companionship, admiration, maybe slight understanding.

Jessica Greenbaum
Perhaps the two most different ends of a rainbow in novel form, I recently spent some very hot summer days with Paul Beatty’s jaw-dropping satire The Sellout—hallucinogenic as only x-ray vision of race in America can be—and soon after, Louise Erdrich’s masterful, evenly-stitched, and sober story from the heart of a Native American community, LaRose. In The Sellout, long listed for this year’s Man Booker and bizarrely not talked about by everyone everywhere, Beatty goes there—as in, is he really going to go there? Uh, yeah, and beyond, inspired on every page. Erdrich’s LaRose fills in real life and turns the pages with the three dimensional, 360-degree vision of a truly sage storyteller. You will know the country—its history and present moment—better through the story she tells, and you will forget to look up and have lunch while you are experiencing the tale. And to feel microscopically more prepared for a trip to Indian Country, I am consulting James Wilson’s The Earth Shall Weep, incorrectly subtitled by my bookstore’s distributor as A Guide for Sensitive People, while in fact the subtitle is A History of Native America. Hmmmm. The frontispiece of a map of North America showing “Approximate Locations of Native American Groups at Time of Contact,” and four maps from 1775 to 1992 titled simply, “Land Losses” begin the text’s tireless uncovering.

On the poetry front, I listened to Stephen Mitchell’s awesome translation of The Iliad—magnetic to me in its collar-grabbing metaphor and its clear devotion to metaphor, along with the entertaining zig-zag between conversations of the gods and scenes of the soldiers. Mitchell himself reads a loving and illuminating introduction—worth the price of admission; I was so hoping it would never end—and the actor Alfred Molina reads the poem. I don’t think I ever want to hear anyone else try. I got the physical book itself, so I could refer back . . . and one can never be sorry about that. It’s the best book for metaphor practice on my shelves.

Wayne Holloway-Smith
One of my favorite books to have emerged recently is Currently and Emotion: Translations, edited by Sophie Collins. Alongside being an original poetic voice, Collins has a fierce capacity for criticism, evidenced by her introduction to the anthology, which sets out its expansive and inclusive project. This collection houses work from many poets I’ve long admired—Holly Pester, Lisa Robertson, Rachael Allen—and many writers new to me, and it succeeds, I think, in rupturing new openings with respect to how we are able to understand the practice of translation—as an art, but also, importantly, as a contribution to the “rapidly occurring and measurable changes in attitude towards race, gender, and modes of representation.” One section of the book to which I've repeatedly returned is Don Mee Choi’s dialogue with Kim Hyesoon’s “I’m OK, I’m Pig,” also featured in Bloodaxe Books’s collection of the same name, which I’ve enjoyed rereading in light of Collins’s insights.

In keeping with the challenges induced by Collins, Jack Underwood’s “A Brief Manifesto on Kindness” eloquently calls bullshit on white, male arbitration of poetic knowledge—wittily taking apart its “universalized” notions of “quality … supported with continual reference to a tradition we [both Underwood and I, by the way, are white, male poets] have long rigged in our favour.” His argument instead for a conceptualization of poetics as mechanisms of plurality, making available endless other interpretations of the social, seems, to me, an invaluable one. There remains a culture in the U.K. in which casual discrimination is widely practiced. This has been recently demonstrated by the various publications of latently and, at points, openly racist and sexist articles questioning the validity, and therefore, quality of major prize-winning work by women of color. This makes the criticism of Collins and Underwood et al all the more urgent and essential.

Laurie Clements Lambeth
Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly has fully captivated my attention this past month, not so much the English translation, which I’ve read many times, but the distinct tonal differences between Leggat’s translation and Bauby’s original French. I’m teaching the book, a memoir of locked-in syndrome composed in blinks corresponding to an alphabet board, in my Lyric Medicine course this fall. The translator appears to subscribe to the same narrative fears of illness and disability as horror that my course attempts to push against. Notions of confinement inside the body are actually added by the translator. For instance, Bauby writes that an invisible diving bell encloses his whole body, period, while the translator pushes that to “holds my whole body prisoner.” Beautiful, fresh images in the original, like “kneading each sentence ten times” and “this vast movement of souls,” are replaced in English with more expected phrases: “ churn over each sentence” and “all this spiritual energy.” A deeply moving one-sentence paragraph is missing. Perhaps one day another translation will appear. Could it be mine?  Maybe in another lifetime.

In preparation for the course I’ve also been reading Dana Walrath’s beautiful graphic memoir Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass, which, through stunning visual artwork and short vignettes, introduces the reader to some of the humorous and beautiful aspects of dementia. I’m looking forward to rereading Matthew Siegel’s elastic and electric poetry collection Bloodwork later this month. For most of my undergraduate pre-health major students, this is the first collection of contemporary poetry they’ve ever read, and for many, it becomes a favorite.

This summer I also revisited my late friend Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan’s two poetry collections and read Paul Lisicky’s memoir The Narrow Door, which, through fine, honest attention to his friend’s death, helped me approach and reflect upon the varied emotions of losing Claire in May.

Randall Mann
Two recent books I love are Miguel Murphy’s brutal, exquisite book of poems Detainee, over a decade in the making; and Dodie Bellamy’s bracing and brilliant book of essays When the Sick Rule the World.  These are fearless, almost feral writers everyone should read.

On my October reading list is Aaron Smith Primer and Whitney Terrell’s The Good Lieutenant.

Lani O’Hanlon
As the nights draw in I can be found in the bath with John Banville’s novel The Blue Guitar, laughing to myself and underlining sentences, whole paragraphs so I can find them again. I don't know if anyone else finds his dark musings so sharply insightful and often funny. Lines like: “A kind of innocence, a kind of artlessness, attaches to covert love, despite the flames of guilt and dread that lick at the lover’s bared and bouncing backside.” or “At three or four in the morning my eyelids snap open like faulty window blinds and I find myself in a state of lucid alertness, the equal of which I never seem to achieve in the daytime.”

When my own eyelids snap open like that on these autumn nights I reach for the particular comfort of old friends who can lure me away from repetitive thinking and into a sensual, altered state; the rhythmic poetry of Mark Roper, a contemplative nature poet. Robin Song:

“Autumn”
Song slows down to mourning
for and from a blood-brown breast
as if an apple found a tongue
to grieve its own sweet flesh.

and from Grace Well’s collection FUR,

Like a woman who goes
to her lover's room when he is not there
I go to the woods.

When this small cottage is shrouded in fog and mist I read that white flame of a poet; Paula Meehan, Painting Rain:

day after day
I go out into it

drizzle, shower, downpour

I am also reading from my treasured Yeats, Jack Gilbert’s Collected and Daniel Ladinsky’s translation of Hafiz, I Heard GOD Laughing,

Fire has a love for itself
it wants to keep on burning.

Clare Pollard
I had my second baby in May, and am currently obsessed by writers who manage to combine the maternal and the radical. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is my book of the year, with its vision of the “sodomitical mother.” I’ve also been rereading Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born and Brenda Shaughnessy’s Our Andromeda, and seizing greedily on Dorothea Lasky’s new poems of motherhood.

I’ve mainly been reading on an iPhone in the middle of the night, so I’ve not bought as many collections as usual, but couldn’t resist Say Something Back by Denise Riley, Sunshine by Melissa Lee Houghton, and Falling Awake by Alice Oswald. Three distinctive writers, each unable to utter a line that isn’t completely new. I was given a copy of Brother by Matthew and Michael Dickman too, which made me cry and made me jealous, like all the best poetry books.

In my distracted state, I’ve also found pamphlets more appealing than anything substantial. There are small presses producing irresistible ones in the U.K. such as The Emma Press and Sidekick Books, and the most recent edition to my collection is The Stones by Matthew Hollis in a hand-printed limited edition by Incline Press, which is a truly lovely thing.

Michael Symmons Roberts
Someone once told me that the best way to get to know a city is to work in it. That way you slip into the city's bloodstream at a different pace, you start to understand its rhythms and networks. I’ve found a similar effect with books through dramatizing them. Recent work on adaptations for BBC Radio has sent me back to Anthony Trollope’s Barchester novels and Thomas More’s Utopia with fresh eyes, but right now I’ve got my head down in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse novel Aurora Leigh, to be recorded in December. It’s proving to be quite a challenge to abridge and dramatize, driven as it is by EBB’s densely lyrical blank verse lines. There’s plenty of drama there, but the trick will be to draw that out without mangling the verse.

I’ve always got various books of poems on the go. In recent weeks these have included Denise Riley’s astonishing Say Something Back, and Jana Prikryl’s debut collection The After Party. Both books are speculative, philosophical and bold. The Prikryl was bought on spec after reading an essay on her work by Charles Simic in the New York Review of Books. It was a fine recommendation. Also in poetry, I've been revisiting William Carlos Williams’s late, flawed but great epic Paterson in the New Directions annotated edition by Christopher McGowan. It’s reminded me what a crazily ambitious and fascinating poem Paterson is, and what a shame it is that it’s currently unpublished in the U.K.

Finally, I've been flicking through the catalogue of William Eggleston’s recent exhibition Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in London. I’m glad to have the book as a record, but nothing matches seeing those super-vivid images in the flesh. Their scale and color has you rocking on your heels as you stand in front of them.

Michael Robbins
I'm reading two old companions in newish translations, Keith Waldrop’s version of Les Fleurs du mal & John Ashbery’s of Illuminations.

I recently reread Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle & Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Both remain—despite the end of colonialism as Fanon knew it, despite the replacement of one pole of Debord’s division of spectacular tasks, despite the fading of delusory faith in workers’ councils and the like—sadly relevant. There are no better analyses of our historical situation.

Speaking of historical relevance, in early summer I read a couple of books on American revolutionary movements of the sixties and seventies. Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin’s Black against Empire is a fine, nuanced study of the Black Panther Party. In Days of Rage, Bryan Burroughs brings detail but no depth to compelling histories of Weatherman, the SLA, the FALN, the Black Liberation Army, & other groups. He seems genuinely bewildered that so many smart young people could have taken up arms against the state, but he is politically incurious. There is little reckoning with the obscenities of the Vietnam War, for instance, but many assurances that the young radicals were immoral naifs. Such contempt is de rigueur, of course—see Adam Gopnik’s recent piece in The New Yorker on the Attica uprising. But Burroughs’s primer in bourgeois thinking is also quite readable, a perfect beach book (I read it on the beach). He can tell a story, I'll give him that.

On deck: Silvia Federici’s Caliban & the Witch and Mallarmé's Divagations.

Finally, I find myself having to reread Miguel James’s “Against the Police” every week or so.

Isabel Rogers
Like most people (I think are worth knowing—can I say that second part out loud here?), I have teetering piles of books on my bedside table waiting to be read, and I’m usually part-way through about five of them at once.

I’ll pick some I’ve started most recently. The Good Immigrant is a clear-sighted, shocking and—at times—ridiculously funny collection of essays edited by Nikesh Shukla about what it means to be BAME in today’s Britain (Unbound). I think this will be one of the books I evangelize about for a long time. The Poetic Edda is a collection of the stories of the Norse gods and heroes, translated and edited by Jackson Crawford (Hackett). I discovered Crawford on Twitter quite recently because of his two-minute explanations of various aspects of ancient Norse culture and writing: one of the latest was him standing in front of a whiteboard (OK, all his talks have that), but this time he was actually wearing a cowboy hat AND NOT MENTIONING IT. Nobody deadpans like he can. I’m late to the marvel that is Laurent Binet’s HHhH (Vintage).

I get as many new poetry pamphlets and collections as my budget allows: one recent stand-out has been John McCullough’s Spacecraft, published by Penned in the Margins this year. I saw John read some of these poems live, and was by turns exhilarated, deeply moved, and learned new words, which I class as a top evening’s entertainment. (Did you know “flittermouse” is an old English name for “bat”?)

I subscribe to waitbutwhy.com. Tim Urban writes incredibly detailed, long, infrequent posts about stuff I find urgent and fascinating (the latest is about SpaceX going to Mars). Each post can spark a couple of poems for me.

Drew Swinger
Sapiens: A Brief History of Human Kind by Yuval Noah Harari caught my eye this summer at a Barbara’s Bookstore in Terminal C of O’Hare Airport. It continues to travel with me to soccer sidelines and doctor’s offices. I’m still not sure what to expect of it. At times, it reads less like history than indictment. In its earlier chapters, Neanderthals come off like the Petya Rostov of the genus Homo, the unlucky brother in War and Peace whose talents die with him when cut down in his youth. Elsewhere, imagining this book might wean me from following the daily rough-and-tumble of electoral politics, instead I find that today’s politics are merely the latest instance of a stratagem that humans have employed in a quest for dominance over other animals and other humans since the beginnings of our species: make-believe. Our complex societies wouldn’t exist, we’re told, if it weren’t for the stories we tell to persuade others (and, as often as not, to put others in their place). Indeed, some of these stories have been for the good. Yet time and again, as Burns put it, “Man’s inhumanity to man / Makes countless thousands mourn.”

I’ve pitted this history of human kind against the chronicle of one man. Stoner, a beautiful and sad novel by John Williams, tells the story of William Stoner, an assistant professor of English who suffers some and doesn’t come to much but whom we come to know so well and admire for his minor acts of love and defiance that his defeats and death seem a personal loss. I admit, I was drawn to the book by a rumor promulgated on the internet that the poet and critic J.V. Cunningham was Stoner’s real-life counterpart. But the rumor is dubious and the parallels a distraction. Better perhaps to turn to Williams’s wonderful anthology on English Renaissance Poetry. Here one not only finds the poem at the thematic center of the novel and through which Stoner discovered his calling (Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73) but may notice in the prefaces that Stoner’s thoughts on the Latin tradition in Renaissance poetry are Williams’s own.

Kerri Webster
Solmaz Sharif’s Look is a book I’ve eagerly anticipated. This moment in American history feels, to me, not shocking but inevitable, the result of a clear arc from the dismantling of the middle class by a former movie star to an attempted impeachment to a contested election to the conscious and deliberate desecration of the 9/11 dead for use as propaganda in furthering disastrous foreign policy, all of it leading us to this year of hateful nativist fear-baiting. We’re reaping what we sowed, and Solmaz Sharif’s searing book makes us remember and face—makes us look upon, without flinching—the ways in which our failures as a country have come at massive cost to others, inflicting harm past atonement or expiation. Brilliantly, Look uses the lexicon of the military industrial complex to lay out the psychic, spiritual, and physical costs. “I’ve been largely well-behaved and gracious,” the speaker tells us. As much as Look illuminates the past, it can and should provide a road map for American poets going forward. The time for being well-behaved and gracious is over.

Alice Notley’s Certain Magical Acts includes a poem, “I Went Down There,” that I’ve taught for several semesters as a bad cut-and-paste job/handout from the internet. I’m so glad to have it here in book form. The poem illuminates the ambition of Notley’s project: “I went down there, played the drums, called to everyone,” the speaker says, and that’s what she does: call, and then channel the chorality of voices that show up. “I am the being connecting everything but dependent on/nothing else,” the speaker tells us in the tour-de-force “Blinding, The White Horse in Front of Me,” formulating the figure of the poet as disembodied, timeless, prophetic. This is a book I’ll be reading for years to come; Notley plays the long game in her work, writing poetry that’s built to last. What we have left of Ozymandias is not his monument but the poem about his monument. Notley dismantles our structures and replaces them with new epics.

Jane Mead often writes with a minimalism I admire yet can never pull off.  In her latest, World of Made and Unmade, short lines, straight-forward diction, and simple declaratives create tension against the book’s impossibly difficult central concern: the death of the poet’s mother. As I’ve spent the last several years living with a mother with late-stage emphysema, trying to comprehend that coming apocalypse, I so appreciate this spare and elegant book that reminds us that central to elegy is the question of legacy, of the dead’s impact on the living:

How will you spend your courage,
her life asks my life.

No courage spent of—
bloodshot/gunshot/taproot/eye.

How will you spend
your courage, how

will you spend your life.

Cynthia Zarin
I am usually reading a few books at a time.  At present, Magda Szabo’s Iza’s Ballad; I’d read her novel The Door and found it mesmerizing and confounding, a scarifying missive about how the parameters of our lives define and hold us. Also, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness by Sarah Beckwith. I’ve been thinking a lot about Shakespeare lately, and the multiplicity of ways the late plays speak to our current predicaments—both private and public—and Beckwith is a graceful, thoughtful guide to rethinking the role of syntax. I’m also rereading Montale, in various translations side by side. I spent the summer in Rome, and so have at hand Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. I’m up to the Tarquins to Scipio Long Beard! A reminder, if one needed it, that time is at once slow and fleet-footed. And I’m looking forward to reading The Lesser Bohemians, by Eimear McBride, as the excerpts I’ve read are extraordinary: a reinvention of language that seems to get closer to the truth of experience, rather than further away from it.