Reading List: January 2019

The Reading List is a feature of Poetry’s Editors’ Blog. This month contributors to the January 2019 issue share some recommendations.

Ching-In Chen
I always travel with a few carefully-selected volumes which I hope will contain sustenance, surprise, growth, push for movement, and time spent outside of the usual. I dip into these books for a few lines or for the duration of a landscape spinning by.

For this trip: Antígona González by Sara Uribe, translated by John Pluecker. Uribe transforms the story of Antigone—one of many Antigones woven into the text—into a testimony for a lost brother disappeared in the war against drug trafficking in Mexico. The voice is insistent, clear, demanding of the reader to pay respect: “First, the dates, like the names, are the most important. / The names, even more than the caliber of the bullets.”

Also: I Don’t Write About Race by June Gehringer is written in a flat, direct voice, which surprises me by acquiring its power through the accumulating associations of each line:

I don’t write about race,
I write about gender,
I once killed a cis white man,
and his first name
was me.

Books on my to-read list: Tacey M. Atsitty’s Rain Scald: Poems; Omar Pimienta’s Album of Fences (translated by Jose Antonio Villarán); and Do Not Ask Me on Mel Chin’s exhibition of the same name.

Kai Conradi
I’ve been able to read more than normal lately, partly because I’m between semesters, and partly because I’ve been recovering from (hopefully) the last of a string of transition-related surgeries I’ve undergone over the past few years. I often feel very isolated during recovery, and in my medical experiences generally, and one way that I cope with this is by reading writing that provides affirmation and reminds me that I’m not alone in these experiences.

A few months ago I read Gwen Benaway’s essay “A Body Like a Home,” about her recent gender-affirming surgery. This was the first in-depth piece by a trans person about gender-affirming surgery that I felt acknowledged how lonely and terrifying this experience can be, but also how strange and other-worldly and necessary (for those who choose to pursue it). I didn’t realize how badly I needed this essay until I read it.

 I really enjoy reading interviews, and lately I’ve been reading the transcribed versions of interviews (books 1 and 2) from Nia King’s podcast “We Want the Airwaves,” in which she talks to queer and trans artists of color. I also love Trans/Portraits: Voices from Transgender Communities by Jackson Wright Shultz, which consists of interviews with a diverse group of trans-identified people on various topics.

As far as queer/trans writing more generally, I’m currently making my way through Billy-Ray Belcourt’s This Wound is a World (rather slowly, partly because I don’t want it to be over, and partly because more than a few poems at a time is more than I feel I deserve or can take), and Lisa Tatonetti’s The Queerness of Native American Literature. Another recent favorite of mine is Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s essay “Indigenous Queer Normativity” (chapter 8 in her book As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance). A poem I keep going back to lately is Saeed Jones’s “Elegy with Grown Folks’ Music.”

Michael Farrell
The tip of the year, from Chilean poet and translator Kurt Folch, was Gonzalo Millan’s Strange Houses (translated by Annegret Nill). Millan writes short lyrics of excitingly disorienting scale (“And I with my big hands begin / to play the toy piano from afar”). There is a touching relation to all objects, and a satisfying, bendy, openness to his titles: “I Limp Because You Limp. Forgive Me.” Strange Houses includes his long poem “The City,” an instructive poem on combining distance with feeling.

Other discoveries were Italian poet Amelia Rosselli’s Locomotorix (translated by Jennifer Scappettone) and Canadian P.K. Page’s Kaleidoscope. Rosselli’s trilingual experiments are unusual for a European writer in their explicit relation to Anglophone Modernism. Page is often plain, yet elegant. A major poet that is relatively unknown, at least in Australia, she could be described, perhaps oddly, as a link between Philip Larkin and John Ashbery.

A posthumous book by Chuvash poet Gennady Aygi is an event, and Time of Gratitude (translated by Peter France) is special, providing an intimate outsider’s perspective (Aygi being Chuvash) on Russian poetry: he describes spending time with Boris Pasternak, for example.

I enjoyed Erica Hunt’s subtle Local History and Greg Tate’s wonderful music essays in Flyboy in the Buttermilk, both from the nineties.

Joanna Warsza’s recent I Can’t Work Like This is a many-sided compilation on art boycotts.

A daggier addition to this list is E.M. Delafield’s The Diary of a Provincial Lady.

Standout novels were Yan Lianke’s mind-expanding The Explosion Chronicles (translated by Carlos Rojas) and Mariana Dimópulos’s All My Goodbyes (translated by Alice Whitmore), with its nihilistic woman as narrator.

Theory-wise, Timothy Secret’s The Politics and Pedagogy of Mourning and T.R. Johnson’s The Other Side of Pedagogy were stimulating pleasures.

Locally, instead of identifying one or two books among many, I’d like to point to essays on eighties and nineties Australian poets that were a privilege to edit in Late Night Nerves, which you can read online.

Mark Ford
Caravaggio has long been one of my favorite artists. I recently came across F.T. Prince’s fascinating poetic sequence, Memoirs of Caravaggio (composed in the fifties but posthumously published in 2015), and this in turn prompted me to read Andrew Graham-Dixon’s enthralling biography, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane. It’s judicious, beautifully written, and tells the story of a life that beggars belief. I found particularly interesting the links that Graham-Dixon makes between Caravaggio’s religious paintings (which was most of them) and the folk art tradition of the Sacro Monte di Varallo, with its dramatic polychrome statues erected in chapels in the mountains. Graham-Dixon casts a cold eye on some of the more lurid legends that have accrued around Caravaggio’s stormy life, but plenty of brawling and improbable adventures (such as the painter’s escape from a dungeon in the seemingly impregnable Castel Sant’Angelo on Malta) remain. Caravaggio’s murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni in 1606 on a tennis court in Rome resulted, as Graham-Dixon tells it, from a prearranged duel rather than a spur-of-the-moment dispute, and it seems the painter was attempting to castrate rather than kill his opponent, lunging at his groin and piercing his femoral artery (Tomassoni bled to death). Caravaggio was himself disfigured, as he left a brothel in Naples in 1609, in a vendetta hit organized not by Tomassoni’s relatives but by Giovanni Rodomonte Roero, a Knight of the Order of St. John whom the painter had assaulted during his stay in Malta. Although Caravaggio survived this attack, he died the following year and was buried in an unmarked grave in Porto Ercole.

2018 was a terrific year for British poetry. I would like to draw readers’ attention in particular to the following: Blotter by Oli Hazzard; One Lark, One Horse by Michael Hofmann; Anomaly by Jamie McKendrick; New York Hotel by Ian Seed; and Three Poems by Hannah Sullivan.

Stephen Ira
I am reading Aristilde Kirby’s chapbook, Sonnet Infinitéismal n°3 / Matérial Girl n°8. She is one of the most astonishing and experimental poets working right now. I’m also always reading the online journal The Wanderer. I like to know where I am as a trans writer, and while The Wanderer isn’t trans-specific, it does consistently show me where I am. I like it here. If you read mostly cis literature and would like to change that, The Wanderer wouldn’t be a bad start.

An Li
Poetry that I have fallen, or am currently falling, in love with: 
Shane McCrae’s The Animal Too Big to Kill;
Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of (particularly devastating are her triptychs);
Paisley Rekdal’s Imaginary Vessels;
Như Xuân Nguyễn’s forthcoming chapbook A System of Satellites.

Nonfiction that I have read before and am revisiting: 
Clarence Orsi’s meditations on gender (“Take Stock,” “Pronoun Discomfort: A Situational Analysis”) to meditations on literary bowel movements (“The Self at the Bottom of the Toilet Bowl”);
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.

Fiction that I have just begun but am already enraptured by: 
Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues;
Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko.

Elizabeth Metzger
In between my bed and my desk, I have a bassinet that hasn’t been used in about 18 months for anything but holding books. They either sleep beside me at night or keep me awake: The Unknown Rilke, Franz Wright’s translations of Rilke, currently on top, reads like a smoke torch passing through the mind. Better yet, tucked safely in a cabinet across the room, two sheets of Wright’s typewriter drafts I read and reread when my hands are very clean. I love the agedness of the page, the light coming through the frailty, the fact that two of the poems are always recognizable to me and two still always not. His poems are my bridge between trouble and worship.

The self mosaics in the night brain. Cecilia Vicuña’s hefty hybrid New and Selected has taken the place of earthy newborn snores. There is something that moves from death back to life in her poems visually and texturally, an otherworldly relief at the end of a long day. Two poems I’ve been pulling up on my phone throughout the day, from recent publications to help drag me through the dark: Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s “Hammond B3 Organ Cistern” in the New Yorker, the way it works a band up out of the soul (go listen to it), and Shane McCrae’s tour de force “From Life” in the winter issue of the Paris Review, which opens in the most persuasive afterlife.

Lastly, my favorite young children’s book to revisit daily with my son is now Grandfather Twilight by Barbara Berger, a gift from a poet friend. It reminds me that metaphor is the way we know what we can’t know. A pearl is released into “the silence above the sea.” It is never called the moon. Even a one-year-old can dwell in knowing without saying. The unsayable holds us all.

Sawako Nakayasu
In Hardly War by Don Mee Choi, the author refuses to translate. “I refuse to translate.” The book is rife with translation and anti-translation, the juxtaposition of images (war journalism photos taken by her father), songs, feminist-maximalist opera, loud opera. It is hard, hardly, hardly not—containing the millions of shards of postwar devastations, recuperations, and articulations of a geopolitical aesthetics. Other fascinating multilingual books: Paraguayan Sea by Wilson Bueno, translated from Portunhol with Guaraní into Erín Moure’s “Frenglish.” Subsisters: Selected Poems by Uljana Wolf and translated by Sophie Seita is delightfully interlingual, translational kinship: sometimes you’re missing the inside joke, but then again I thrill in the privilege of eavesdropping on this conversation. These books delightfully queer translation out of its traditional (“binary”) modes, as does the brand new Chronology by Zahra Patterson that is many things: documentary, email, personal and linguistic memoir through and of Sesotho in South Africa, translation products and processes, essay, and little slips of images, notes, and paratextual matter that fall out as you’re reading, interjecting as a child might.

 “What is a fuckable text and is it only fuckable in English?” is a line from Je Nathanaël by Nathanaël, a book that is self-translated, reissued, “intergenre,” queer in content and form, ghostly, dangerous and endangered, cut in erotic muscle, a slippery bleed. From the author’s postface: “I wish only to tell the lie of this book such as it has come upon me. But the lie has been told, and I am it.” I suspect many lies, and I’m intrigued. Prosopopoeia by Farid Tali, translated by Aditi Machado—this book also engages a visceral, corporal text through grief and layerings and decompositions, and is more narrative and immersive than Je Nathanaël, darker. (Wearing a slightly different fabric, I am also enjoying Aditi Machado’s Some Beheadings.)

Charles North
Three very different novels I read recently and liked enormously: The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald; Turn, Magic Wheel by Dawn Powell; and Trunk Music by Michael Connelly—like day and night, and the morning after. Equally exciting: The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare (edited by Margaret Grainger).

Willie Perdomo
Transitions and relocations often involve shifting one’s book stacks from old office to new study, played city to strange city. Recently I found a chapbook that—to those who knew John Rodriguez (1973-2013)—is considered a classic. Author of bangers like “How to Be a Street Poet” and “At My Best,” Rodriguez’s first and only published collection, a chapbook titled Purple 5, speaks to our masculinities, our levels of resistance to urban pathologies, and our efforts to navigate dangerous city blocks with a rigged compass. Rodriguez was kin when it came to his use of an inner-city blues native tongue. He wrote what Gwendolyn Brooks called “male poetry” when she introduced Etheridge Knight’s first book to the world. Here’s Rodriguez flexing muscular in “On Being Rejected”: “I can / write good shit in my sleep under / water hopping on one foot upside / down in the dark with the lights turned off say word.” And it’s true: John Rodriguez was on some superhero shit with his sampling of hip-hop lyrics, his tight conversational units, deep imagery, dialect-driven slang, non-grammatical correctness—straight, no chaser, and definitely no decoration. If there was ever a poet who knew when to end a poem, it was Rodriguez. Here he is again, slinging a dope verse to finish his ode to Spiderman in “spidermanizm”: “and, who showed me that / when you get to the end / of your rope the least you / can do is swing, baby.” When I first read Purple 5, I knew I was in front of a voice that was fresh, funky funky fresh, engaging, vital, necessary, combative, urgent. And my first reaction (and my usual reaction whenever I’ve encountered such a voice since) was to throw the book across the room in appreciation and awe and simply utter, damn. Then I retrieved the book like I was ready to hang out with a homeboy from the old neighborhood.

Carl Phillips
For new reading, I’ve just finished Jamie Quatro’s Fire Sermon, an intriguing sort of novel/meditation on one of the oldest themes, the intersection of sex and faith, but a book that manages to visit that theme in a new way. I’m meanwhile making my way through a collection of short stories by Alice Munro—not a new book, but new to me: Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You. And I’ve spent the last couple weeks diving randomly into Jeremy Noel-Tod’s The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, which has so many writers who were unknown to me, and which really provokes some different thinking about the prose poem by presenting pieces that I, myself, wouldn’t have immediately considered to be prose poems. It’s truly terrific.

I started 2019 with Raúl Zurita’s INRI (translated by William Rowe). I discovered his work on Twitter, proof that Twitter can be useful! It’s a book-length, trance-like elegy for those who were “disappeared” during Pinochet’s dictatorship. Side by side with that is Tommy Orange’s There There, which I have been meaning to read for months, and now that I have started, I see why there’s been so much excitement about this novel. Both the Zurita and the Orange are examples of how I’m returning to reading things that explore uncomfortable subjects. I’d had a couple months of reading more escapist literature, just as a way of countering life as it is in this country right now. But I realize the point of literature, or at least the point for me, is in fact to disturb and challenge.

And finally, I’m rereading Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, after learning (again via Twitter!) that Thom Gunn’s poem “My Sad Captains” gets its title from that play. I had no idea.

Mira Rosenthal
I had to wait a while after C.D. Wright’s unexpected death before turning to those last two books that came out right around the same time. All year I’ve been savoring her collection of prosimetrical essays, The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All. I find her sense of the writing endeavor incredibly true and have so many underlines. There’s this: “The goal is to make not sense but art of this story. The goal is not to make a story but to experience the whole mess.” And this: “In words, narrative is ultimately inescapable, but scattered elements of it will get the job done.” It’s the kind of book that I feel myself, while I’m reading it, already looking forward to rereading.

In a similar way, I’ve been engrossed in the commentary on the writing process built into Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer’s Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries. The book presents 25 poems from other languages, each with three different translations and an essay on the nuances of rewriting it in English. It’s the very best way to read poetry in translation: being able to compare different English versions of the same poem reinforces an awareness of translation as an interpretive act and celebrates, rather than condemns, the inevitable shifts and cultural differences that become apparent.

Speaking of which, we were lucky to get not one but two volumes in English of the poetry of Polish writer Ryszard Krynicki this past year: Magnetic Point: Selected Poems, edited and translated by Clare Cavanagh; and Our Life Grows, translated by Alissa Valles. I’m in awe of his later haiku (available in the selected) and Cavanagh’s ability to stick the landing of such compressed poems while transforming them into English. The poem “I Can’t Help You” stays with me in the way that it raises moral questions about action versus indifference and keeps working on me long after its brief two lines:

Poor moth, I can’t help you,
I can only turn out the light.

Adrienne Su
I have known Faith Shearin for many years, but the world of her sixth book, Darwin’s Daughter, feels new to me. Darwin appears, as do woolly mammoths and the skeleton Lucy, but so do several literary daughters: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton. The intertwining of autobiographical and persona poems expands the former and focuses the latter. This sentence from “Persephone’s Pomegranate”—“She sat with Cerberus, at the gates, her hand / on one of his three heads”—has made me aware, as never before, that my dog has only one head. “My Father, Injecting Insulin” is intensified by appearing among poems on family losses: “I looked / away when he pricked his finger // at his desk, measuring sweetness, / focused instead on his jar of pencils, // though these were also hard and sharp, / waiting for words.”

Maw Shein Win’s Invisible Gifts deploys wordplay and sentence fragments with just the right degree of slipperiness. Sound and sense compete in “I hate programming without free will”: “Greatness is tremendous. / Thunder is the underside of a walrus. / A chant is a velveteen dress. / The tourist is a red bloom under a carcass.” “Patrol” consists mostly of incomplete sentences but in eight lines moves from the ladling of beef stew to tragic completeness: “The wisteria asleep. / That violet hanging. / The warm body there, the lattice, the lantern, swinging, swinging.” This winter I will not be able to eat a grapefruit without thinking of “Grapefruit,” spoken by the fruit: “Though my taste / to your tongue / was bitter, you / remembered / my juice / and we rejoiced / in sweet fiction.”

Claudine Toutoungi
I just got to the end of the phenomenal audiobook version of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo. It has a cast of over a hundred, including Saunders himself, Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, and a crowd of exceptional others including Susan Sarandon and Julianne Moore. Digesting this novel via your ears really accentuates the impact of its leaps from the sordid to the sublime. The dazzlingly idiosyncratic voices of those stuck in limbo for wildly divergent reasons will haunt you for a good long while.

Before that, I really enjoyed Upstairs at the Strand: Writers in Conversation at the Legendary Bookstore, edited by Jessica Strand and Andrea Aguilar. I love a good transcript, especially when it entails eavesdropping on a lineup that includes Edward Albee, Charles Simic, Tina Chang, Deborah Eisenberg, and Tracy K. Smith. At one point,  in response to whether he likes confessional poetry, Simic says he does, definitely, as long as the poet is a good liar. That made me very happy.

Adam Zagajewski’s droll and wide-ranging essay Slight Exaggeration (translated by Clare Cavanaugh) has been another recent treat, as has the wry, engrossing, and sometimes squirmy Acts of Infidelity by Lena Andersson, translated by Saskia Vogel.

Poetry-wise I’ve taken in a mix of excellent pamphlets of late, including David Constantine’s deft and moving For the Love of It, Stav Poleg’s disarmingly vivid Lights, Camera, and Susannah Dickey’s mind-bending and extremely funny genuine human values. And, when they appear this spring, I’ll be eager to get hold of Geraldine Clarkson’s Monica’s Overcoat of Flesh and Jane Yeh’s Discipline—two always-enticing writers whose work comes packed with linguistic verve, wit, and startling encounters.

Brad Trumpfheller
I live in Boston right now and daylight as a person who stands on ladders a lot at the lovely Brookline Booksmith, one aspect of which involves being deeply aware of how many books I have not read yet—I say this as the most earnest kind of asterisk.

I’m actively trying not to get caught up in all of the “best of 2018” listing, but some poetry I’ve really enjoyed this year: R E D by Chase Berggrun; Indecency by Justin Phillip Reed; the eternally-incredible Natasha Trethewey’s new and selected, Monument; J. Michael Martinez’s Museum of the Americas; sam sax’s spectrally sonic Bury It. New books coming from Ilya Kaminsky, George Abraham, Emily Skaja, and Hala Alyan should have people ready to camp outside stores when they hit the shelves of the local indie. I’m finally getting around to dancing with Ari Banias’s Anybody, too. On my coffee table right now: Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s astonishing book Iep Jāltok, Frank O’Hara (duh), and the liner notes to a Hop Along album.

Outside of poems, Jordy Rosenberg’s new(ish) novel Confessions of the Fox is my present obsession. Eighteenth century trans metafiction about the jailbreaker Jack Sheppard; among many things, it’s a wedding of anti-capitalism, queer sex, autotheory, and anachronism. Rosenberg is a phenomenal scholar; he has a few essays floating around the web (“The Daddy Dialectic” and “Trans/War Boy/Gender: The Primitive Accumulation of T”) that are guiding the dorky Marxist in me through my postgrad moodiness. See also Andrea Lawlor’s fabulist wet dream of a book, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl.

My pitch for China Miéville’s novella The Last Days of New Paris is that it’s speculative fiction about French surrealists quite materially fighting fascists with their art, and if that doesn’t sell you, I don’t have much else to say.