From Poetry Magazine

Reading List: February 2019

BY Holly Amos

Originally Published: February 18, 2019
A yellow background with black text that reads "Revealing a racial marker in a poem is like revealing a gun in a story or like revealing a nipple in a dance." The text is attributed to Monica Youn.

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

Beth Bachmann
I haven’t read a book of fiction in 15 years, but then I decided to read James Joyce’s Ulysses (for the first time) to clear my head. I’m getting close to the half-way mark and it seems to be having the desired scrubbing-bubbles effect.

Also, I recently read all of René Char and then wrote a series of poems written from the perspective of a warhorse of the same name, though, so far, he’s never called by name. I think I need a children’s book illustrator to bring it to life. I just read this encyclopedia description of Char: austere, dense, difficult. I guess that’s my kind of thing.

Oliver Baez Bendorf
Reading now-ish:

  • Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through by T Fleischmann (due out in June)
  • Letters So That Happiness by Arnaldo Calveyra, translated by Elizabeth Zuba
  • A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area, edited by Sarah Rosenthal
  • Mess and Mess and by Douglas Kearney
  • That Which Girls Conjure Will Help Them Survive by Kristen Stone
  • The Selected Poems: Expanded Edition by A. R. Ammons
  • Twelve Views from the Distance by Mutsuo Takahashi, translated by Jeffrey Angles
  • Wild Grass on the Riverbank by Hiromi Itō, translated by Jeffrey Angles

Next up:

Rosebud Ben-Oni
Currently I’m rereading Lost in Math by Sabine Hossenfelder; she calls upon physicists to reconsider the idea of “beauty”—i.e., all those elegant equations—so that we might see real, concrete progress in the field. Hossenfelder also writes a wonderful blog called Backreaction, and just shared a rather provoking piece entitled “Particle physics may have reached the end of the line” that argues against building the next (and larger) particle collider. I can’t pinpoint only one reason why poetry becomes a greater joy when read against theoretical physics; there are too many to list here, so I’ll just get to the good stuff. I’m enjoying Jared Harél’s Go Because I Love You and Ada Limón’s The Carrying. I’m looking forward to Library of Small Catastrophes by Alison C. Rollins, Be Recorder by Carmen Giménez Smith, and Lima :: Limón by Natalie Scenters-Zapico, all of which come out this year.

Caroline Bird
Here are some of the poetry collections I’ve gleefully devoured over the last six months or so. I already feel guilty about the genius ones I’ve inevitably forgotten to include. Forgive me!

Marianne Boruch
Jane Brox’s new work fascinates. In secret I’ve wanted this book all my life, not breathing a word. Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives follows its breadcrumb trail of gift and curse from the highest punishment (solitary confinement) through Thomas Merton’s Trappist habit of silence and sense into various rabbit-hole amazements about this ageless state of mind and being and ... Well, no need to make claims about the enormous relief of such a book in our noisy vapid world.

Then take silence into a continental expanse with the plainly compelling, addictive Look at the Lake by Australian poet Kevin Brophy, his ninth collection, just out after two years among the Walmajarri people as a volunteer at the local school and library in Mulan, a remote town. Part daybook, part meditation, these poems precisely narrow then vastly enlarge the world. Fact: I love this book.

Traci Brimhall
Poetry:

Nonfiction:

  • Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
  • Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood
  • Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

Fiction:

  • Jamel Brinkley, A Lucky Man
  • Frances de Pontes Peebles, The Air You Breathe

Stephanie Burt
Poetry:

Not poetry:

  • Sarah Rees Brennan, In Other Lands
  • Kheryn Callender, Hurricane Child
  • Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road
  • Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity
  • Tillie Walden, On a Sunbeam
  • The comic book What If? Magik #1: Became Sorcerer Supreme, written by Leah Williams, art by Filipe Andrade, and cover by Jeff Dekal
  • Melanie Yergeau, Authoring Autism

Cortney Lamar Charleston
I’ve found reading time to be a rare commodity early on in this year, so my stack of books to explore has grown to a hilariously intimidating size. With too many choices and too little time, I’ve tended to, chapter by chapter, Dr. Imani Perry’s Looking for Lorraine, a beautiful portrait and interpretation of the life of artist-activist Lorraine Hansberry. In case you haven’t noticed, presidential election season is already upon us again. Just a few days prior to my writing this, hundreds of thousands of federal workers were being furloughed or forced to work without pay; men, women and children were still being detained for trying to seek political asylum in the United States; members of the trans community were barred from serving in the U.S. Armed Forces, among other avoidable calamities. In times like these, it’s hard not to ponder one’s place as an artist, but Hansberry provides an inspiring model. I believe I, and all contemporary Black writers, are Hansberry’s children as much as we’re James Baldwin’s. Her noble ghost is invigorating my newest language, and I’m grateful for it.

Another book that I’m grateful for? Marwa Helal’s full-length poetry debut, Invasive Species. Incisive, inventive, and, at times, hilarious, Helal’s collection begs reformation of our understanding not only of the lives of immigrants, but of immigration. To leave and to return, to be native or naturalized do not mean (and do not have to mean) what we ascribe to them, a revelation that’s revealed through the linguistic hybridity of the collection. Disavowing the rigidity of formal English, Helal’s language takes on the role of migrant, building its life while crossing the laws of English and Arabic at will, subject of both but defiantly unbeholden, imbued with a very necessary courage. Invasive species is daring and damning: it deserves your time and full attention.

Geraldine Clarkson
Poetry:

  • A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver
  • Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 by Lucille Clifton
  • I Am Not From Here by Amerah Saleh
  • Vertigo & Ghost by Fiona Benson
  • Isn’t Forever by Amy Key
  • Terms and Conditions by Tania Hershman
  • Subcritical Tests by Ailbhe Darcy and S.J. Fowler
  • Fire Stations by A.B. Jackson
  • New Selected Poems by Edwin Morgan
  • Knowing This Has Changed My Ending by Alex MacDonald

Novels:

  • The Proof and The Third Lie by Agota Kristof, translated by David Watson and Marc Romano
  • Eugénie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac, translated by Marion Crawford

Essays:

Journals:

  • Poetry magazine’s January 2019 issue
  • Magma 72: Climate Change Issue

Clodagh Beresford Dunne
On my desk (some new, some I repeatedly revisit for, inter alia, their penetration of difficult subjects, the beauty of their lyric):

  • Furnace of Love by Tadhg Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin translated by Pádraig J. Daly
  • Immigrant Model by Mihaela Moscaliuc
  • jackknife by Jan Beatty
  • Human Chain by Seamus Heaney
  • The Malvern Aviator by Richard Skinner
  • Trestling by Bernadette Ulsamer
  • Racing Down the Sun by Ron Carey
  • Dark~Sky Society by Ailish Hopper
  • Lifting the Latch by Frank Dullaghan
  • A Gather of Shadow by Mark Roper

On my bedside locker: Thomas McCarthy’s unparalleled Asya and Christine, which I’m rereading, and Counterparts: A Synergy of Law and Literature (edited by Danielle McLaughlin in aid of the Peter McVerry Trust), a wonderful mixed-genre anthology inspired by Irish legal cases.

In my handbag: “Songs for Dark Times: What The Arts Can Do That Politics Can’t,” Samantha Power’s 2017 T.S. Eliot lecture.

In my mothering: one of my children is currently obsessed with Legends of Long Ago (Colliers Junior Classics), so most days I’m re-digesting beautifully palatable mythology, too.

Kathy Fagan
I got to read a whole novel over winter break: Kate Walbert’s His Favorites, a book about girls’ friendships and shame. I also reviewed a soaring new book of poems by Christopher Howell, The Grief of a Happy Life, soon to be published, and am now rereading the collection I chose for The Journal’s Wheeler Prize last year, Susannah Nevison’s Lethal Theater (a gutting look at the prison industry), as well as Jenny Browne’s ever-gorgeous Dear Stranger.

Harmony Holiday
James Baldwin recommended George Cain’s Blueschild Baby in an interview I watched recently, so I’m reading that. The Baldwin who recommends a sordid, unflinching story like this one, wrote If Beale Street Could Talk, and extols Richard Wright’s Lawd Today! as Wright’s best book, is underrepresented.

Angela Davis’s Women, Race, & Class. Didn’t wanna do it, but have to go back to the basics.

Soul Survivor: A Biography of Al Green by Jimmy McDonough. The legend of the hot grits his girl poured on him before he devoted himself to his lord and savior—turns out it was Cream of Wheat.

Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston by Valerie Boyd—the vivid testimony possible when a black woman is the biographer of a black woman. So far this contains none of that clinical tone that makes some biographies of icons seem like insincere anthropology.

The Knees of a Natural Man: Collected Poems by Henry Dumas. I’m working on turning some of his poems into an album, but transposed to music or not, he should be widely read.

Thomas McCarthy
In 1975 the elderly poet Robert Graves turned to me at dinner and said, “Thomas I’ve been to Heaven several times this month.” He then opened a tiny silver box to show me “magic” mushrooms he’d received from Carlos Castanada after a reading in New Mexico. His wife Beryl slapped him on the wrist. His gesture was irresponsible, wild, and full of his feverish searching after truth, poetry, and Heaven. All of this sense of mission is captured brilliantly by Jean Moorcroft Wilson in her masterful biography Robert Graves: From Great War Poet to Good-bye to All That (1895-1929). It’s been a long time since I enjoyed a book so much; it is simply a frantic, intoxicating read. Graves, the author of The White Goddess and Poetic Unreason, a brilliant officer, survived horrific injuries in WWI and shepherded an astonishing relationship with poet Laura Riding, eventually writing an autobiography at the age of 34 that sold 30,000 copies within a month. Every encounter with Graves is a salutary blessing. I assure you, if you read Moorcraft Wilson’s new biography you will feel inspired to write even better poems.

Sandra McPherson
I’ve been mixing genres, concentrating on one-liners by comedians, writers for comedians, unimprovable lines also exemplary as models for poets, and related sentences with punch by literary writers and interviewed speakers in non-literary disciplines. Some I’ve found are by George Carlin, Phyllis Diller, Ken Kesey, Carol Burnett, Alan Alda, Gracie Allen, Jim Harrison, Emily Carr, Mel Brooks, Colette, Jerry Seinfeld, Joan Rivers, Ray Charles, Twiggy, Miles Davis, Basho, RuPaul, Judy Garland, Stephen Colbert, Jonathan Winters, Marlene Dietrich, Robin Williams, Cyndi Lauper, Dick Van Dyke, Tina Fey, Charles Mingus, Lewis Black, Paula Poundstone, Amy Poehler, Sid Caesar, Audrey Meadows, W.C. Fields, Dick Gregory.

I’ve been studying brief texts painted on Mexican ex-votos, especially ones that don’t pretend to be genuinely historic, allowing for humor and absurdity.

Since losing my library several years ago, I’ve repurchased books I loved: Paul Valéry’s Poems in the Rough (translated by Hilary Corke), W.S. Merwin’s Selected Translations, Lorine Niedecker’s Collected Poems.

Letters: Morris Graves, also Amy Clampitt.

Mary Meriam
When reading Nicole Santalucia’s submission for the Charlotte Mew Chapbook Contest for Headmistress Press, of which I am the publisher, I noted: “This. Is. A. Winner.” Indeed, Santalucia’s Spoiled Meat did win. It is a brutal portrait of the wasteland of rural America—addiction, guns, women in prison—and the clash of all this with a highly-educated out lesbian. But the one element that gives the poems such magnitude is the form Santalucia invented. A rhetorical device of repetition unifies the poems: foul words. The profanity explodes in your mind like the subconscious breaking into consciousness. It’s how the foul words are handled that makes the difference. There’s no sniggering or rage connected to their use. They seem to function as an artistic fulcrum between the speaker and her environment, adding force and balance to the poems. She is at once condemning the homophobic hell of this backwater and, through the energy her poems create, healing it.

Pascale Petit
Tishani Doshi’s dance poem “Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods,” from her magnificent collection of the same name, is special. The poem is outstanding, but combined with her dance, unforgettable—topical for the #MeToo movement but transcends it.

Vertigo & Ghost by Fiona Benson is a collection I keep rereading, awed and moved by the ferocity of each poem and the consistent duende through the “Zeus” sequence and the standalone poems.

Saudade by Traci Brimhall has accompanied me on many travels—it’s full of saudade and wonders, extravagant as a stall at Belém Market.

The Night Life of Trees by three Gond artists, Durga Bai, Bhajju Shyam, and Ram Singh Urveti, is exquisite. These artists, from a forest tribe of Central India, have screen-printed tree paintings, with names such as “Tree of Song,” on thick, black, hand-bound paper, along with accompanying myths.

Recent and forthcoming collections I’m looking forward to reading:

  • Natalie Diaz’s Post-Colonial Love Poem
  • Niall Campbell’s Noctuary
  • Selima Hill’s I May Be Stupid But I’m Not That Stupid
  • Jay Bernard’s Surge
  • Will Harris’s Mixed-Race Superman

Adrienne Raphel
I’m currently in an Edmund Spenser reading group where we’re reading the Faerie Queene very slowly, out loud. Beyond etymological clickbait (“mirror” spelled “mirrhour”!), we’ve discussed the narrator’s anxiety, or lack thereof, at being a narrator. How do you get over yourself and tell the story? Do allegorical characters know that they’re allegories, and what does that kind of anxiety of influence feel like? Does Duessa get sick of having to be duplicitous? 

I ground myself in books on poetic form, particular midcentury classics. Lewis Turco’s The New Book of Forms is as soothing as any meditation app. I recently picked up Babette Deutsch’s Poetry Handbook and discovered a technique she called “backwards rhyme”: belated / detail; sidestep / their pets. I love when contemporary poets ravel and unravel form, as Lindsay Turner hypnotically does in Songs & Ballads, her love letter to the quatrain (and to Spenser: Britomart makes a triumphant appearance). “American Cockroach” by Robyn Schiff aggressively shatters form. I simultaneously want to wear this poem engraved on a scarab pendant around my neck and throw it into a molten lava pit: it hurls me into the uncanny valley of adoration-revulsion.

Donald Revell
Praeterita, the autobiography of John Ruskin. This book is a heroic (and heart-rending) act of gratitude and sustained attention in the face of advancing age and mental illness.

For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet by Rebecca Rischin. This is a brilliantly researched and beautifully written account of how one of the great spiritual works of the twentieth century, “Quartet for the End of Time,” came to be composed and first performed in Stalag VIII A, a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany during the fall of France and the bitter winter of 1940–41. Inspired by the tenth chapter of The Revelation of St. John the Divine, Messiaen’s Quartet seems keenly urgent and apt just now, as does the example set by the four imprisoned musicians (including Messiaen himself) who first played it.

Atsuro Riley
I feel a special tenderness-hunger for books strongly veined with sui generis, the unforeseen unexampled persistors brought to mind by Amy Clampitt’s poem “The Smaller Orchid”:

                                     But this
next-to-unidentifiable wildling,
…………………………………..
                …found
flourishing in the hollows
……………………………..
declaring its authenticity.

Here are some satisfyingly radical radicles (new and not) I’ve been sucking upon recently:

Penelope Shuttle

Bloodhoof by Gerđur Kristnŷ, translated from the Icelandic by Rory McTurk is a minimalist retelling from the ancient Icelandic sagas of the abduction of the maiden Gerđur by the Lord Freyr. Pared to language’s icy bone, this book-length poem includes elements of the Persephone myth and of Sleeping Beauty, but is powered by searing witness against sexual violence.

A Bright Acoustic by Philip Gross: poems as beautiful and attentive in their spirit as in their intimately-perceptive and exact language.

The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus. Published by one of the UK’s most exciting new presses (Penned in the Margins), Antrobus writes on and of the cusp between being British/Jamaican, between hearing/hearing loss. Again, a poet of vital witness.

Holly Amos (she/her) is the associate editor of Poetry magazine. Her poems and humor have appeared with...

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