From Poetry Magazine

Reading List: April 2019

BY Holly Amos

Originally Published: April 15, 2019
Black text on a white background that reads "The poets are right about the moonlight." The text is attributed to José Olivarez.

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

Kareem James Abu-Zeid
I’ve recently been on a kick to increase my work efficiency, and implementing the principles of Cal Newport’s Deep Work and Joseph Mercola’s Fat for Fuel has yielded immediate and impressive results.

For poetry, I’ve been rereading two old favorites, A. R. Ammons’s Selected Poems and C.K. Williams’s Repair, and have been enjoying two more recent books: Sasha Pimentel’s For Want of Water, and Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey.

My meditation books this month are: Rupert Spira’s The Transparency of Things, a sustained series of direct non-dual “pointers”; and Anthony de Mello’s The Way to Love, short Buddhist meditations from the unlikely perspective of a Jesuit priest.

Desirée Alvarez
We just read Audre Lorde’s timeless essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” in tandem with her poem “Coal” in my Juilliard seminar, Citizenship, Art & Politics, and it led to a passionate discussion of the feeling artist. I felt her radiance with us in the room as we wrote. We’re also looking closely at Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas and Solmaz Sharif’s Look.

I recently devoured Joshua Rivkin’s The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly, which obsesses like no other artist biography.

Bianca Stone’s Poetry Comics is my first crush on a graphic poem.

The anthology Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing, edited by Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin, is a treasure.

I’m rereading Stay, Illusion and missing Lucie Brock-Broido.

Ashanti Anderson
I read each of these books yearly, at least.

Poetry:

  • Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers by Frank X Walker
  • Look by Solmaz Sharif
  • Please Bury Me in This by Allison Benis White
  • Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones

Not poetry:

  • The Graduation of Jake Moon by Barbara Park (children’s book)
  • Doing Time: Notes from the Undergrad by Rob Thomas (young adult novel)
  • Liar: A Memoir by Rob Roberge

Leo Boix
These are some of the books I’ve read in the last few months. Or rather, of the many things I’ve read, these are the books that have stayed with me. A slightly odd mix of ancient authors, Elizabethan and twentieth-century British poets, and contemporary Latinx and Latin American poetry and fiction, with a few other things thrown in.

Poetry:

Novels:

  • Maria Gainza, Optic Nerve
  • Hernan Diaz, In the Distance
  • Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Stubborn Archivist
  • Alia Trabucco Zerán, The Remainder
  • Julián Fuks, Resistance
  • Beatriz Bracher, I Didn’t Talk

Nonfiction:

  • Ed Morales, Latinx
  • Will Harris, Mixed-Race Superman
  • Carolyn Forché, The Country Between Us

Angela Conway
The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride: already acclaimed, I’ve just finished this somatic, immersive account of sex and unexpected love in a pocket of north London in the nineties. Edna O’Brien is another writer always unflinching on female experience. I used to raid my (Irish) mother’s bookshelf for educational purposes as a teenager, and here I am rereading Night. 

Divine Comedies by James Merrill, which includes The Book of Ephraim, the opening section of the The Changing Light at Sandover: what a premise, the words emerging collectively from the living—and a large cast of the dead, via years on the Ouija board. Merrill was a friend/admirer of Elizabeth Bishop. 

Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s “They Think They Know You, Lionel Messi” in the Paris Review: I saw Messi play once and in this beautiful essay Phillips nails the footballer’s unworldly talent.

Safia Elhillo
I’m reading, rereading, or just recently finished reading the following:

  • Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James
  • Magical Negro by Morgan Parker
  • Exiles of Eden by Ladan Osman
  • Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes on a Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib
  • Land of Love and Drowning by Tiphanie Yanique
  • What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
  • The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy

I’m about to start these:

  • Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden
  • The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez

Ru Freeman
I stumbled upon Jeanette Winterson’s Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery a few weeks ago while creating a syllabus and fell completely under the spell of her fiercely held brilliance. 

Two books that had sat unopened, Kim Thúy’s Mãn and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fires, I’ve been reading in tandem each night, charting the unfolding of women with emptinesses in their make-up—faith, calves, and hearts in the former; the triumvirate of politics, love, and loyalty in the latter. The distinct pace of each provides a complex tonic for both insomnia and sleep. 

Reading the Terrance Hayes oeuvre to date, I reached To Float in the Space Between and moved organically to the live-wiring of The Essential Etheridge Knight.

Activism and grief are my touchstones, so next up: What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forché and Yiyun Li’s Where Reason Ends.

Edil Hassan
Rereading now:

  • The Spiral of Memory: Interviews with Joy Harjo, edited by Laura Coltelli
  • M. NourbeSe Philip’s A Genealogy of Resistance: And Other Essays
  • Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing

Reading next:

  • Tiana Clark’s I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood
  • Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest
  • Meena Alexander’s Fault Lines: A Memoir 

Forthcoming:

  • Chet’la Sebree’s Mistress 
  • Eve L. Ewing’s 1919
  • Lizzo’s Cuz I Love You

Nadra Mabrouk
This is a compilation of books I have recently read, and books and poems I continue to carry within me this season.

Poetry:

Nonfiction:

  • The Narrow Door by Paul Lisicky
  • The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq by Dunya Mikhail
  • Ordinary Light by Tracy K. Smith
  • Photographs Not Taken: A Collection of Photographers’ Essays, edited by Will Steacy

Miscellaneous:

  • Light Experiments by Madeleine Barnes. This mini chapbook holds so much power. “It seeks to evoke the same energy and sensations that a language-based poem might, and to challenge ideas surrounding what it means to write poetry,” writes Barnes.

Momtaza Mehri
Currently, I am working on my own book so it’s probably the worst time to immerse myself in a multitude of gorgeously-textured voices that leave me with an incapacitating urge to destroy everything I have written. I am embracing the pleasurable discomfort in stumbling across work that forces me to reevaluate my own, even if that means smashing the backspace key in a fit of self-doubt.

I am currently thinking with and through:

  • Bharat Jiva by kari edwards
  • A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos, edited by David Trinidad
  • Adua by Igiaba Scego
  • Letters Against the Firmament by Sean Bonney
  • Not Vanishing by Chrystos
  • Nostalgia, My Enemy by Saadi Youssef
  • Head on Fire: Rants / Notes / Poems 2001–2011 by Lesego Rampolokeng
  • Minty Alley by C.L.R. James
  • The Camel in Somali Oral Traditions by Axmed Cali Abokor
  • Reacquainted with Life by Kokumo
  • On the Edge of an Island by Jean “Binta” Breeze

Angel Nafis
Aside from this review of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life that has been rearranging my brain in glorious ways, I’ve been mostly hitting the books something fierce. And lucky me, these books are currently the sovereigns of my bedside table as I either ecstatically revisit them for my current teaching syllabus or gobble them up for the first time. (Pro tip: If you can read and you ain’t reading or preordering these—whew, no baby, fix that.)

  • Kingdom Animalia by Aracelis Girmay
  • Odes to Lithium by Shira Erlichman
  • Magical Negro by Morgan Parker
  • Teacher/Pizza Guy by Jeff Kass
  • Under the Knife by Krista Franklin
  • On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

José Olivarez
These are the various texts I’m paying attention to.

Visual art:

  • Yvette Mayorga’s work is the bomb
  • Ditto Sentrock
  • Krista Franklin is the truth
  • Ditto Kane One

Books:

  • I’m reading Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others
  • I loved Ellen Bass’s Like a Beggar
  • I also loved Marwa Helal’s Invasive Species
  • I’m in the middle of Carrie Fountain’s Instant Winner
  • I’m also reading and loving Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland
  • Yesika Salgado’s second book of poems, Tesoro, is my next read
  • Jessica Hopper’s Night Moves is on my list to reread

Music:

  • Go listen to Saba’s CARE FOR ME

Afshan Shafi

  • The Professor by Charlotte Brontë
  • Things That Are: Encounters with Plants, Stars and Animals by Amy Leach
  • The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar
  • New River Press Yearbook 2019: When They Start to Love You As a Machine You Should Run, edited by Heathcote Ruthven
  • Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
  • Ooga-Booga by Frederick Seidel
  • Torpor by Chris Kraus

Saaro Umar

  • Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick
  • The World Was Whole by Fiona Wright
  • I occupy space, which is to say, I am always grieving by Chi Tran
  • The White Book by Han Kang 
  • Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
  • A Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich
  • Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
  • The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony by Ladan Osman
  • A Handbook of Disappointed Fate by Anne Boyer
  • And this poem by Toi Derricotte: “My dad & sardines”

Jane Yeh

  • The Twenty-Ninth Year by Hala Alyan
  • The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus
  • Indictus by Natalie Eilbert
  • Land of Shadows by Rachel Howzell Hall
  • Lighthead by Terrance Hayes
  • Isn’t Forever by Amy Key
  • Siren by Kateri Lanthier
  • Knowing This Has Changed My Ending by Alex MacDonald
  • Baby, I Don’t Care by Chelsey Minnis
  • Magical Negro by Morgan Parker
  • Beauty/Beauty by Rebecca Perry
  • bury it by sam sax
  • Soho by Richard Scott
  • WITCH by Rebecca Tamás
  • Neck of the Woods by Amy Woolard (forthcoming)

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

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