From Poetry Magazine

Reading List: May 2019

BY Holly Amos

Originally Published: May 15, 2019
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The Reading List is a feature of Poetry’s Editors’ Blog. This month, contributors to the May 2019 issue share some recommendations.

Anthony Anaxagorou
Here are some poetry collections I’m currently reading and relishing, along with those I find myself constantly reopening, and those forthcoming.

David Baker
I’ve judged two poetry contests during these past several months—the Great Lakes College Association’s New Writers Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry—so it feels as though I’ve read everything. That’s not the case, I know, as there are so many books coming our way these days. Among younger poets, Jos Charles and her feeld stands out to me for its particularly affecting blend of Middle English idiom and transgender identity; I feel that her deep, authentic urge toward clarity and connection is rare in much new poetry. I much admire Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s Cenzontle, whose narrative couldn’t be more timely and significant: a story of undocumented immigrants, border crossing, transgression, and the tantalizing fictions and facts of the American Dream. I’m rereading old favorites, too—Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s The Orchard, Gwendolyn Brooks’s Riot, Donald Justice’s late poems, and over and over Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, Edward Taylor. 

Libby Burton
I always like to be reading things that make me feel bad about myself (e.g. really brilliant or accomplished writing). These types of books get me all fired up to try harder but also show me what is possible on the page. I balance that with the empowering or the edifying—books that will tell me about the world (particularly lives and experiences different from my own) and also how I can do better within my own life. There’s space for joy, too, but joy comes, for me, in being moved by writing, which is generally accompanied by an assortment of complicated, and sometimes icky, emotions. I would always rather feel than not. 

Way important to read:

  • Evicted by Matthew Desmond
  • Becoming by Michelle Obama
  • Educated by Tara Westover (if your title is longer than one word, what are you even doing?)

Way important to feel:

Way important to read to feel better:

  • I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell
  • Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Natalie Eilbert
To start, I want to praise—with utter bias—the recent books Noemi Press has published: Sara Borjas’s Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff (“and we dream about these things these things these old blue things”), Grace Shuyi Liew’s Careen (“I have heard of extinction; I just don’t aspire to ruin”), Vanessa Angelica Villarreal’s Beast Meridian (“and after the atrocity/the daughters will walk//along the palm of God’s hand/to find me—”). These books, the first two fresh off the press, remain books that I return to often for their generative engagements with language and the pulse of inheritance. They are not easy books, for which I am grateful. I’ve always fixated on poetry collections that are so suffused with language, the words brim off the page. I see a connection to this feral typographical anxiety and more formal ones—the fusion between. I adore poetry collections that engage form toward restitution, revolution; against traditional and institutional affirmation. Other works of note that I’ve this month read with wild delight:

  • Soft Science by Franny Choi (“i am no insect,//only an ache on loop in the window”)
  • Doomstead Days by Brian Teare (“the limit between/my body’s flesh & the world’s ::/the limit is learned”)
  • Stereo. Island. Mosaic. by Vincent Toro (“Time/is given to strangers with an ambiguous smirk”)

Elaine Equi
Anne Waldman, Trickster Feminism; Rae Armantrout, Wobble; and Ann Lauterbach, Spell. Brilliant new collections by three of my favorite women poets.

Robert Lax, 33 Poems. Glad to see this classic recently reissued by New Directions. I could spend years happily wandering these minimalist wordscapes.

Annie Baker, The Antipodes and The Vermont Plays. I love dialogue, so I don’t know why I don’t read more plays. I guess I somehow feel the only way to really experience them is in a theater. But I’ve changed my mind. Baker’s addictive work makes me feel as if I’m eavesdropping on a series of darkly hilarious and brutally honest conversations. It’s a pleasure to reconnect with this genre. I do indeed look forward to seeing more productions of plays in the future, but also to reading more of them in the present.

Richard Garcia
Fake News Poems by Martin Ott. In this climate where some think truth doesn’t matter, Ott is writing real poems based on real fake news from real newspapers. A really fun read from a real poet.

Apologies in Reverse by Daniel Romo. These haunting, funny, elegiac prose poems straddle mysterious territory between fable, short fiction, and memoir.

I’m No Longer Troubled by the Extravagance by Rick Bursky. Prose poems by a magician of the form—now you see him now you don’t. He reveals and conceals at the same time, always with an odd humor—but as we know, humor is serious.

Spare Room by Jim Natal. Haibun is the perfect method to combine the lyric poem and the essay. I wonder why more poets don’t use it. Natal has mastered the form in Spare Room and also in his first book of haibun, 52 Views: The Haibun Variations. I am not a fan of classic haibun, nor am I crazy about contemporary haiku in English. But I do like Natal’s books, and they show how both can be beautifully done.

Fearn by Linda Dove. Take one look at the table of contents and you’ll be hooked, because the table of contents is itself a poem. Remember those matches that said, “strike anywhere?” Open this chapbook anywhere and there is fire—a stunning book of poems.

A Cumulus Fiction by Judith Pacht. A chapbook of acrostic responses to classic haiku. Even without the originals, included here in translation and in Japanese, these meditative poems would stand on their own. Beautifully conceived and designed.

Self-Portrait in the River of Déjà Vu by Susan Laughter Meyers. When I read this posthumous book by a friend and colleague, I see Susan—her colors and word games; her knowledge of nature; her special, simple but complicated lyricism. And I see a Susan I did not know—of humorous family legends and odd relatives, a touch of Southern Gothic, and of the death, or wishfully miraculous disappearance, of a troubled and beloved aunt.

Devin Johnston
Lately I have been reading back and forth between The Minds of Birds by Alexander F. Skutch and Bird Minds: Cognition and Behaviour of Australian Native Birds by Gisela Kaplan. The first is more speculative and anecdotal, the second more scientific and thoroughly researched. But as April tips into May—“come//white/sweet/May//again,” as William Carlos Williams writes—the books that interest me most are atlases, field guides, and travel books. These offer not so much destinations as itineraries. This April afternoon, the first magnolia warblers are flitting through our walnut tree, a little flock en route to Canada, along with a few goldfinches. The warblers often arrive in the wake of thunderstorms, just as the first bees are browsing wild currant flowers, and plastic Easter eggs appear among the violets and wild onions. As Thomas A. Clark writes, “In small things, delight is intense.”

Emily Liebowitz
These are my favorite reads over the last year or so, including some I was revisiting and some encountered for the first time.

  • Flung Throne by Cody-Rose Clevidence
  • Dear Angel of Death by Simone White
  • Poetry for My People by Henry Dumas
  • The H.D. Book by Robert Duncan
  • Quartet by C. Violet Eaton
  • YEAH NO by Jane Gregory
  • Montaigne’s Essays
  • Hospital Series by Amelia Rosselli
  • Paterson by William Carlos Williams

Chapbooks:

Shane McCrae
Lately, I’ve been really into poems by dead folks (Emily Dickinson, back in my head because of that movie, which rules! John Keats! Muriel Spark!), but the book I’ve loved most these past few weeks—and also one of the best books of poems I’ve read in who knows how long—is Sophie Collins’s Who Is Mary Sue? Who Is Mary Sue? is primarily about women’s creativity, how it is feared and delegitimized. And, like all great poetry, it’s also about what it is to be a human being. And also, like all great poetry, it’s about some mysterious other thing that can’t be named or even seen straight on, but only glimpsed, though it’s felt at every moment—which is to say (as is the case with all great poetry) there is no end to what Who Is Mary Sue? is about.

Philip Metres
Poetry recently read, taught, or about to read:

  • Andrea Abi-Karam, EXTRATRANSMISSION
  • Zaina Alsous, A Theory of Birds
  • David Baker, Swift: New and Selected Poems
  • Simeon Berry’s manuscript, Fingerling Lakes 
  • Jericho Brown, The New Testament
  • Danny Caine, Continental Breakfast  
  • Leila Chatti, Tunsiya/Amrikiya
  • Kahlil Gibran, The Collected Works
  • Marwa Helal, Invasive species
  • Anna Maria Hong, Age of Glass
  • Marilyn Hacker, Blazons: New and Selected Poems, 2000-2018
  • Naomi Shihab Nye, The Tiny Journalist
  • Nomi Stone, Kill Class

Prose recently read or about to read:

  • Paul K. Chappell, Soldiers of Peace: How to Wield the Weapon of Nonviolence with Maximum Force  
  • Michael Croley, Any Other Place
  • Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
  • Colum McCann, Apeirogon
  • Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation  

Dunya Mikhail
Recently I read Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. In this wonderful poetry collection we find ourselves in an unknown occupied territory, yet we recognize it as a setting as if we’ve been there. Its citizens watch a deaf boy being killed by a soldier. As a result, they no longer can hear one another. Their deafness is a metaphor that has two sides; solidarity on one side and indifference on the other. Poetry here is pure, eloquent, and effective; coming to us as a sign that alerts us to our conscience and questions our collective silence in front of cruelty and injustice. 

André Naffis-Sahely
In Natural History, Pliny the Elder says it was common for epileptics in ancient Rome to cure their illness by drinking the blood of gladiators—ideally straight from a freshly cut throat—thus imbibing their life force. There’s always been a cannibalistic edge to the “sweet science” and Fighters, Losers by Declan Ryan is a pamphlet of poems about some of history’s greatest boxers—Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, and Muhammad Ali, among others—charting the travails of the ring’s fallen heroes. Another new pamphlet I was impressed by was Romalyn Ante’s Rice & Rain, whose melancholy but steely voice sings of the dislocation between her current home in the UK and her roots in the Philippines. A new “discovery” for me this spring was The River by Lewis MacAdams, a Paterson-esque epic charting MacAdams’s efforts in helping to revitalize the long neglected L.A. River. I also really admired The Caiplie Caves by Karen Solie.

Miller Oberman
These have been my jam this month!

Martha Serpas
I’m not sure what I’ve been reading. (It hasn’t been the news. I highly recommend this stress-reducing break.) The text that has stayed with me is Mary Rakow’s This is Why I Came: A Novel. It is a work of Midrash, commentary on part of the Hebrew scriptures. The earliest Midrashim can be traced to the second century and are attached to the biblical manuscript. Now labels are overrated—this book is poetry despite its subtitle; Rakow writes the most beautiful sentences. She has a command of syntax and trope that rival anything I’ve read in decades. If the idea of reimagined Bible stories leaves you uninterested, please trust that her reconfigured narratives are challenging, surprising, and unsurpassed.

John Skoyles
John Wieners’s Supplication: Selected Poems (if you are not familiar, start with “Act #2” on page 52) and Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals.

Sweet Theft: A Poet’s Commonplace Book by J.D. McClatchy. Wisdom, hilarity, and insight.

Sweet Marjoram: Notes & Essays by DeWitt Henry. These prose pieces contain stories of the world free from the restrictions of narrative; a way to show wide learning without showing it off.

Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder by John Waters. His best book yet.

Verses by Lola Ridge. A book-length collection of poems that Ridge wrote when she lived in New Zealand and Australia in 1905, unpublished until now.

Bad Boats by Laura Jensen. This dazzling book deserves to be reprinted.

Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly by poet Joshua Rivkin. An entertaining and insightful biography of the painter.

Chris Kraus’s Social Practices and After Kathy Acker.

Barbara Guest’s The Collected Poems and Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing.

Bianca Stone
Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae has appropriately been gifted to me like a mordant tarot deck, and I dip into it each day to counteract any sentimentality that may be lurking. It’s filled with statements like: “We cannot grasp nature’s bare blade without shedding our own blood.” And “The search for freedom through sex is doomed to failure.” And “Blake’s masturbatory rose belongs to the tradition begun in Egypt where autoeroticism is a method of cosmogony.” I read it slowly without clinging to anything I think I already know.

Poetry:

  • Emily Pettit, Blue Flame: “The shape of shame/colliding with the old somethings.”
  • Franz Wright, Wheeling Motel: “How about some lovely soft Thorazine music?”
  • Terrance Hayes, Lighthead: “Ladies and gentlemen, ghosts and children of the state,/I am here because I could never get the hang of Time.”
  • Anne Sexton, Selected Poems: “I am not lazy./I am on the amphetamine of the soul.”
  • Ben Fama, Deathwish: “my wanting like/a mist spread over this room of strangers,/satanic courtship dating/how lovely love only finds its truth in death.”

Melissa Studdard
Poetry:

  • Kelli Russell Agodon, Hourglass Museum
  • Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red and Glass, Irony, and God
  • Tiana Clark, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood
  • Vievee Francis, Horse in the Dark and Forest Primeval
  • Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive
  • Hieu Minh Nguyen, Not Here
  • dg nanouk okpik, Corpse Whale
  • Ovid’s Metamorphoses, translated by Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden, et al
  • Ovid’s  Metamorphoses, translated by Mary Innes
  • Ovid’s Metamorphoses, translated by A.E. Watts
  • Tales from Ovid: 24 Passages from the Metamorphoses, translated by Ted Hughes
  • Stesichorus: The Poems, edited by M. Davies and P.J. Finglass
  • Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Beast Meridian
  • Jane Wong, Overpour

Nonfiction:

  • Stephanie Burt, Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems
  • Robert Kaplan, The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero
  • Julia Serano, Excluded

Lily Zhou
Recently read/currently reading:

  • Exit, Pursued by Dalton Day
  • Antigonick by Anne Carson
  • Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar
  • Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
  • Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li
  • The Twenty-Ninth Year by Hala Alyan
  • Eye Level by Jenny Xie
  • Paradise, Indiana by Bruce Snider
  • The Boss by Victoria Chang
  • When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
  • The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara

To read:

  • Humanimal: A Project for Future Children by Bhanu Kapil
  • My Seditious Heart by Arundhati Roy
  • Soft Science by Franny Choi
  • The Year of Blue Water by Yanyi
  • An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang

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

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