From Poetry Magazine

Reading List: November 2019

BY Holly Amos

Originally Published: November 22, 2019
White text on a marigold/orange background reads "On whose doorstep will we/build our welcome now?" It's attributed to Kevin Craft.

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

Dorothy Chan
Currently re-reading:

Currently/will soon be teaching:

  • Mess and Mess and, Douglas Kearney
  • Tender Data, Monica McClure
  • Are You My Mother? Alison Bechdel
  • Sour Heart, Jenny Zhang
  • The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, Mona Eltahawy
  • Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls: A Memoir, T Kira Madden
  • Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata
  • Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies, Tara Ison
  • Oculus, Sally Wen Mao
  • Year of the Snake, Lee Ann Roripaugh
  • Sons of Achilles, Nabila Lovelace

Victoria Chang
There are so many books that I enjoy! There are lots more on my desk but these are the ones I’ve been enjoying at the moment (both poetry and prose):

Kevin Craft
I spent part of my summer teaching an interdisciplinary arts and writing course in Rome. Between reading newspapers and gauging the self-defeating surges of global populism—on full display in Italy as in the US—I found solace in terrific books that reimagine classical history and myth. Favorites were Paisley Rekdal’s Nightingale, which fiercely reinvents Ovid’s Metamorphosis for the #MeToo era, and Karl Kirchwey’s Stumbling Blocks, which probes Roman roads and ruins—most notably those gold cobblestones which memorialize the deportations of Jews during WWII—for vestiges of political conscience and truth.

Closer to home, books by several poets living in the Pacific Northwest (and one in Dubai) have filled me with radiant awe and inventive joy throughout the year. Keetje Kuipers’s All Its Charms and Bill Carty’s Huge Cloudy stand out for the tender, tough-minded ways they delve into familial rifts and intimate landscapes to reimagine the North American sublime. I feel the same way on a global scale about Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s Water & Salt and Shara Lessley’s The Explosive Expert’s Wife, two poets who pluck genuine resilience from the spare language of profound cultural conflict—no small achievement in an era where compassionate truths that might alleviate suffering are lost in aggravated spin.

Kit Fan
I should be ashamed of my promiscuous relationships with books but, luckily, I am not. These are the pre-Christmas encounters that I am having, re-having, and desperate to be having soon. The alphabetical order by surname disguises the pleasure of randomness.

Christine Gosnay
These are the books I’ve recently read and loved:

  • The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
  • The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated by Ruth L. C. Simms
  • Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag, translated by Srinath Perur
  • Women Talking by Miriam Toews
  • The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
  • The Invention of Love by Tom Stoppard
  • Charms by Paul Valéry
  • Poems of Paul Celan translated by Michael Hamburger
  • Collected Works by Lorine Niedecker
  • The Odes of Horace

And these are the books I’m reading, or re-reading, now. It appears that I will be reading Proust until I die. As usual, there are more books that I’m reading at any given time than I ever finish. It lends horrible, terrific suspense to my reading life.

  • Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt
  • Basic Black with Pearls by Helen Weinzweig
  • SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa
  • In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff
  • Lives Other Than My Own by Emmanuel Carrère, translated by Linda Coverdale
  • The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Richard Zenith
  • The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Fulton
  • Love by Stendhal, translated by Gilbert and Suzanne Sale

Genevieve Kaplan
Some books I’ve lately been reading or re-reading:

  • Alexis Almeida, I Have Never Been Able to Sing (chapbook)
  • Brent Armendinger, Street Gloss
  • Chiwan Choi, The Yellow House
  • Hilda Hilst, Of Death. Minimal Odes (translation by Laura Cesarco Eglin)
  • Angela Hume, meat habitats (chapbook)
  • Nathalie Léger, Suite for Barbara Loden (translation by Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon)
  • Sawako Nakayasu, The Ants
  • Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
  • Martha Ronk, Silences
  • Michelle Brittan Rosado, Why Can’t It Be Tenderness
  • Jessica Smith, How to Know the Flowers
  • Mónica de la Torre, The Happy End / All Welcome
  • Sara Uribe, Antígona González (translation by John Pluecker)
  • Rosmarie Waldrop, Gap Gardening

Jeanne Larsen
Right before a visit to the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi, I re-read Angela Ball’s stunning Talking Pillow. Afterward, I rushed to read Stranger by Adam Clay, and J.A. Bernstein’s novel Rachel’s Tomb. I just reviewed The Fisher Queen by Kathryn Kirkpatrick for the Hollins Critic.

Other recent top-notch reads/re-reads:

  • Chad Abushanab, The Last Visit
  • Lauren K. Alleyne, Honeyfish
  • Erica Dawson, When Rap Spoke Straight to God
  • Rebecca Morgan Frank, Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country
  • Becky Gould Gibson, Indelible
  • Linda Gregerson, Prodigal
  • Alyson Hagy, Scribe (novel)
  • Cathryn Hankla, Galaxies
  • Twyla Hansen, Rock · Tree · Bird
  • David Huddle, My Surly Heart
  • Patricia Spears Jones, A Lucent Fire
  • Ursula K. Le Guin, So Far So Good
  • Tyler Mills, Hawk Parable
  • Miles Waggener, Superstition Freeway
  • Annie Woodford, Bootleg

I’ve started Don Paterson’s 600+ page book of theory/craft/electric/ranting, The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre. Onward.

Ae Hee Lee
Poetry collections I’ve waded through most recently:

Joy Manesiotis
I am reading in Medieval spirituality and illuminated manuscripts—from bestiary to religious treatise—as ballast for the poems I am working on, but I will list here more contemporary work, published and forthcoming, that I am equally engaged in.

And, teaching:

And, always:

Valzhyna Mort
Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon (translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi) pushes the language of loss to absurdity in order to show that we have forgotten how to mourn. Hyesoon’s shamanistic repetitions and illogical similes resist emotional atrophy. The book was triggered by the deaths of school children in a 2014 ferry accident, and it goes straight to the heart of “prayers and thoughts” offered to the victims of school violence in this country. 

The playfulness of Aleš Šteger’s Above the Sky Beneath the Earth (translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry) is contagious: Here comes Aleš Šteger. His name is protein. His body is a Central Committee. His language is dirty but his shirt is perfectly white (I’m quoting across the poems to capture Steger’s speaker). His “cherished doctor, internationally ill expert on the manufacture of souls” speaks to César Vallejo’s “Mr. Minister of Health,” mocking the life we’ve manufactured out of our ills and longings. 

On the English-language side of my bed right now: Carolyn Forché’s What You Have Heard Is True; Matthew Zapruder’s Father’s Day; Negative Space by Luljeta Lleshanaku (translated from the Albanian by Ani Gjika); and Elena Fanailova’s The Russian Version (translated from the Russian by Stephanie Sandler and Genya Turovskaya). 

Charles Shields
I don’t write poems as much as I render them in the spirit of a sensibility, in the spirit of the production of the spirit and sensibility of poetry itself; likewise, I love largely textless renditions of text, naked linguistic codes, things like:

  • Nothing in MoMA by Abraham Adams 
  • Selected Writings of Mirtha Dermisache
  • Prose Architectures by Renee Gladman
  • Hair Paintings by Jarrett Key
  • SET by Na Kim 

And I love exhibition catalogues, especially:

  • Blackness in Abstraction from Pace Gallery 
  • Speech/Acts from Futurepoem in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania 

Claudine Toutoungi
Lately, I have been dipping into and very much enjoying:

And, when it’s out early next year, I’m very much looking forward to reading Heaven by Manuel Vilas, translated by James Womack.

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

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