From Poetry Magazine

Reading List: December 2019

BY Holly Amos

Originally Published: December 27, 2019
White text on a green background that reads "You learn to recognize beauty by its frame." The text is attributed to Claire Schwartz.

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

Cameron Awkward-Rich
My partner and I have gotten into the habit of reading books together, out loud, in the morning, after the kitchen is clean and the coffee has been made. It’s very sweet (perhaps too sweet), and it’s changed my relationship to reading, at least temporarily. It’s much slower-going. Also, the books I recommend, now, tend to be ones that charge the morning air with feeling (hilarity, tenderness, grief) and follow me into the day. Here’s a best-of dispatch from the kitchen table.

Poetry:

Etc.:

  • Anne Carson, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy
  • Lucy Cooke, The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife


Naomi Ayala
Recently read:

  • Afaa Michael Weaver, City of Eternal Spring
  • Annie Dillard, The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New
  • Tomas Tranströmer, The Half-Finished Heaven
  • Samuel Miranda, WeIS
  • Holly Karapetkova, Towline
  • Reuben Jackson, Scattered Clouds
  • Shohaku Okumura (translator), The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo
  • Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu with Douglas Abrams, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World
  • Carolyn Forché, Blue Hour
  • Ben Connelly, Inside Vasubandhu’s Yogacara: A Practitioner’s Guide

Among those I return to:

Up next:

  • Charles Kamasaki, Immigration Reform: The Corpse That Will Not Die
  • Martín Espada (editor), What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump
  • Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police
  • Mark Eisner, Neruda: The Poet’s Calling

Paul Batchelor
Some of the poems in Miriam Gamble’s excellent third book, What Planet, feel like ghost stories written from the perspective of the ghost: “Walking here is like walking the vacated spaces/of your own life ...” (“Abandoned Asylum”). Again and again, Gamble captures lost moments, missed chances, and seemingly ephemeral states or feelings that only reveal their full emotion or consequence when drawn out through her sometimes baroque formal strategies. Gamble is a witty, funny, and yet deeply serious poet. 

My favorite comic at the moment is Marjorie Liu’s Monstress. Liu builds a fantasy world of gods and monsters—but also of refugee camps and elaborate political machinations. Sana Takeda’s art matches this with its unlikely yet perfect blend of steampunk and manga. My favorite character is a foul-mouthed, multi-tailed cat called Master Ren, whose words of wisdom include: “To quote the poets ... we’re fucked.”

Rosebud Ben-Oni
I’m currently reading, savoring, teaching, rereading, and eagerly awaiting:

Mark Bibbins
Recent, current, imminent:

Jane Huffman
I recently finished Milkman by Anna Burns and picked up At the Sign of the Naked Waiter by Amy Herrick, both of which are bleak but ultimately graceful portrayals of young womanhood. I’m also in the middle of Dandelions, Yasunari Kawabata’s final novel, which I’ve read no fewer than ten times since Michael Emmerich’s stunning translation came out in 2017. (My copy is coming unbound, which is a fitting metaphor for what this book does to me—read it.) What else ... I recently saw a production of a new translation of Uncle Vanya at Iowa City’s regional professional theater, which reminded me that the play is utterly relevant in the present moment. I’m eager to get a copy of the book, which has been beautifully revitalized by Richard Nelson, Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky. Much like its characters do, the play’s language staggers wildly between old and new worlds.

Kathleen Ossip
Old: Duncan Emrich, editor, American Folk Poetry: An Anthology. 774 pages of the US unconscious, murder ballads, spirituals, work chants, love laments, disaster narratives. This book is so chunky and chewy I want to eat it. If I could, I have a feeling I’d understand what’s going on a lot better than I do.

New: some recent books from the UK:

and from the US:

  • David Baker, Swift
  • Kyle Dargan, Anagnorisis
  • Jana Prikryl, No Matter
  • Brenda Shaughnessy, The Octopus Museum
  • David Trinidad, editor, Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith

Finally, the Jonathan Bate biography of Ted Hughes, which shows him to be as bedeviled and precarious as Plath, despite his myth as the stable rock who kept her together and writing.

Alissa Quart
These are books I’ve enjoyed that I’ve read in the last three months.

Poetry:

  • Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Claudia Rankine
  • Build Yourself a Boat, Camonghne Felix
  • Troy, Michigan, Wendy S. Walters

Memoir:

  • Lives Other Than My Own, Emmanuel Carrère
  • The Odd Woman and the City, Vivian Gornick

Fiction:

  • Evening in Paradise, Lucia Berlin
  • Grand Union, Zadie Smith
  • And lots of my friends’—and my writers’—rough drafts!

Julian Randall
Poetry books I’m (re)reading:

  • Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds
  • Odes to Lithium by Shira Erlichman
  • Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz
  • Tender by Toi Derricotte
  • We Inherit What the Fires Left by William Evans

Nonfiction books I’m reading:

  • The First Cell by Azra Raza
  • Abandon Me by Melissa Febos
  • Heavy by Kiese Laymon (fourth time)

Fiction books I’m reading:

  • A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
  • Who Put This Song On by Morgan Parker
  • Sula by Toni Morrison

Books I wish my students hadn’t stolen but am also secretly glad are growing with them elsewhere:

  • Whichever of my beloved students never returned my copy of Open Interval by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon has my lukewarm wrath following them—it contains one of my all-time favorite poems.
  • Same goes for whichever of you brilliant, petty criminals never returned my copy of The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin.

Alison C. Rollins

  • A Theory of Birds, Zaina Alsous
  • HULL, Xandria Phillips
  • Space Struck, Paige Lewis
  • Documents, Jan-Henry Gray
  • Heed the Hollow, Malcolm Tariq
  • When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams: “A mother and daughter are an edge. Edges are ecotones, transitional zones, places of danger or opportunity.”
  • The Seas, Samantha Hunt: “My mother is regularly torn between being herself and being my mother.”
  • Mostly Dead Things, Kristen Arnett: “It was the whole animal laid out in front of me again; unnatural and unknown.”
  • Freedom Time, Anthony Reed: “Freedom Time argues that black experimental writing, at the level of form, advances an aesthetic of what Erica Hunt has called ‘unrecognizable speech’ and that the hiatus of unrecognizability can spur new thoughts and new imaginings.”
  • Black Dada Reader, Adam Pendleton: “Black Dada is a way to talk about the future while talking about the past; it is our present moment.”

Julia Salem
Poetry:

  • Monica Ferrell’s You Darling Thing for its virtuosic use of various perspectives and poetic forms to explore desire, danger, and sexual objectification.
  • Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars for its engagement with science and for daring to imagine the “great black distance they—we—flicker in.”
  • Up-and-coming poet Mitchell Glazier for his topsy-turvy worlds, linguistic dexterity, and uncanny ability to surprise.

Fiction:

  • Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone, a stinging indictment of Germany and the EU’s immigration policies, and also a hopeful tale about a man finding his purpose.
  • George Douglas’s The House with the Green Shutters, set in mid-nineteenth century Scotland, chronicling the downfall of Mr. Gourlay, a “big-man-in-a-small-way.” It’s an astonishingly vivid depiction of pettiness, hubris, and resistance to change.

Nonfiction:

  • Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality, because it reminds us we’re small in a possibly infinite multiverse, and that other worlds are reachable through math and our imaginations.

Claire Schwartz
Fred Moten says:

There’s always an element, however illusory, of working by yourself, which takes the form of practicing in that sense that, you know, a piano player would practice alone, but then the actual practice that you’re practicing for, so to speak, is in the ensemble, in the encounter.

Lately I’ve been thinking of reading in this way—as practicing alone in order to better (re)turn to the ensemble. I’ve been seeking books that challenge power’s distortions of language, books that recuperate ways to be together threatened by empire, and that imagine abolition with wild precision.

  • Aria Aber, Hard Damage
  • Zaina Alsous, A Theory of Birds
  • Athena Farrokhzad (translated by Jennifer Hayashida), White Blight 
  • Renee Gladman, Prose Architectures
  • Renée Green, Other Planes of There
  • Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive
  • Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
  • Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions
  • June Jordan, Civil Wars
  • Layli Long Soldier, Whereas
  • Fred Moten, consent not to be a single being 
  • Christina Sharpe, In the Wake
  • Solmaz Sharif, LOOK
  • Cecilia Vicuña (ed. Rosa Alcalá), New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña

Adrienne Su
Here are some of the books that have stood out for me recently:

  • Steep Tea by Jee Leong Koh
  • Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl by Diane Seuss
  • The Popol Vuh, translated by Michael Bazzett
  • Children of Grass by B.A. Van Sise
  • A Little Book on Form by Robert Hass
  • Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
  • Know My Name by Chanel Miller
  • The Way We Eat Now and First Bite by Bee Wilson

Doug Van Gundy

Michael Wasson

These ...

... they are all holding me dearly between their teeth.

Robert Wrigley
Mostly I am reading dead people. I had long given the dead short shrift, thinking the living were where it’s at. There are, of course, such exquisite poets among the dead, and most of them are not read as much as they should be. In addition, they are never unkind, they haven’t a jealous bone in their bodies, and they never need letters of recommendation. Also, for some reason, no one ever complains that there are too many of them.

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

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