From Poetry Magazine

Reading List: January 2020

BY Holly Amos

Originally Published: January 28, 2020
An excerpt from a Jorie Graham poem presented as white text on a black background from the back cover of the magazine. The text reads "The earth/said remember//me. I am the/earth it said. Re-/member me."

The Reading List is a feature of Poetry’s Editors’ Blog. This month, contributors to the January 2020 issue share some recommendations.

Hala Alyan

Oliver Baez Bendorf
Some of the books keeping me good company this winter:

  • Samuel Ace, Meet Me There: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash. 
  • Francisco Aragón, After Rubén (forthcoming in May)
  • Lynda Barry, Making Comics
  • KC Councilor, Between You and Me: Transitional Comics
  • Diana Marie Delgado, Tracing the Horse
  • Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (rereading)
  • Juan J. Morales, The Handyman’s Guide to End Times
  • Ovid, Fasti
  • Trace Peterson, Since I Moved In (new & revised)

Emily Berry
Thomas Bernhard was recently recommended to me by a friend; I took to him with a great passion and read Woodcutters, Wittgenstein’s Nephew (both translated by David McLintock) and My Prizes (translated by Carol Brown Janeway) in quick succession. Despite the evidence, I thought I had discovered this famous Austrian author all by myself and went around telling various people how good he was and how I was sure they would love him too but it turned out many of them had secretly discovered him all by themselves years ago and so my news was not news at all and I suppose neither is this.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

  • Artforum (current issue)
  • Bookforum (current issue)
  • New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuna
  • In eisige Höhen, Jon Krakauer
  • Black Dada Reader, Adam Pendleton
  • Exiles of Eden, Ladan Osman
  • Advantages of Being Evergreen, Oliver Baez Bendorf
  • Look, a White! George Yancy 
  • A Sand Book, Ariana Reines
  • Grief Sequence, Prageeta Sharma
  • Cezontle, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
  • Monsters I Have Been, Kenji C. Liu
  • Blacks, Gwendolyn Brooks

CAConrad
When I read our world, it is through poetry. These are nine amazing recent books that have startled me into new ways of loving our planet and our lives! To quote my amazing friend Hoa Nguyen (who I recently interviewed for Occult Poetry Radio): “Poetry crushing all other forms of literature!” 

  • LeAnne Howe, Savage Conversations
  • Nisha Ramayya, States of the Body Produced by Love
  • Ariana Reines, A Sand Book
  • Raquel Salas Rivera, while they sleep (under the bed is another country)
  • Carlos Soto-Román, Nature of Objects
  • Anne Lesley Selcer, Sun Cycle
  • Sandra Simonds, Atopia
  • Rebecca Tamás, Witch
  • Magdalena Zurawski, The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom

Wo Chan
Given my flirty peepers that read every scrap of mislaid paper, that note the native town signage blurting by on an interstate bus ride, and that soak up the pornography of data, infinite scrolling late-night on my phone, I have a hot, hungry romance with reading. So, declaring the books I love now—the ones I carry by my body—feels institutional, like m-a-r-r-i-a-g-e. I offer here a nonhierarchical list of recent and ongoing great book flings.

I’ve done a lot of reading this year on Instagram actually. The mini-essays of @sighswoon, @yumisakugawa, and @nedratawwab have helped me immensely in organizing both my radiant and ugly thought-feelings. I think that is the purpose of poetry. Therefore, I have to assert that memes are poems too.

I love Marilyn Hacker’s work. Right now I’m reading Desesperanto: Poems 1999–2002 and Squares and Courtyards.

I’m reading Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill, Yiyun Li’s Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, and Feng Sun Chen’s The 8th House.

I am reading Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, an anthology edited by Camille T. Dungy.

I love horror manga and graphic novels. How do you create suspense, dread, and horror on a flat piece of paper when it’s the reader who gets to decide when to flip the page, when to put the book away? Poets should study the way manga constantly reinvents the page/space in their storytelling methods. This summer I read Junji Ito’s Uzumaki: Spiral into Horror, Vol. 1 & 2, Kengo Hanazawa’s I am a Hero series, and Gengoroh Tagame’s My Brother’s Husband (a weeper). I recommend them all.

I am rereading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Su Cho
Here are some books that never leave my book shelf:

I’ve been doing my best to familiarize myself with contemporary Asian American literature, and the critical texts that helped me contextualize our present were:

  • Elaine H. Kim’s Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context
  • David Mura’s A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing 
  • Timothy Yu’s Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965

Hannah Copley
In my bag I have Whereas by Layli Long Soldier and Surge by Jay Bernard. Both keep bringing me to tears.

I’m in the middle of compiling a list of poems to inspire my new creative writing students, and I’ve been rereading some of my favorite collections to source them. It’s a great job. The list currently includes: Kim Moore’s “All The Men I Never Married” sequence; Terrance Hayes’s “The Golden Shovel”; Vahni Capildeo’s “Investigation of Past Shoes”; Kei Miller’s “Unsung”; Hera Lindsey Bird’s “Ways of Making Love”; Roy McFarlane’s “Joy Gardner, 1993”; Leontia Flynn’s “Alzheimer’s Villanelle”; Sinéad Morrissey’s “Vanity Fair”; Alice Oswald’s “Birdsong for Two Voices”; Tiphanie Yanique’s “Dangerous Things”; Kayo Chingonyi’s, “calling a spade a spade”; Ocean Vuong’s “Seventh Circle of Earth”; Holly Pester’s “Comic Timing”; and Helen Mort’s “Difficult Women.”

Finally, I keep returning to Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting by Shivanee Ramlochan. It’s staggeringly good. 

Clodagh Beresford Dunne
On my desk (some new, some rereads):

On my bedside locker:

  • A Monk’s Guide to a Clean House and Mind by Shoukei Matsumoto
  • Future Perfect, edited by Mary Shine Thompson

In my handbag: Girl by Edna O’Brien. In my mothering: Over Nine Waves: A Book of Irish Legends by Marie Heaney.

Reginald Gibbons
Reginald Dwayne Betts’s new book of poems, Felon, assembles the most wonderfully disparate resources of poetry in a tremendously cohesive book of focused artistic power and emotional intensity—poetically articulated deep truths about the human spirit, suffering, mayhem, and survival, in language that’s so alive it almost jumps up out of the lines.

An opposite: Tom Pickard’s mixed-genre, poet’s-notebook miscellany, Fiends Fell: life and writing near the rural border of England and Scotland, filled with wonderful, chewy, unfamiliar words from that region. The book is all of a richness of perception, feeling, thought, and history in very windy up-and-down places, sparsely settled and quiet (i.e. not the noisy and ominous pandemonium of American chaos).

And to go beyond books of poetry, there’s The Black Arts Movement in Chicago, an extraordinary recent issue of Chicago Review, with a beautiful lead-off reminiscence by Angela Jackson, “Angels and Tricksters,” and poems by Carolyn M. Rodgers, a section on Oscar Brown Jr., poems by Sterling Plumpp, and many other compelling contributions, along with marvelous visual materials.

Jose Hernandez Diaz
Chapbooks:

  • This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album by Alan Chazaro
  • The Cartography of Sleep by Laura Villareal

New books:

Always returning to:

Can’t wait to read:

Komal Mathew
I return to the following books each year, either rereading the entire book or particular sections:

  • Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988–2000 by Lucille Clifton
  • Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer’s Life by Bret Lott
  • Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother by Beth Ann Fennelly
  • Lucky Fish by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
  • The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Books I’m currently reading and enjoying:

  • Afterland by Mai Der Vang
  • Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks by Jason Reynolds
  • The Dream of Reason by Jenny George
  • The Carrying by Ada Limón

Elizabeth M. Mills
Poetry:

Nonfiction:

  • Andrew Epstein, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture
  • Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art
  • Hilma af Klint: Notes and Methods, edited by Christine Burgin, and the Guggenheim catalogue Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future
  • Elaine Pagels, Why Religion?
  • Dani Shapiro, Inheritance
  • Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink
  • Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse
  • Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate
  • Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

Fiction:

  • Samanta Schweblin (translated by Megan McDowell), Fever Dream
  • Tommy Orange, There There
  • Madeline Miller, Circe
  • Michael Ondaatje, Warlight
  • Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing
  • Richard Powers, The Overstory
  • Elizabeth Strout, Olive, Again
  • Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

Noor Naga
Here are three books to lull you to sleep:

The Book of Sleep by Egyptian author Haytham El Wardany is a gorgeous meditation on sleep, forthcoming in March in Robin Moger’s English translation. Divided into short vignettes, it contains a blend of the autobiographical, the philosophical, and the lyric, and begs to be read in a posture of recline.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh is a nauseating novel with a simple (relatable) premise: in the early 2000s, a young New Yorker determines to sleep through the year with the aid of pharmaceuticals. Most disturbingly, she succeeds. 

Laziness in the Fertile Valley by Egyptian author Albert Cossery is a 1945 satirical novel about a family obsessed with sleep in the wake of Egypt’s independence from the British and the new capitalist demands of modernization. It is allegedly based on Cossery’s own family, for whom unemployment and indolence were sources of pride, even resistance. It is translated from the French by William Goyen.

C.L. O’Dell
Books I’ve been keeping close:

Jonathan Andrew Pérez
Law and poetry reading list:

  • Martín Espada, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed
  • Aracelis Girmay, The Black Maria
  • Hart Crane’s ode to Brooklyn Bridge, The Bridge, urban-jazz American epic!
  • Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems (a lawyer poet who flirted with sound)
  • Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things
  • Clint Smith’s Counting Descent (justice and form)
  • Reginald Dwayne Betts’s Felon (justice and the poetry of a formerly incarcerated person)
  • Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (the Chicana feminist who did it all, and made the poetry of the original borderlands—an epic)

Yes—just a few but this is the poetry of art, law, and justice.

Christopher Phelps
Here are some books I’ve spent time with lately, in idiosyncratic order:

  • The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
  • Hopes and Impediments, Chinua Achebe
  • Finite and Infinite Games, James P. Carse
  • Blankets, Craig Thompson
  • The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age, Bina Venkataraman
  • Voices, Antonio Porchia, translated by W.S. Merwin

And now, I’m off on a walk to the closest Little Free Library, to see what comes to hand.

Declan Ryan
In terms of poetry, the things I’ve been most caught up with recently are Douglas Crase’s reissued The Revisionist & The Astropastorals—fresh and a missing link, simultaneously; The Poems of Dorothy Molloy are full of odd delight; at the other end of posterity, Roseanne Watt’s debut Moder Dy and two brilliant 2020 debuts in manuscript, Robert Selby’s The Coming-Down Time and Will Burns’s Country Music. 

In prose, it’s been Memorable Days, selected letters between James Salter and Robert Phelps, as well as a selection of Stuart Dybek’s stories, The Start of Something; some sports writing in Tobias Jones’s Ultra, about the Italian football fans of that name, and Tyson Fury’s autobiography, Behind the Mask. I have two short story collections lined up next which I’ve heard great things about, Wendy Erskine’s Sweet Home and Nicole Flattery’s Show Them a Good Time. 

Christopher Soto
Currently reading:

  • City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 by Kelly Lytle Hernández
  • Lighthead by Terrance Hayes

Recently finished:

  • Tracing the Horse by Diana Marie Delgado
  • Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya Hartman

Flipping through:

  • Yesterday, I was in A Muriel Rukeyser Reader looking for the poem “[College Radicals]”
  • I’ve been revisiting certain poems in Autobiography of Death and I’m Ok, I’m Pig! by Kim Hyesoon

Christopher Spaide
For me, the last decade began and ended with sleeplessness, poetry-induced, of the most charmed kind. In 2010, I’d routinely be up late finishing the reading for my first poetry courses, wondering if my teachers shared a similar gift for procrastination; today, as the sleep-deprived lecturer for the very sort of undergraduate I once was, I can confirm that, yes, we sure do. The last book from the decade to keep me and my students up all night, then up nights and nights since, was Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s Lima :: Limón. One poem I still haven’t gotten over, “The Women Wear Surgical Masks,” is Scenters-Zapico’s stab at writing an “unbeautiful poem” for hunger strikers protesting femicide in El Paso–Juárez, something “uncrafted//with sterile diction” to do justice to those women and their disciplined austerity. But Scenters-Zapico finds herself unable to keep her own artistry at bay:

                                   I don’t want to turn
these women into an aesthetic. I have
failed. That last line break shows I still

want to build tension.

No poetry this year spoke more precisely to me about everything poetry fails to do: “This poem, my failed/re-creation—their protest a failed resuscitation,” Scenters-Zapico’s last lines conclude, fatal as any epitaph. But no poetry seemed to mount counterarguments on poetry’s behalf more handily, answering the very failures it diagnosed with line after tensely broken line of unquestionable success.

Lee Upton
These are some of the most fortifying books of poetry I’ve been reading and rereading recently:

G.C. Waldrep
Favorite poetry books from the fall that merit eventual rereading this winter:

In November I was also rereading Alejandra Pizarnik and the thirteenth-century German mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg, who are not the same person, although it’s interesting, by which I mean impossible, to imagine they might have been.

Devon Walker-Figueroa
Reading/rereading:

John Wilkinson
Two books published (or republished after fugitive pamphlet or online appearances) by Commune Editions are singular and singularly important works, D.S. Marriott’s Duppies and the much-mourned Sean Bonney’s Our Death. Both books are profoundly radical and of this moment, and profoundly and specifically historical and engaged with (very different) literary histories. Friedrich Hölderlin’s Selected Poems and Letters (Amsterdam: The Last Books) offers Christopher Middleton’s translations in parallel with the German texts, along with Middleton’s essays on translation in an edition which is scholarly, beautiful, and reasonably priced. Lastly, I have been late in discovering the masterpiece which is Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire.

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

Read Full Biography