From Poetry Magazine

Reading List: February 2020

BY Holly Amos

Originally Published: February 25, 2020
The back cover quote from the February 2020 issue, in red, which reads, "Let us / talk more of how dark // the beginning of a day is." In black text it's attributed to Maggie Smith.

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

Beth Bachmann
The last time we spoke, I confessed to writing poems in the voice of a veteran warhorse after reading René Char; since then, I’ve read Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch and am working my way through Proust, steeping myself in translations whilst translating the voice of the horse! I also just read Richard Adams’s Watership Down aloud to my daughter. It’s an epic tale about bunnies at war, which I highly recommend.

Gabrielle Bates
Does it make me a terrible person if I admit that all my favorite books I’ve read so far in 2020 have been prose? Quiet as it’s kept, sometimes poets need a break from poetry! When I flew home to Birmingham for the holidays, I went to my favorite bookstores there (shout out to Little Professor and Thank You Books) and found myself piling up a giant stack of novels. 

Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline is a novel I think many poets would love: very obsessive and strange, short enough to read in a single evening, lots of exciting moments happening in the syntax.

E.J. Koh’s memoir The Magical Language of Others I found completely captivating (the vulnerability! the craft! the restraint!). I truly believe everyone will find a piece of themselves broken and healed by this book—and the author is a wonderful poet too, so ... poetry! 

Zeina Hashem Beck
Since the Lebanese revolution started in October 2019, I’ve been disoriented and almost read nothing but the news. An article that’s relevant is John Berger’s “The Nature of Mass Demonstrations,” and listening to the Lebanese Politics Podcast also helped me process a little bit. The Public Source, a Beirut-based media organization, has just released its first issue, “Dispatches from the October Revolution,” and I’m excited to read. I resumed reading Ahdaf Soueif’s Cairo: A Memoir of a City Transformed, and I began Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World (edited by Zahra Hankir) and Youssef Rakha’s The Crocodiles. In terms of poetry, to which I’m slowly returning, I’ve started A Handful of Blue Earth by Vénus Khoury-Ghata (translated by Marilyn Hacker). 

Partridge Boswell
Now revolving on the lazy Susan:

John Lee Clark
I am going through the catalog of a single press—Flood Editions—and am enjoying it as one means of rich discovery. Flood Editions is quietly publishing some of the most astonishing, beautiful poetry, often by poets who are underappreciated—or very much appreciated by those who are fortunate enough to know them!

David Felix
Here’s a piece of history, first published 60 years ago: Ten Twentieth Century Poets edited by Maurice Wollman. Google it and you’ll immediately find 10 references to start with. It’s a classic collection containing many well-known and, by now, signature pieces. The 10 poets included are W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, and Robert Frost, two Scottish writers, Edwin Muir and Andrew Young, William Butler Yeats from Ireland and the remaining John Betjeman, Walter de la Mare, Thomas Hardy, and Edward Thomas providing poetry that I feel is quintessentially English. Eight of these poets were born in the nineteenth century and the collection is briefly representative of the first 50 years after 1900. For me, it’s a testament to the singular power of poetry. Many lines from this anthology are still faithfully, unshakably remembered after over 50 years.

Daisy Fried
You caught me while I’m working on syllabi for the five (count ‘em! five) courses I’m teaching this semester. For a Contemporary Women’s Poetry course I’ve been cruising happily through Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary, Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Headwaters, Ana Ristović’s Directions for Use, Hera Lindsay Bird’s Hera Lindsay Bird, Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler, Warsan Shire’s Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth, Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, Stacey Waite’s Butch Geography, Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women, Trace Peterson’s Since I Moved In, and Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue. My head is buzzing! And I’ve been reading the galleys of Irish poet John McAuliffe’s forthcoming The Kabul Olympics, a heartening, clarifying, beautiful book, because enormously intelligent and feeling. There are poems here about home, family, political situations, terrorist attacks, history: places where all these things converge. McAuliffe is superb at attending to the details while also managing the panoramic view. 

Caoilinn Hughes
Some books I’ve been reading or rereading and loving this winter:

  • The Travelers, Regina Porter
  • In the Distance, Hernan Diaz
  • If All the World and Love Were Young, Stephen Sexton
  • Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo
  • How Much of These Hills Is Gold?, C Pam Zhang
  • Lanny, Max Porter
  • Faces in the Water, Janet Frame
  • Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber
  • There There, Tommy Orange
  • Why Marx Was Right, Terry Eagleton (disclaimer: Marx was wrong about race, gender, and colonization)
  • New Kings of the World: Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi, and K-Pop, Fatima Bhutto
  • A book that’s coming out with a wee UK indie this summer but is the most important book I’ve read in years: The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Futures from the Frontiers of Climate Science, Paul Behrens
  • Today, I’m ignoring my TBR pile to dive into Ágota Kristóf’s The Notebook, translated by Alan Sheridan

Zach Linge
(Re)reading:

Anticipating:

James McCorkle
Some of what I’ve lately finished, in no particular order (there’s an environmental/climate catastrophe theme here):

  • Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World (trans. Lisa Dillman)
  • Jeff Vandermeer’s Dead Astronauts
  • Elizabeth Rush’s Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore
  • Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
  • Robert Seydel’s Songs of S.
  • The Popol Vuh, translated by Michael Bazzett
  • Yang Jian’s Long River
  • Todd Miller’s Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security

What’s next:

  • Alice Notley’s Certain Magical Acts
  • Jenny Xie’s Eye Level
  • Fred Moten’s All that Beauty
  • William Kentridge’s Six Drawing Lessons
  • David Hinton’s Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry

And now’s the time to revisit Charles Wright, with his Oblivion Banjo waiting on my desk.

Mary B. Moore
The poets I read and reread revel in image and music, and sometimes mess up syntax and received poetic forms in excellent ways. I’m sure I’m forgetting some:

  • Rosa Lane, Chouteau’s Chalk 
  • Rebecca Gayle Howell, American Purgatory 
  • Lise Goett, Leprosarium: Poems 
  • Ross Gay, Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude 
  • Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf 
  • Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin 
  • Carol Frost, Entwined: Three Lyric Sequences 
  • Adam Vines, Out of Speech 
  • Leila Chatti, Deluge 
  • Art (AE) Stringer, a friend and master of the tight poem, Asbestos Brocade 
  • Kathleen Peirce, Vault 
  • Donald Revell, Drought-Adapted Vine 
  • Caki Wilkinson, The Wynona Stone Poems 

Lately, I’ve also been reading twentieth-century women poets whose range and craftsmanship inspire me: 

Lani O’Hanlon
I have just finished reading Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life by Adam Feinstein which explores the politics of Neruda, his development as a poet, and the loss of his mother when he was two months old. The book is infused with Feinstein’s love of Neruda’s poetry.

I have been choosing one or two poems to live with and reflect on over weeks. My December poem was “Dirge” by Frank Paino, which resonated with me as I work as a writer in palliative care; also Helen Dunmore’s last poem, “Hold Out Your Arms.”

My January poems were “Crawthumpers” by Eileen Sheehan, about the cruelty of Irish women, steeped in religious dogma, to other women—it has a heart-stopping last line; also “Insha’Allah” by Danusha Laméris.

For February I will be listening to Poetry File on RTÉ Lyric and Grace Wells’s ecological poem addressing poets, “We Speak on the Outbreath.”

Nome Emeka Patrick
These are books that I have (re)read in the last three months.

Poetry:

I keep going back to this:

For fiction:

  • Stay with Me—Ayobami Adebayo
  • The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives—Lola Shoneyin
  • Be(com)ing Nigerian—Elnathan John
  • A Thousand Splendid Suns—Khaled Hosseini

And I’m currently reading Unfortunately, It was Paradise: Selected Poems by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché (edited by Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein); also And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini and Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li.

Alison C. Rollins
Books currently living on my bedside table: 

  • Yanyi, The Year of Blue Water
  • Danez Smith, Homie 
  • Dionne Brand, The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos 
  • Sarah Vap, End of the Sentimental Journey 
  • E.J. Koh, The Magical Language of Others
  • Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends
  • Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee 
  • Brandon Shimoda, The Grave on the Wall
  • Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
  • Sarah Broom, The Yellow House
  • Meena Alexander, Fault Lines
  • Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood
  • Terese Marie Mailhot, Heart Berries 
  • Anne Boyer, The Undying 
  • Joy Williams, The Changeling 
  • Stephanie Burt, Don’t Read Poetry 

Maggie Smith
Recent, current, and not-so-patiently awaiting:

  • Heather Christle, The Crying Book
  • Emily Berry, Stranger, Baby
  • Camonghne Felix, Build Yourself a Boat
  • Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine, translators (though they refer to their translations as “readings”), Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva
  • Lia Purpura, All the Fierce Tethers
  • Hanif Abdurraqib, A Fortune for Your Disaster
  • Arthur Sze, Sight Lines
  • Jenny Slate, Little Weirds
  • Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell, translators, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai
  • Mark Bibbins, 13th Balloon
  • Helen Phillips, The Need
  • Victoria Chang, Obit
  • Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
  • Mary Ruefle, Dunce
  • Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation
  • Alison C. Rollins, Library of Small Catastrophes
  • Jenny Boully, Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life

Terese Svoboda
Caroline Knox’s Hear Trains offers thrillingly gnomic, playful, and erudite poems that converse with Alan Alda, Napoleon, and Andrew Marvell—and the marvelous. The poem “Pomander” sums up her effect: “acid and balm combined, so the fragrance/—sweet-tempered, good-natured—” subtly pervades, like the tiny orchids you wouldn’t know “were there/if you didn’t know they were there” in “I Wouldn’t Mow the Fields,” which ends with its corporate power-structure-magnate mowing away.

A tour de force in poetry, C.P. Mangel’s A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest presents more than 600 pages of blank verse—but is billed as a novel. A “passing” girl moves to a Southern town, where the KKK and men constantly threaten her and her Rimbaud-loving father and librarian mother. “‘Why you staring/at her?’ asks the older man. ‘She sure pretty,’/says the younger one, ‘what a white girl doing/in here?’” Tender, suspenseful, delicious—dove dumplings and rhubarb beet cake—the book’s accumulation of terror and wisdom is hypnotic.

Museum of Stones by Lynn Lurie is a novel but built like a beautiful prose poem. More than collage, more than a list of one terrifying vignette after another, the book depicts a difficult mother/child bond that includes encounters with Peru’s Shining Path terrorists, meditations on Theresienstadt, and, yes, a lot of rocks.

Dujie Tahat
I’ve been giving myself a DIY MFA for the last couple of years, culminating in my first semester at Warren Wilson, which is all to say I’ve been reading a lot. Here are a few books I’ve read recently or am in the middle of reading right now: 

  • Anaïs Duplan, Take This Stallion
  • Athena Farrokhzad, White Blight translated by Jennifer Hayashida
  • Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead
  • Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Rocket Fantastic
  • Paul Celan translated by Michael Hamburger, The Poems of Paul Celan
  • Han Kang, The Vegetarian
  • Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town
  • Gwendolyn Brooks, The Bean-Eaters and Maud Martha
  • Bill Carty, Huge Cloudy
  • Aria Aber, Hard Damage
  • Ellen Bryant Voigt, The Art of Syntax
  • Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
  • David M. Buerge, Chief Seattle and the Town That Took His Name
  • Taneum Bambrick, Vantage
  • Bettina Judd, Patient.
  • John Murillo, Up Jump the Boogie

Jack Underwood

  • Doing the Most with the Least, Momtaza Mehri
  • “Andromeda” by Weyes Blood (I love the lyric “Treat me right/I’m still a good man’s daughter” and its cool delivery)
  • “The Barrel” by Aldous Harding (I have watched the bewitching video about 50 times)
  • “Roly Poly” by T-ara (suggested by Mia You as the distant K-pop cousin to my poem on her fab K-pop playlist for the February issue)
  • Isn’t This Nice by Courtney Bush
  • Earth by Hannah Brooks-Motl
  • Marnie by Connie Scozzaro

Jeffrey Yang
I read a lot for my publishing job, and two poetry books by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge that I recently worked on come out this month: a revisited reissue of her 1989 collection Empathy and her new collection A Treatise on Stars. The two books seem to converse with each other across the years, bridging quanta and matter with mind-melting lyricism. Over the holiday I started Yukio Mishima’s tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, and finished the first two volumes, Spring Snow and Runaway Horses, translated by Michael Gallagher. Wow! I’m almost ready to commit ritual seppuku, too, just to see how I’ll be reincarnated. And Susan Howe and I both found Józef Czapski’s Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp incredibly moving—one of those books that can restore humanity’s faith in literature, or at least define it.

Mia You
Dutch poet Maarten van der Graaff’s newest collection Nederland in stukken was published in January. My goal for 2020 is to translate the whole thing into English! Kimberly Quiogue Andrews’s A Brief History of Fruit is the most technically impressive book I’ve read in a long time, and it moved me to tears. Megin Jiménez’s Mongrel Tongue has made me completely rethink the prose poem. It almost goes without saying that I’m reveling in Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal; Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony appears this spring, and I’ve gotten my hands on a review copy, ahead of seeing the book’s accompanying exhibition in Berlin next month (I’m really excited!); and CAConrad recently mailed me two glorious—both in terms of poetry and design—chapbooks, Seized by the Left Hand and 18 Poems & (Soma)tic Rituals.

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

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