From Poetry Magazine

Reading List: March 2020

BY Holly Amos

Originally Published: March 26, 2020
Black text on a white background from the back cover of the March 2020 issue of POETRY. The text reads: "Like deja vu, poetry intimates that the past is never quite over and done with."

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

Naomi Ayala
Just finished:

Now reading:

  • Barry López, Arctic Dreams
  • José Tomás Pérez, La gente detrás del muro
  • Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You
  • Jeanne Carbonetti, The Yoga of Drawing

Up next:

Matthew Bevis
I’ve really been enjoying Timothy Donnelly’s new collection, The Problem of the Many, and also Charles Wright’s Oblivion Banjo, a capacious selected edition of his work over the last five decades. Denise Riley’s captivating Say Something Back and Time Lived, Without Its Flow have just been reissued as one volume. Sarah Arvio’s translations of Lorca—Poet in Spain—are wonderful. I recently reread J.-B. Pontalis’s beautiful book, Love of Beginnings (Windows and Brother of the Above are also great; I wish more of his work were available in English). Three things I’m looking forward to: Kay Ryan’s Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose, Julia Copus’s biography of Charlotte Mew, and Joanna Klink’s collection The Nightfields.

Rachael Boast
Folks in North America will appreciate the enormity of the publication of Carolyn Forché’s In the Lateness of the World, out 17 years since Blue Hour, which is a beauty. Luckily for UK-based admirers of Forché’s work, Bloodaxe Books will publish the paperback shortly after. I have a copy of Ciaran Carson’s Still Life which, to the shocked surprise of many of us, turns out to be his final collection. I can’t bring myself to read it yet but I’m aware that, to quote Gail McConnell’s comment from her speech made during the book’s posthumous launch in October 2019, “Ciaran has always been attentive to the world at the cellular level,” and I look forward to being altered by these late poems. One of my favorite ever books is his take on Rimbaud, In the Light Of.

Jennifer Chang
My reading is more eclectic than usual right now because I’m working on two essays simultaneously, which is slightly crazy-making in good and bad ways. These are the books I keep circling back to as I write:

  • Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews
  • Marjorie Welish, Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960
  • T.J. Clark, The Sight of Death
  • Tima Kurdi, The Boy on the Beach
  • Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

And I’m always reading poetry and poetics or, at least, in those proximate directions; these are the ones—a couple newly begun, most months-long habits—accompanying me between classes, on public transportation, and before bedtime:

  • Rick Barot, The Galleons
  • Emily Berry, Stranger, Baby
  • Harris Feinsod, The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures
  • Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
  • Aditi Machado, Rhapsody
  • Denise Riley, Selected Poems and Time Lived, Without Its Flow

Lastly, heavy-heartedly, since his recent death, I’ve been revisiting the work of Kamau Brathwaite, a poet who radically transformed my conception of literary authority. Rereading History of the Voice, his landmark essay, and Black + Blues, my favorite of his poetry collections, has been a small way to honor his memory.

Anaïs Deal-Márquez

p.e. garcia
Currently, I’m working on my doctoral dissertation about Latinx poetics, literacy, and identity, so mostly I’m reading a lot of theory and poetry.

  • Lo terciario/The Tertiary and while they sleep (under the bed is another country), Raquel Salas Rivera
  • Cenzontle and Children of the Land, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
  • Slow Lightning, Eduardo C. Corral
  • Degollado resplandor: Poesía selecta [1949–2000], Blanca Varela
  • Capital, Karl Marx, translated by David Fernbach
  • Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching, Kristie S. Fleckenstein 
  • This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga
  • Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement, Angela Y. Davis
  • Basic Writing as a Political Act: Public Conversations About Writing and Literacies, Linda Adler-Kassner and Susanmarie Harrington
  • In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self, Mariana Ortega
  • Theories of the Flesh: Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation, and Resistance, edited by Andrea J. Pitts, Mariana Ortega, and José Medina

Roberto Carlos Garcia
Poetry:

Fiction:

  • Malcriada & Other Stories by Lorraine Avila
  • Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
  • The World Does Not Require You by Rion Amilcar Scott

Nonfiction:

  • Sidewalks by Valeria Luiselli
  • Heavy by Kiese Laymon
  • Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity edited by Grisel Y. Acosta
  • Whatever Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker by Damon Young

Music:

  • One of the Best Yet by Gang Starr
  • “Cruisin’ to the Park,” Durand Jones & the Indications
  • Anything Julia Patinella sings

Suzi F. Garcia
I was lucky enough to read Madness (forthcoming) by Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué, and while the premise—a fictional collection by a fictional poet—is exciting and intriguing, it is the language that grabs me. Ojeda-Sagué creates a collection that is thoughtful, well-paced, and heartbreaking.

Metta Sáma’s Swing at Your Own Risk is constructed beautifully, only outmatched by the stunning writing. This is a book that bites and seduces, kisses and cuts. The speaker says, “Love,/I’ve touched a human/heart,” and I believe her.

One of the things I love about Eve L. Ewing’s work, including 1919, is her refusal to separate criticism from art. She is fed by history, by research, by the thought process, as well as by imagination and emotion. These connections cannot and should not be lost. She says in the beginning, “This book is a story,” and it is: a story of history, and of future.

Robin Gow

  • Documents by Jan-Henry Gray
  • Blood Box by Zefyr Lisowski 
  • Devil’s Lake by Sarah M. Sala
  • A Theory of Birds by Zaina Alsous 
  • how to get over by t’ai freedom ford 

Lauren Haldeman

  • Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race 
  • Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island 
  • Kiki Petrosino, Witch Wife 
  • Oliver Baez Bendorf, Advantages of Being Evergreen 
  • Natalie Diaz, When My Brother Was an Aztec
  • Isaac Fitzgerald, How to Be a Pirate
  • Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep
  • Kristen Radtke, Imagine Wanting Only This
  • Joy Harjo, How We Became Human

féi hernandez

Luther Hughes
Here’s a list of books I’ve (re)read in the last few months, including books I’m currently reading:

  • Hard Damage by Aria Aber
  • Vantage by Taneum Bambrick
  • Twenty Prose Poems by Charles Baudelaire
  • Half-light: Collected Poems, 1965–2016 by Frank Bidart
  • Useful Phrases for Immigrants by May-Lee Chai
  • The Dream of the Unified Field by Jorie Graham
  • Invasive Species by Marwa Helal
  • How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones
  • Bird of the Indian Subcontinent by Subhashini Kaligotla
  • Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire by Michelle Peñaloza
  • The Malevolent Volume by Justin Phillip Reed
  • Nightingale by Paisley Rekdal

And quite frankly I’m always reading The Collected Poems of Robert Hayden and always listening to The Poet Salon.

Sylvia Legris
Recently I have been reading the Selected Writings of Prussian explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, edited and with an introduction by Andrea Wulf. In conjunction with this I’ve been reading Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science. Humboldt was already documenting and writing about human-induced climate change back in 1800.

I’ve been dipping in and out of David Sylvester’s Interviews with Francis Bacon, which start in the sixties. The conversations are a bit on the rambling side, but I’ve always loved Bacon’s paintings and I just don’t care if he’s rambling! And I have been rereading Oliver Sacks’s Oaxaca Journal. I am also trying to read Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy... I think I have the rest of my reading life cut out for me!

As for poetry: H.D., Collected Poems, 1912–1944—I never tire of H.D., I will bring H.D. to my desert island. And Rachael Allen’s Kingdomland... I love this book. Also, Michael Hofmann’s One Lark, One Horse and Hiroaki Sato’s collection of essays On Haiku.

Sergio Lima
The following titles shook me in a variety of ways.

Fiction:

  • Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo
  • In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje
  • “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin
  • Kiss of the Spider Woman, Manuel Puig
  • The Sellout, Paul Beatty
  • A Spy in the House of Love, Anaïs Nin

Poetry:

Nonfiction:

J. Estanislao Lopez
Recently reading:

  • Carl Phillips’s Pale Colors in a Tall Field
  • Robert Hass’s Twentieth Century Pleasures
  • Martha Menchaca’s Recovering History, Constructing Race

Looking forward to reading:

  • Roy G. Guzmán’s Catrachos
  • francine j. harris’s Here Is the Sweet Hand
  • Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell
  • Eduardo C. Corral’s Guillotine
  • Iliana Rocha’s The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez
  • Joy Priest’s Horsepower
  • Bryan Washington’s Memorial
  • Danez Smith’s Homie
  • Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem
  • John Murillo’s Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry

Some lodestars:

Dora Malech
I’m teaching a course on sonnet sequences while working on co-editing a critical anthology and co-organizing a symposium with Laura T. Smith focused on sonnets in America, so I’ve been reading a lot of books conversing with or subverting the form and its traditions. Just a few of the books I’m currently reading or rereading in this vein include:

John McAuliffe
Norman Lewis’s Voices of the Old Sea was recommended to me by my friend Igor Klikovac. It describes three years, in the late forties, which Lewis spent in a Catalan fishing village on the cusp of exposure to modernity. The fishermen object to a road being built along the sea because they consider it unlucky to be watched while fishing. The road is built anyway, by a speculator; tourists arrive and so does a new economy. The fishing “industry,” with its patched-together boats and fraying nets, its relish for feast days and custom, duly ceases, to be replaced by blackleg sightseeing cruises; the “village cultures/fade into each other.” Except Lewis’s book...

Here’s good poetry from two of the village cultures.

Ireland:

Manchester:

Lupe Mendez
Books that expand my thinking:

  • Libro centroamericano de los muertos by Balam Rodrigo 
  • Chronology by Zahra Patterson 
  • Cold Mountain Elementary by Mark Nowak 
  • Entre Guadalupe y Malinche edited by Inés Hernández-Ávila and Norma Elia Cantú 

Poetry books:

  • African, American by Ayokunle Falomo 
  • Shadowboxing by Joseph Rios 
  • Speaking Wiri Wiri by Dan Vera 
  • Culture of Flow by Tim Z. Hernandez 
  • For Want of Water by Sasha Pimentel

Books I am looking forward to reading:

  • The Chasers by Renato Rosaldo 
  • Sana Sana by Ariana Brown 
  • Brother Bullet by Casandra López 
  • Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo 
  • I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean by Shayla Lawson 

Books I tell people they should buy: 

  • Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e: Personal Essays and Poetry by Jasminne Méndez 
  • Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff by Sara Borjas 
  • black / Maybe by Roberto Carlos Garcia 
  • A Crown for Gumecindo by Laurie Ann Guerrero

Matthew Minicucci
Chapbooks:

  • Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths by Elizabeth Acevedo
  • Portrait of the Alcoholic by Kaveh Akbar
  • Final Girl by Lauren Milici

New(ish) poetry collections:

  • Vantage by Taneum Bambrick
  • The War Makes Everyone Lonely by Graham Barnhart
  • The Low Passions by Anders Carlson-Wee
  • Through a Small Ghost by Chelsea Dingman
  • Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
  • The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon by Jane Kenyon
  • Tap Out by Edgar Kunz
  • Refusal by Jenny Molberg
  • Fruit Geode by Alicia Jo Rabins
  • feast gently by G.C. Waldrep

Rereading:

  • The Sobbing School by Joshua Bennett
  • Mother Love by Rita Dove
  • To the Place of Trumpets by Brigit Pegeen Kelly
  • Quiver of Arrows by Carl Phillips
  • The Flexible Lyric by Ellen Bryant Voigt
  • Solarium by Jordan Zandi

Prose:

  • The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories by Lydia Davis
  • The Cactus League by Emily Nemens
  • Suicide Woods by Benjamin Percy
  • With Teeth by Natanya Ann Pulley

Anthony Morales
These collections give me life when the world is stealing hope. 

someone’s dead already by Tongo Eisen-Martin. This debut will have you ready for the revolution after your resurrection.

“Slavery in Santurce” by Paula Ramirez. I return to this poem by the Matron Saint of the Hood as a reminder that home will always be with me no matter where I am. 

Traffic Violations by “Reverend” Pedro Pietri. The Reverend’s poems jump off the page, into your soul, allowing you the shotgun seat in his skull. 

The World Changes at the Expense of Black People by Keith Roach. Roach’s voice should welcome us all at heaven’s gate and introduce us to the microphone at the celestial poetry slam in the afterlife. 

Smoking Lovely by Willie Perdomo. Your favorite poet has likely dog-eared every poem in this classic that lets us float on the clouds in the block cypher. 

Comprehending Forever by Rich “El Profe” Villar. El Profe bares his heart for us to imagine a landscape full of love within. 

Notes on the Return to the Island by Bonafide Rojas. Bone charts a map to invite all of us back home to a motherland unknown to her children.  

A Southside Girl’s Guide to Love & Sex by Mayda Del Valle. This ChiTown Rican explores the promises for rebirth after rising from the ashes of heartbreak. 

PTSD By Elisabet Velasquez. This Brooklyn-born Boricua’s poetry provides spells for healing while creating powerful new legacies.

Across the Mutual Landscape by Christopher Gilbert. One of my favorite poets whose eye for the line and ear for the cosmic rhythm are unmatched. 

Willie Perdomo

  • The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier 
  • Home by Toni Morrison 
  • Stories of Your Life by Ted Chiang
  • Hunger by Knut Hamsun
  • Friend of My Youth by Amit Chaudhuri
  • The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists­­ by Naomi Klein
  • Passing by Nella Larsen
  • Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry by John Murillo

­­Noel Quiñones
As I journey through my first year of my MFA at the University of Mississippi, I have been blessed with more reading time than New York City ever offered. The following literature has been instrumental in shaping my first poetry manuscript as well as providing a space for me to feel seen and held:

Maurice Riordan
I recommend these recent poetry collections:

I’m revisiting Juvenal’s lacerating satire with the help of Peter Green’s classic translations (still fresh after more than half a century). And I’ve spent a few intense, quarrelsome months with Rilke, alongside a somewhat more acquiescent time with Baudelaire.

I read too few novels but I was spellbound by Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend. In science, I’ve enjoyed centenarian James Lovelock’s Novacene for its youthful, speculative vision of the future (though not one he or I will inhabit!). For an unflinching view of the world we do live in, I’m turning to Tom Sleigh’s The Land Between Two Rivers, and I have just now located my ancient copy of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.

stephanie roberts
Daggers and astonishments:

  • Asylum, Quan Barry (astounding)
  • A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James (wow)
  • How Long ’Til Black Future Month?, N.K. Jemisin (please read)
  • Fur Not Light, Jeff Alessandrelli (an inspiration)
  • Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire, Helen Vendler
  • A Pretty Sight, David O’Meara (David!)
  • Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
  • heft, Doyali Islam
  • Interference, Sue Burke
  • Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty (been reading for two years, le shrug)

Straight, no chaser:

Virgil Suárez
Here’s my short but ongoing list:

  • Moroccan Holiday by Lauren Tivey
  • My Name Is Immigrant by Wang Ping
  • Slow Lightning by Eduardo C. Corral
  • Postcolonial Love Poems by Natalie Diaz
  • The Tradition by Jericho Brown
  • Sight Lines by Arthur Sze

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

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