From Poetry Magazine

Reading List: May 2020

BY Holly Amos

Originally Published: May 22, 2020
White text on a red background that reads "To build a labyrinth it takes/Some good intentions, some mistakes." It's attributed to A.E. Stallings.

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

Desirée Alvarez

  • Geometry of Shadows, Giorgio de Chirico, translated by Stefania Heim
  • Jo Sarzotti, Waiting for Achilles
  • Jennifer Hasegawa, La Chica’s Guide to Banzai Living
  • Laura Eve Engel, Things That Go
  • Dan Beachy-Quick, Variations on Dawn and Dusk
  • Anxiety of Words: Contemporary Poetry by Korean Women, Ch’oe Sŭng-ja, Kim Hyesoon, and Yi Yŏn-ju, translated by Don Mee Choi
  • Arnaldo Calveyra’s Letters So That Happiness, translated by Elizabeth Zuba
  • Elizabeth Zuba, May Double as a Whistle
  • David Koehn, Scatterplot
  • Ariana Reines, Mercury
  • Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, Slingshot
  • Metta Sáma, Swing at Your Own Risk
  • Katherine Barrett Swett, Voice Message
  • The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire, translated by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman
  • LM Rivera, Against Heidegger
  • Jason Koo, More Than Mere Light
  • Philip Glass, Words Without Music

Raymond Antrobus
Some memorable new poetry books I’ve been reading in quarantine:

Anticipated books:

Jennifer Barber
Recently read or reread:

  • Places and Names, Elliot Ackerman
  • Silence, Jane Brox
  • Zen Haiku, translated by Jonathan Clements
  • Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries, edited by Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer
  • Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, John Murillo
  • Falling Awake, Alice Oswald
  • Du côté de chez Swann, Marcel Proust
  • The Tale of the 1002nd Night, Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann
  • The Land of the Dead Is Open for Business, Jacob Strautmann
  • From the Notebooks of Korah’s Daughter, Linda Stern Zisquit

Stuart Barnes
Poetry:

  • Contemporary Asian Australian Poets, edited by Adam Aitken, Kim Cheng Boey, and Michelle Cahill
  • Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry, edited by Bonny Cassidy and Jessica L. Wilkinson
  • Fire Front: First Nations Poetry and Power Today, edited by Alison Whittaker
  • The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry, edited by Tracy Ryan and John Kinsella
  • Rabbit 24: LGBTQIA+ (journal)
  • Writing to the Wire, edited by Dan Disney and Kit Kelen
  • Cassandra Atherton, Exhumed
  • Lisa Brockwell, The Round Ring
  • Lachlan Brown, Lunar Inheritance
  • John Mukky Burke, Late Murrumbidgee Poems
  • Tricia Dearborn, Autobiochemistry
  • Benjamin Dodds, Airplane Baby Banana Blanket
  • Dave Drayton, P(oe)Ms
  • Quinn Eades, Rallying
  • Zenobia Frost, After the Demolition
  • Matt Hetherington, Kaleidoscopes  
  • Rose Hunter, Glass
  • Andy Jackson, Immune Systems
  • Anna Jacobson, Amnesia Findings
  • Rebecca Jessen, Gap
  • A. Frances Johnson, Rendition for Harp & Kalashnikov
  • Jo Langdon, Glass Life
  • Kate Lilley, Tilt
  • Ramon Loyola, The Measure of Skin
  • Nathanael O’Reilly, (Un)belonging
  • Felicity Plunkett, A Kinder Sea
  • Andy Quan, Bowling Pin Fire
  • Thom Sullivan, Carte Blanche
  • Prithvi Varatharajan, Entries
  • Catherine Vidler, Furious Triangle

Fiction:

Nonfiction:

  • Coming of Age: Growing Up Muslim in Australia, edited by Amra Pajalic and Demet Divaroren

Dean Browne

  • Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus (translated by Stephen Mitchell)
  • Ciaran Carson, Still Life
  • Stephen Sexton, If All the World and Love Were Young
  • Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets to My Past and Future Assassin
  • James Tate, The Eternal Ones of the Dream: Selected Poems 1990–2010
  • Marianne Moore, Complete Poems (the Penguin edition)
  • Mary Noonan, Stone Girl
  • Matthew Sweeney, Blue Shoes
  • Caroline Bird, The Air Year
  • Michael Hartnett, Selected and New Poems
  • Tom Moore, Brother Adam
  • David Toms, Northly
  • Richard Hawtree, The Night I Spoke Irish in Surrey

For refreshment I often go back to:

Prose:
In recent months I’ve enjoyed reading Lydia Davis’s Collected Stories and Essays One, Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Marc Chagall’s My Life, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Volume 4, Sodom and Gomorrah (translated by John Sturrock).

Kayleb Rae Candrilli
Full-length poetry collections:

  • While Standing in Line for Death by CAConrad
  • Ugly Music by Diannely Antigua
  • A Falling Knife Has No Handle by Emily O’Neill
  • More than Organs by Kay Ulanday Barrett
  • Autobiography of a Horse by Jenifer Sung Eun Park
  • Found Poems by Bern Porter

Poetry chapbooks: 

  • Alien Pink by Spencer Williams
  • Jump Ship by Kirwyn Sutherland
  • Blood Box by Zefyr Lisowski

Graphic novels: 

  • Lake Jehovah by Jillian Fleck
  • Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe

Poetry anthologies: 

  • Hick Poetics, edited by Shelly Taylor and Abraham Smith
  • Bodies Built for Game: The Prairie Schooner Anthology of Contemporary Sports Writing, edited by Natalie Diaz

Ricki Cummings
On base:

  • Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure by Eldritch Priest
  • Phonogram Vol. 1: Rue Britannia by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie

At bat:

  • The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory C. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams, Joseph Bizup, and William T. FitzGerald
  • The Holy Forest: Collected Poems by Robin Blaser

On deck:

  • The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem
  • The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, edited by Lawrence Sutin

Not a whole lot to say about all that, I think, besides that I don’t actually read that much poetry overall and that I have some kind of weird sci-fi/magic project brewing in the brainmeats. Some sort of Jack Spicer poetry-as-magic thing. Looking for connections and filaments between nodes in reality.

Safia Elhillo
I’m reading/have recently read and loved:

  • Less by Andrew Sean Greer
  • Upend by Claire Meuschke 
  • Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry by John Murillo 
  • Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
  • And an anthology of essays called What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About (edited by Michele Filgate), which in turn led me to the memoir Out of Egypt by André Aciman

Inua Ellams
A Warning to the House that Holds Me is the debut pamphlet from a young Somali-British poet, Amina Jama. Jama is a member of Octavia Poetry Collective and cohost of the Boxedin poetry series. Her pamphlet is a dazzling, confident, playful, and experimental exploration of Somali, Islam, British, and post-millennial cultures.

Minna Salami’s Sensuous Knowledge. In this progressive feminist book for everyone, Salami invokes poetry as a prized tool in the Black feminist toolkit. She draws from John Milton (who coined the word “sensuous”) Lauryn Hill, Eduard Manet, Audre Lorde, and many more in crafting this passionate and eloquent analysis of Euro-patriarchal knowledge and why it needs to change.

Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King. This startling second novel by the Ethiopian writer tells the story of women who fought in Ethiopia’s war against Italian colonization. It is written with deep feeling, with deep sensuous knowledge, such care, that the prose is precise and poetic, yet opulent, swirling, and all-consuming. I haven’t read anything like it before.

Kelle Groom

Perry Janes
I’m currently sinking into two gorgeous collections: Fantasia for the Man in Blue by Tommye Blount and Space Struck by Paige Lewis.

Uncollected still, but scattered across the digital ether, I’m loving the “Letter” poems by Matthew Olzmann and “Cistern” poems by Gabrielle Calvocoressi. 

In the chaos of this pandemic, I’ve also found myself returning to my always-guiding lights, some of which include:

Jennifer Jean
I’m grateful to be alive, and I’m reading more than ever. I’m reading Into English edited by Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer, which compares translations of the same poem. It’s a swim through fascinating choices. My poetry stack includes: Battle Dress by Karen Skolfield, The Boy in the Labyrinth by Oliver de la Paz, and Gravity Assist by Martha Silano. These poems (as my brother would say) shoot the pier. My prose stack includes: The Library Book by Susan Orlean, Air Traffic by Gregory Pardlo, A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, Knock Wood by Jennifer Militello, The Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience and Change Agent edited by Quraysh Ali Lansana and Georgia Popoff, and Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown. Their weight is grounding and I like the ground. I’m missing fiction, though. I’m missing that campfire in the dark.

Jennifer L. Knox

  • Victoria Chang, Obit
  • Natalie Diaz, editor, Bodies Built for Game
  • Bernd Heinrich, The Homing Instinct: Meaning and Mystery in Animal Migration
  • Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road
  • Lisa Olstein, Late Empire and Pain Studies
  • Carl Phillips, Pale Colors in a Tall Field
  • Renée Roehl and Kelly Chadwick, editors, Decomposition: An Anthology of Fungi-Inspired Poems
  • Jason Schneiderman, Hold Me Tight
  • Natalie Shapero, Hard Child

Kyle Carrero Lopez
A few things I’ve been reading and rereading lately...

Poetry:

  • Wanda Coleman, Bathwater Wine
  • Adrian Matejka, Mixology
  • Nancy Morejón, Homing Instincts / Querencias, translated by Pamela Carmell
  • Chris Hosea, Put Your Hands In
  • Kwame Opoku-Duku, The Unbnd Verses

Fiction:

  • Simona Vinci, In Every Sense Like Love
  • Raven Leilani, Luster
  • Ishmael Reed, Conjugating Hindi
  • Constance DeJong, Modern Love

Nonfiction:

  • Doreen Massey, For Space
  • Adrian Piper, Escape to Berlin: A Travel Memoir
  • Suzanne Césaire, The Great Camouflage
  • Jace Clayton, Uproot
  • Grace Jones, I’ll Never Write My Memoirs

Plus two poems:

Gerard Malanga
By nature, I am a bibliophile. My criteria for reading books, chosen from my private library numbering 5,000, or any new addition that happens to come my way, are curiosity and enjoyment. Most recently:

  • The End of the Game, text and photographs by Peter Hill Beard
  • Proof: Photography in the Era of the Contact Sheet from the Collection of Mark Schwartz + Bettina Katz by Peter Galassi
  • Four Screenplays by Ingmar Bergman
  • History, poems by Robert Lowell, the Faber & Faber edition
  • Maurice Utrillo by Alfred Werner
  • Ben Shahn: Paintings by James Thrall Soby
  • Dining with Proust by Jean-Bernard Naudin, Anne Borrel, and Alain Senderens
  • Jumbo: Marvel, Myth, and Mascot by Andrew McClellan
  • The Irish Wolfhound by John Gordon
  • I Promise to Be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud, volume II, translated by Wyatt Mason
  • The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary
  • “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell, a reread

Travis Nichols
These lists are like those creative nonfiction exercises where writers include three truths and a lie. So, in that spirit, I’m lying here in different ways throughout.

Every few days, a pink envelope arrives from the Dream Delivery Service. Each envelope contains dreams written out for my family. My son reads them aloud, and my twin girls look at each other in astonishment—“Did you really dream that?” 

This year, I thought I would go to monthly climate rallies, so I bought a fancy new backpack. I have no real use for the backpack now here at home, but I do now get the Patagonia catalog, and I read it like it’s the New Yorker. 

Audre Lorde’s Dream of Europe has helped me reimagine what’s possible. When normal is a crisis, what should we build toward and with what intentions? How do we stop the terrible, amplified abuses in this moment and, at the same time, make a better future? 

After long days of Zoom, my son and I read Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä comics. They’re a welcome visual reset from the flat banality of my screen, and ecological empathy between species is good.

Jason Novak
I love ancient travelogues. The best of them are an earnest mixture of witness and hearsay, and remind me of the kind of wonder I had about the world beyond my own street when I was very little.

Three that I keep coming back to are:

  • Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, an encyclopedia of general knowledge from first-century Rome
  • The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, a similar compendium from fourteenth-century Egypt by Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri 
  • Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness, an anthology of accounts from Arab travelers in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe that ranges from the tenth to fourteenth centuries

All of these books were put out by Penguin. They can be read at random. The entries are usually brief, and always fascinating. Great raw material for firing up your imagination!

Daniel Poppick
In this the month of our pandemic I’ve been fortifying my spirits with two gorgeous new collections of longer poems that case the outer limits of futurity and love in the time of capital—The Shore by Chris Nealon and Little Hill by Alli Warren. And I’ve also been totally taken with a couple of deeply rewarding, rich, and strange books from decades past, just unearthed/reissued thanks to the work of devoted editors—So I Looked Down to Camelot by Rosamund Stanhope (with an excellent afterward by Graham Foust) and The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words by Madeline Gins (introduced with characteristic brilliance by Lucy Ives). 

Vidyan Ravinthiran
The poems of Nasser Hussain’s SKY WRI TEI NGS are made of three-letter airport codes, with, on the facing page, Matthew Stephenson’s images showing, on a world map, the imaginary flights constructing each poem. It’s a funny book (“IZT BRD? // PLN? // KNO! // SPR MAN!”), with adroit reworkings of classics (“PET ALS ONA WET  BLA ACK BOW”)—written in a spirit of adventure, openness to the new, and with clarifying smacks of critique: “USA USA USA USA USA USA USA,” reads “ISL AMO PHO BIA,” and also: “MAK EAM ERI CAG REA TAG AIN.” Hussain suggests the power-encodings of global culture while also, through his own inventiveness, arguing genuine freedoms. I really hope the book’s more widely read. Consistently ingenious, there are also moments in it of real beauty:

THE SKY WAS THE SKY

THE SKY WAS HER
SHE WAS THE SKY

THE SKY WAS SLY
THE SKY WAS INK

THE SKY WAS SOH IGH

THE SKY WAS
THE SKY ALL DAY

Srikanth Reddy
Like many of us who’ve long dreamt of sheltering in place with a stack of good books, I now find myself incapable of reading with any sort of deliberate attention amid our present crisis. Nonetheless I’ve begun to page through the ancient Indian epic, the Mahabharata (in John D. Smith’s abridged English translation), with an eye to adapting that work for a contemporary Anglophone audience someday. Ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey put together, the Mahabharata is a world unto itself. “Whatever is here is found elsewhere,” it is said of this cosmological poem, “But whatever is not here is nowhere else.” Faced with the prospect of so many deaths—in our individual communities and across the planet—it may help to think of the world to come, once all this has passed, as a kind of rebirth.

Jayme Ringleb
Books recently read or reread, poetry and not:

  • Chad Abushanab, The Last Visit
  • Rick Barot, The Galleons
  • Sophie Calle, Suite Vénitienne
  • Dorothy Chan, Revenge of the Asian Woman
  • Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying
  • Geri Doran, Epistle, Osprey
  • Nicole Dennis-Benn, Patsy
  • Carmen Giménez Smith, Be Recorder
  • Erin Hoover, Barnburner
  • Edgar Kunz, Tap Out
  • Min Jin Lee, Pachinko
  • Paige Lewis, Space Struck
  • Marilyn Nelson, How I Discovered Poetry
  • Claudia Rankine, The White Card
  • Natalie Shapero, Hard Child
  • Danez Smith, Homie

Karen Skolfield
Poetry:

  • The War Makes Everyone Lonely by Graham Barnhart
  • Little-Known Operas by Patrick Donnelly
  • Hail and Farewell by Abby E. Murray
  • The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry, edited by Ruth Awad and Rachel Mennies

Fiction:

  • Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
  • The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
  • Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

If post-apocalyptic/pandemic literature is comforting, because it implies “after”:

  • Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich
  • The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin
  • The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman
  • Kyrie by Ellen Bryant Voigt

D. M. Spratley
Recent and current reads:

  • God Had a Body, Jennie Malboeuf
  • The Derelict Daughter, Brittney Scott
  • Bodies Built for Game, edited by Natalie Diaz
  • The Houseguest, Amparo Dávila (translated by Matthew Gleeson and Audrey Harris)
  • Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith
  • Girl Town, Carolyn Nowak
  • How We Fight for Our Lives, Saeed Jones
  • Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori)
  • How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell
  • The Tradition, Jericho Brown
  • Delicate Edible Birds, Lauren Groff
  • Funny, You Don’t Look Autistic, Michael McCreary
  • When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, Chen Chen

A.E. Stallings
The prize for most aptly-titled poetry collection this year surely goes to Peter Junker’s Things Will Get Worse, a group of sturdy little poems in a form he’s dubbed a “hekaton.” Another timely title is Christian Wiman’s Survival Is a Style: enviably good, the book sizzles with energy. Ernest Hilbert’s Last One Out (also resonant) is full of a tender masculinity, fatherhood, unfathering.

I am rereading poets recently plucked by posterity: Roddy Lumsden, Lisel Mueller, and now, alas, Eavan Boland.

I’m intrigued with a reissued debut: Rosamund Stanhope’s 1962 So I Looked Down to Camelot. She’s remembered now, if at all, for her recherché vocabulary. What might have seemed ornamental then, however, now seems gorgeous, organic, and architectural, not in the sense of brick or stone, but open ironwork—which could be a gazebo, or an Eiffel Tower: as she says of a spider’s web, sustained by a “lace intelligence.”

TC Tolbert
Poetry:

Fiction:

  • Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir, Kai Cheng Thom

Nonfiction:

  • Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America, R. Eric Thomas
  • All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals, John Conway, C.M. Koseman, and Darren Naish
  • This Atom Bomb in Me, Lindsey A. Freeman

Miscellaneous:

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

Read Full Biography