The Poetry Foundation’s 2022 Staff Picks
In keeping with our annual tradition, Poetry Foundation staff share a book (or two, or more) that brought them joy, or comfort, or pleasure this year.
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Janet Cheung, Web Producer
I would like to share two books that convey opposite emotions to me: Niina Pollari’s Path of Totality and Xi Chuan’s Bloom. One made me weep intermittently, the other cracked me up. One can’t avoid the topic of death, the other sees people everywhere. One works through the aftershock of losing a child, the other preserves a clear voice amid confusion. One holds tight to memory, the other breaks loose from history. One has a centripetal force, the other centrifugal. One is candid about bodily suffering, the other is focused on mental health and the ills of self-deception. One admires crows’ ability to face death, the other considers birds equal witnesses though they fail to empathize with man. One tries to keep up with the fast, mechanical movements in New York City and tolerates its overwhelming scent of urine, the other laments the diminishing number of cigarette smokers in Manhattan and reflects on an unchanging Beijing. One is powerful, the other is powerful too.
Evalena Friedman, Library Assistant
Ocean Vuong and Franny Choi both delivered absolute knockouts this year with their most recent collections, Time Is a Mother and The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, respectively. Both poets grapple with grief, and how to survive its seemingly insurmountable force. There is so much to grieve in our world, including the loss of the world itself—a loss that strikes again and again, as Choi reminds us: “I was born from an apocalypse / and have come to tell you what I know—which is that the apocalypse began / when Columbus praised God and lowered his anchor.” How do we honor our grief and allow ourselves to feel these present and historic losses, but still find ways not just to survive, but to find joy again? How can we find the beauty within the broken? Vuong writes, “I thought / the fall would / kill me / but it only / made me real.” The world has been ending for centuries, and yet here we are. Still breathing. Still making poetry. Still real.
P.S. I would be remiss if I did not also mention my favorite book for young readers this year, Book of Questions: Selections by Pablo Neruda, translated by Sara Lissa Paulson, and illustrated by Paloma Valdivia. You can read my full recommendation for this gorgeous work of visual poetry here!
Noa Fields, Events and Accessibility Coordinator
Picking “favorites” gives me anxiety, especially in such a stellar year of poetry publishing. Shout out to S. Yarberry, John Keene, Yanyi, Jos Charles, Simone White, imogen xtian smith, Wo Chan, and Maya Marshall for books that held me, undid me. If you, like me, are drawn to peripherality and uncontainability, then I must also recommend Renee Gladman’s manifesto-like Plans for Sentences: these sentences will leave you gasping in wonder, dreaming, vibrating in the wake of their “blurred cartography.” A rigorous architecture of anaphoric sentences stretching and realizing their own unruly sentience, further enlivened by accompanying drawings that figure as asemic portals.
Stefania Gomez, Education and Youth Services Assistant
There were many life-changing books this year, including Paul Tran’s All the Flowers Kneeling, Solmaz Sharif’s Customs and Caylin Capra-Thomas’s Iguana Iguana, but there was one book that I loved so much I felt it was written specifically for me. The first time I read S. Yarberry’s A Boy in the City, I devoured it in one sitting. It was thrilling to witness the world through Yarberry’s speaker, who embarks on a restless search for the shape of a self—a form to contain their mind and heart. They look to lovers, they look to words—yet these efforts prove fruitless. And yet, in the formlessness of existence, the speaker’s mind and heart are a beacon, a kind of stability. And through the body’s day-by-day, poem-by-poem erection, there is, too, a kind of freedom: “I am. I am. I am an invention.” Through these poems that feel improvisational and full of anxious momentum, Yarberry is able to arrive at fleeting moments of intimacy, connection, clarity, and insight. This on-going-ness, despite it all, the comfort despite discomfort, is what I will carry with me from A Boy in the City. As Yarberry puts it: “It’s not that I became / anything. I was, I was.”
Rebeca Jurado, Guest Experience Representative
The poetry book I kept coming back to this year was Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head: Poems by Warsan Shire. The visceral imagery and bold poetic language in these poems addressing themes of womanhood, familial relations, immigration, belonging, and trauma, will tear your heart apart. This is a thought-provoking collection that will make you question the meaning of survival. Each poem was riveting, each a different experience. Shire will make you explore your past and current life experiences through every line in this book. Warsan Shire is a brilliant poet and her poems are much needed in this world.
Katherine Litwin, Library Director and Exhibitions co-Curator
Pablo Neruda's Book of Questions: Selections (Enchanted Lion Books, 2022)
This bilingual edition of selections from Neruda’s Book of Questions arrives via Enchanted Lion Books, a publisher responsible for an extraordinary catalog of works for children. The volume contains incisive new translations by librarian Sara Lissa Paulson accompanied by startlingly beautiful, full-page illustrations by Paloma Valdivia. The resulting book enhances the mystery at the heart of Neruda’s work, a series of questions that invoke the reader’s imagination with enquiries like “If we use up all the yellow, / with what will we make bread?” A perfect introduction to Neruda’s work, and a book to inspire contemplation in readers of every age.
Maggie Queeney, Library Associate
Jenny Xie’s The Rupture Tense is a collection that dazzles into and through the tears and cracks, silences and lacunae, the bleeds and spills. From the series of prose poems, each titled “Red Puncta,” that, like the punctum in a photograph, offer isolated, piercing scenes to the reader; to a series of contrapuntal poems; and strands of fragments floating on the white space of the page, these poems ask again and again how can we look, can we see, anything or anyone inside the ocean of images, of histories, that flood the world. I find comfort in her reminder that even in the overwhelm “And you, all future tense, leak through.”
Fred Sasaki, Creative Director
Black Phoenix: Third World Perspective on Contemporary Art and Culture
For the first time ever, all three issues of the radical journal Black Phoenix (ed. by Rasheed Araeen and Mahmood Jamal, 1978–1979) are reproduced in this single, handsome volume published by Primary Information. The journal "issued a rallying cry for the formation of a liberatory arts and culture movement" that "positioned diasporic and colonial histories at the center of an evolving anti-racist and anti-imperialist consciousness in late 1970s Britain and beyond." Artwork, activism, and poetry harmonize in this outstanding collection. Essays include "Innocence & Neo-Colonialism: A Case of Ideological Domination in Children's Literature," "Some General Observations on the Problem of Cultural Colonialism," and "An Introduction to Radical Urdu Poetry" with contributions by Guy Brett, Ariel Dorfman, Eduardo Galeano, and many others.
Elizabeth O’Connell-Thompson, Media Manager
Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes by Nicky Beer
I didn't make it ten minutes into this collection before I was taking photos of poems to text to friends. This book has everything: Dolly Parton, feminism, duplicity, conversations about Art™, drag, etc. Poetry loses none of its power or ability to haunt by being fun.