The Poetry Foundation’s 2023 Staff Picks
In keeping with our annual tradition, Poetry Foundation staff share a book (or two) that brought them joy or comfort or pleasure this year.
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Holly Amos, Associate Editor
- American Inmate by Justin Rovillos Monson
Recently, I got to read an advance copy of Justin Rovillos Monson’s American Inmate (forthcoming early in 2024 from Haymarket Books). Right from the opening dedication, the book announces itself differently than any other collection I’ve read: “This isn’t for the shook ones.” It’s an incredible, smart, and bold collection, and it samples from and nods to a variety of sources, including Kendrick Lamar, Patrick Rosal, Nas, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, the Nickelodeon show Hey, Arnold!, and many more. The closing poem, a long sequence, is a triumph. I’ve been thinking about the first line of its final page since I read it: “THIS—WHAT WE’RE doing here: you, reading; me, writing—is a trial.” Damn.
Noa Fields, Public Programs Manager
- Aster of Ceremonies by JJJJJerome Ellis
Aster of Ceremonies by JJJJJerome Ellis is a marvel, an oratorio for black crip nature that makes an instrument of the author’s stutter. Reading this book and seeing excerpts performed live, I experienced the spaciousness between words as an invitation to get lost and revel in the freedom of crip time, to listen deeper and notice the porousness of speech and music. Soft contact: the art of stuttering isn’t too hard to aster; may we, through music and ceremony, learn to give notice and live with dysfluency as a source, as a gift, as a vessel.
Rebeca Jurado, Guest Experience Representative
- Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates
Gabrielle Bates’s Judas Goat is an exquisite read with tender yet terrifying imagery and lyricism. All of the poems in this collection wrestle with the themes of young womanhood, violence, betrayal, love, and relationships. Bates beautifully captures the bleak truths of life and scripture. One of my favorite poems in this poetry collection is “The Dog.” Bates will be a lasting voice in modern poetry.
Evalena Lakin, Library Assistant
- Something, Someday by Amanda Gorman, Illustrated by Christian Robinson
In this world, it is so easy to feel small. So small that we cannot even begin to fight for what we know is right. So small that we believe what is will always be, that one voice cannot possibly make a difference. But Amanda Gorman and Christian Robinson have given us something truly precious with their new book Something, Someday—hope. The text and accompanying illustrations are stunning in their simplicity, as they paint the story of a child saddened by the garbage that has taken over his community. He is told there is nothing he can do, “to sit and wait, / but you know people / have already waited / too long.” So he begins to clean up his neighborhood, finding friends to help him along the way. They start to see that “this problem is big, / but together, / we are bigger.” Together, seed by seed, sprout by sprout, they turn the mountains of trash into a beautiful garden. This book’s target audience is children, but readers of all ages can and should be reminded of its lesson. It takes patience and perseverance, but together, we can build something better. “Something that is not a dream, / but the day you live in.”
Shoshana Olidort, Web Editor
- The Book by Mary Ruefle
Mary Ruefle’s collection of prose poems, The Book, draws on visceral memories—of a child’s first haircut, of friendships come undone, of the clown at a husband’s 50th birthday party—in its examination of a life. This book is also filled with astute observations and so much wit. The poem “Nettles” begins: “If everyone were a storyteller, the infrastructure of the village would collapse.” In “The Bark,” the speaker stands with her dog at a lake, as the dog “bark[s] at his own echo, thinking there was another dog on the other side of the lake. Welcome to poetry, I said.”
Fred Sasaki, Creative Director and Exhibitions co-Curator
- Word Weapons by Cecelia Vicuña
I LOVE THIS BOOK! This impeccable printing is brimming with Cecilia Vicuña’s Palabrarmas, which translates to “word weapons”or “word arms.” They are, as Vicuña writes, “perhaps the only acceptable weapons.” The collection presents her neologistic poems (or words as actions), drawings, and other artworks alongside newly commissioned essays, historical texts, and documentation of the artist’s expansive activism and diverse art practice.
AND DIG THIS SETUP! The book was published during the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts’s year-long season of private meetings and public events about and around the work of Cecilia Vicuña called Season 7: Cecilia Vicuña is on our mind. Just wow.
Erin Watson, Product Manager
- Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco by K. Iver
- Freedom House by KB Brookins
Between my internet-addled attention span and the overabundance of options on the review copies shelf here in the PoFo offices, I tend to dip into and out of volumes of poetry, letting them linger on my Storygraph shelf with the “currently reading” status for months. But K. Iver’s Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco gripped me absolutely and fervently. I read the whole thing across a couple sittings, taking it in like the film of the title. The caesura that runs through their “Anti Elegy” like the Mississippi River shattered my heart; the vision of the speaker and their young lover’s ghost dancing in separate rooms across landlines, radio signals and time to the Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence" gave me goosebumps. Poetry lives in mixtapes and journals and scraps, and poetry lives in vibrant trans voices that bear witness and cry out against attempts to erase them again and again.
KB Brookins’s Freedom House also struck me as an essential document this year. Hearkening to Audre Lorde’s well-known talk “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” with its title, shouting out the rapper who released one of my favorite albums of the year in its epigraph (go, Noname, go), Brookins makes new tools for their readers to build the freedom house of our collective future. Their poems dream toward gender euphoria, climate stability, and true freedom for Black bodies in solidarity with oppressed people everywhere.