Reading List: October 2018

The Reading List is a feature of Poetry’s Editors’ Blog. This month contributors to the October 2018 issue share some recommendations.

Molly Brodak
A friend of mine sent me The Mushroom at the End of the World: On The Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and I’ve found it to be absolutely entrancing: sharp, vivid, interwoven with science and art, both grand and intimate in scale.

I’m constantly picking up Andrew Weatherhead’s Todd, which, with its combination of sparse language and collaged images, feels genuinely meditative in a way that only print media can. “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night so I can be alone,” it says, and I stare into its pages for the same reason.

In the process of considering the expression and “handling” of emotion in men for a new project, I again picked up Sianne Ngai’s genius Ugly Feelings and have found such delight in her careful dissection of difficult emotions, not the least of which is her original term for a vague but pervasive feeling of our moment: stuplimity.

Everything in Zbigniew Herbert’s The Collected Poems: 1956-1998 feels vibrantly timely and crucial to me right now, especially a poem like “From the Top of the Stairs,” written in Warsaw in 1956 under an oppressive regime, which at that time must have felt like it would last forever. Despite these conditions, the poem is startlingly tender, and takes the kind of long view that feels like such a balm right now against the daily panicked flood of news I see on my screens:

We don’t want the sight
of rolling heads
we know how quickly the heads grow back
and at the top there’s always
one man left or three of them
and at the foot a heap of brooms and shovels.

Elena Karina Byrne
ATTENTION, Joshua Cohen
EMBANKMENT, Rachel Whiteread
Parole, Angie Estes
Be With, Forrest Gander
Don’t Call Us Dead, Danez Smith
Please Bury Me in This, Allison Benis White
As iZ, Tyrone Williams
Sycamore, Kathy Fagan
Ghost Of, Diana Khoi Nguyen
Incendiary Art, Patricia Smith
The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays, Wendell Berry

It’s not a coincidence that all of these books, whether in body, spirit, culture, history, nature, or form, share something primal, something as equally primal and sophisticated as grief. Let’s begin “with sex. To begin with loss. To begin with death. To begin with the end” (Cohen) before we lose our minds in the malevolent dummy box of today’s sorry politics. “The root” goes history-back to our “desire to be superior ... rise above sweat and bother of taking care of anything—of ourselves, of each other, or our country” (Berry).

Grief, like poetry, actively resides in the body, “a bouquet of knives where the head should be” (White), and by the saturation-time it sinks in, when “your own misery / preens you against the misery / of others” (Gander), something shines, “a body boiled down to desire,” until “it’s not a death sentence anymore” (Smith). Yet, we can’t walk away from personal grief, or the grief caused by racism, sexism, and greed. Their consecution-consequences force the past into the future.

Let’s find memory’s incalculable art “of what is lost is more than simply / recollection: it is the means by which / the dead are made present” (Estes), proof that “here is the untranslation of the world” (Gander), here, “one / story / chewed off like a limb.” This one story, “it frames the infinite” (Fagan) until we find “[y]ou too will suffer this fate ... bluster exposed” (Williams), and a “shifting wildfire-tinted weave, /... how I grieve / in gospel you can’t clutch—a fusible / display” (Smith) of grief we can and must take on collectively, “each one disappearing in the shadow of another” (Nguyen) until it’s an “unforeseeable thing ... the traces left by what it once contained” (Whiteread), and “every person is the last person you were” (Cohen).

Sarah Gridley
Under the Quarry Woods by Jeremy Hooker. Hooker is a British poet whose work and work practices have been hugely important to me. Few contemporary poets that I know of offer such a rich coordination of journal work, scholarly essays, and poems. This book of prose poems quarried from journals written at his home in Wales is a good entry into his rare sensibility, honed by years of close observation. 

At the door, a sleepy bumblebee flies up and down, heavily, as if inspecting the paintwork or waiting to be let in.

Colour is an energy: not like paint on surfaces, but blood or sap or fire.

What has made me a poet is awareness of how much cannot be spoken or described, or known. Silence comes before our first cry, and returns after our last breath. Silence haunts the words I speak or write. But as a poet I need words—words shadowed by silence.

A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton. I keep returning to this book. It is modestly elemental. It is plainspoken yet spiritually baroque. “He once had a black cat named Anonymous,” write Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal in their foreword, and, “Hamilton’s is an extremely gentle language cultured in loneliness, the product of encountering a world while staying away from it.” I love writing that transmits love and social clarity from a place of isolation.  

Being Still: Reflections on an Ancient Mystical Tradition by Jean-Yves Leloup. One morning I was reading this book when I came across these two sentences: “God seeks amongst people a place of rest. A peaceful person is a dwelling place of God.” The first so took me aback it made me cough up the tea I was drinking. Why would God seek a place of rest amongst people? The very syntax of this statement illustrates our disruptive energy. But what an interesting premise. I am not a monotheist, but what would it mean to practice God-hospitality (or gods-hospitality)? Leloup explains, “Humanity has received a mission other than doing, producing, accumulating goods, information and power.”

Kara Jackson
I’m sure I’m speaking for a party of many when I say I am still recovering from the brilliance that is José Olivarez’s Citizen Illegal. In a nation that’s teetering, this book finds a ground stable enough to do some necessary shouting. The book reads like a home. I feel like Olivarez is offering his privacy to share. Citizen Illegal has a heart that’s full, but still cracks some good jokes; I have cried reading this book as many times as I have laughed.

I’m an avid rereader, and I took some time this month to reread Sharon Olds’s Stag’s Leap, a book I often return to in a state of urgency. I think Olivarez and Olds both do an excellent job of paying attention to things not just in front of them, but beneath them. Where a poet might look up to the sky, perhaps, these poets go searching for lint to make a poem. With a subject like divorce, Olds takes heartbreak—an old song in the mouths of many—and rearranges it. I love the tension of her images. Olds takes love and gives it a new, shiny wig.

Another book that has haunted me with its brilliance is Patricia Frazier’s Graphite. It’s a chapbook of poems, but it deserves the attention of a book twice its size. Frazier has stories, and she wastes no time when telling them. Graphite is a documentation of the South Side of Chicago. Reading it, I feel like I’m sitting in the poet’s ear, a witness to all the tales running through it. These poems have hips to shake, men to finesse, and wombs to fill. These poems tell the story of a love that might bite.

Deborah Landau
I’ve just finished reading stellar new poetry collections by Catherine Barnett (Human Hours) and Tracy K. Smith (Wade in the Water) in preparation for their recent readings at NYU, and have just begun reading Smith’s brand new anthology, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, which features urgent work by Danez Smith, Jericho Brown, Marie Howe, Natalie Diaz, Ada Limón, Solmaz Sharif, Nicole Sealey, Kevin Young, Robin Coste Lewis, Terrance Hayes, Cathy Park Hong, Major Jackson, Dean Young, and many others.

New (for me) discoveries: Emily Berry’s extraordinary, elegiac Stranger, Baby, and Nuar Alsadir’s wild and innovative Fourth Person Singular. 

On my tablet these days I’m glad to have the final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, and am happy to be able to carry its 1,160 pages around on the subway so weightlessly. 

To round it off, I’m finishing two books heavy on death: Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, and a nonfiction book by writer, Buddhist, and palliative care nurse Sallie Tisdale, Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them)—both profoundly unsettling.

Sylvia Legris
In an attempt to recover an emotional connection to a long poem of mine (about grief) that’s been marooned for many years, I recently picked up a copy of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Though I’d read raves about this book and was curious about it when it came out in 2005, at the time I had severe OCD, and the title of Didion’s book hit superstitiously close to home. Superstition beat out curiosity and I avoided the book until now. I don’t know that I have anything to say about The Year of Magical Thinking that hasn’t already been said in countless well-earned glowing reviews—it’s remarkable and harrowing and a testament to emotional tenacity and creative resilience, and to how much pain one can endure and still keep going. This was my first taste of Didion’s writing, and now I’m working my way through her essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Reading these essays, first published as a collection in 1968, feels like pulling Polaroids or fragments of period documentary film from a time capsule of (in air quotes) “America of the 1960s.” Didion’s prose, of course, is always pristine, beautiful, and precise.

Beauty and precision mark the language of two poetry collections I’ve been dipping in and out of: Forrest Gander’s Be With and Tom Pickard’s Fiends Fell. These two books are so different from each other, but what connects them in my mind (other than that I’m reading them concurrently) is that they both awe me into wordlessness. There is nothing I can say that will do either of these works justice. I am only left with questions. How does a poet (Gander) write into and through grief and loss to a place of heartbreaking beauty twinned with an enviable intellectual inquiry? How does a poet (Pickard) polish words as if they are stones, pare language to seeming simplicity, and build a page so that these same words create electricity?

Gregory Maguire
The recent books I have read or reread include:

Père Goriot, Honoré de Balzac. (Featuring the first-ever overtly gay character in fiction, I’m told. I suppose Patroclus and Achilles are mythic and not fictional; and Shakespeare is a poet and not a novelist.) 

One Crazy Summer, a middle-grade novel by Rita Williams-Garcia. I enjoyed this in a terrific audiobook performance. Three kids visit the mother who abandoned them and spend time on the edges of the Black Panthers during a Civil Rights-era summer of protest in Oakland, California. The reader is nonpareil at kids’ voices.

A Great Unrecorded History, Wendy Moffatt’s 2010 biography of E.M. Forster, my hero, which posits him as a quiet mid-century agitator for gay rights in a way that was less political than social—believing as he did in the ambition of human rights, and nourishing young artists to do work when the time was right.

I am always excited about the next few things on my pile, which thrill because they are promising and beautiful to look at:

Adam Thorpe’s Notes from the Cévennes: Half a Lifetime in Provincial France. The first two pages made me snatch up this book and rush to the cashier in Heffers, Cambridge, UK. The prose is funny and precise, and as we have a home not far from that part of the Cévennes, I can tell Thorpe knows what he’s talking about.

De Profundis—Oscar Wilde, of course—in a lovely old copy printed in 1906, with pages that feel like sheets of defrosted filo dough. I mean that in a pleasing way—soft to the touch. (You see how I’m running a certain theme of my reading through Forster and Balzac, though I didn’t recognize it till writing these notes.)

Twelve Nights by Andrew Zurcher, a fantasy adventure novel that visually looks inspired by Philip Pullman. But hey, I’m all for inspiration—any form it takes, any vision it confers.

Khadijah Queen
In screenshots, drawings, memes, tweets, poems, epistles, links, ads, emails, and Facebook posts, Jennif(f)er Tamayo’s YOU DA ONE gives us an electric collage of images and texts full of self-trust, integrity, and love for so-called marginalized populations. Her book offers a model for transgressive power of language. YOU DA ONE advocates for rape victims in the literary community whose methods of disclosure have been questioned—a professional risk Tamayo was willing to take, given the series of refusals in white text on black pages: “No to not making poetry enemies, there are enemies here.” Earlier in the book, a screenshot tweet from 2014: “I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN that 3 women poets were drugged at a Copula reading last spring. HAVE YOU?” That remembrance seems to have a real-life relational cost, as right after that, “I’m lonely” repeats over a page and a half. Despite that, or perhaps to counteract, toward the end of the book is a clear invitation:

Consider doing the right thing. Consider saying something. [...] Consider burning bridges. Consider the possibility that it doesn’t have to be this way forever.

In Houdini: A Musical, a mixed-genre play performed only once, in 1973 and starring Christopher Walken in the title role, we find Muriel Rukeyser at the height of her imaginative powers, building on her views about fear’s dangers and linking social concerns to her fascination with possibility, science, and imagination. Houdini demystifies his magic physically and intellectually, while retaining the wonder of the spectacle: “I have to control my fear, and every muscle in my body.”

On my soon-to-be read shelf: M Archive by Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Kate Colby’s The Arrangements. I’m also loving Shayla Lawson’s I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean, Alicia Mountain’s High Ground Coward, and Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk.

Vidyan Ravinthiran
Here are some South Asian poets (dead Brown people, from a vanishing, never-confirmed canon) I’ll insist you read: Eunice de Souza, A.K. Ramanujan, Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar, and—going back a bit—the prodigy Toru Dutt. It feels, at times (I may be wrong) that there’s no other option—no forum in which to praise these poets, and share their work with you, either in journalism or academia. (Verse gets short shrift in postcolonial studies, though Rajeev S. Patke’s Postcolonial Poetry in English is one exception.)

The other day, I noticed this essay by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (read him too, or I’ll come round and clout you with a dosa) on the correspondence between William Carlos Williams and an Indian poet I’ve never heard of, Srinivas Rayaprol: “I was not free, not white, not twenty-one when I landed one very cold January morning at Idlewild.” It would be fine, I thought, to put the word out; so I wrote to a large, well-known literary magazine. Of course editors must reject pitches, but they don’t usually confuse my Brown face, or name, with another’s: “Dear Aravind,” comes the reply (!!!), “... alas we are too overloaded at the moment to make this commission.”

Would that be the Man Booker-winner Aravind Adiga? I should be flattered. And I’ve learned to distrust (I’m not on Twitter) the reflex, akin to self-pity, which has one feel, in the moment, aggrieved by that which might not be discriminatory—only lazy. But the experience has confirmed the challenges of writing on South Asian verse; and of living within a minority which may feel passed over, in terms of its representation in both poetry culture and popular culture (where you’ll find only amusing Apu figures and samey narratives about forced marriages—Crazy Rich Asians, it’s been pointed out, isn’t about Brown people—and US comedians making jokes they’d be petrified, rightly so, of making about African Americans.) There are novelists, of course: Akhil Sharma’s Family Life is terse, disconcerting, and, as one of the blurbs explains, annihilates the myth of the Indian as an ideal immigrant whose Americanization is entirely a tale of progress and privilege.

So: read these poets mentioned above—they can be both funny and deep. Here’s a short poem by de Souza, “Omen”:

Today
that utterly respectable
big brown clock
in the college staff room
decided to move its hands
backwards.
No one is surprised.

Mark Waldron
Recently I decided to revisit a few of the books I first encountered and loved as a teenager. It’s what I read (as well as listened to) between the ages of twelve and twenty that became part of me. Apparently cognitive neuroscientists refer to an effect they call the “reminiscence bump,” which they reckon encompasses the period from sixteen to twenty-five, but for me I think it was earlier. By the time I was twenty I was just too solidified to let anything that far in. Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves were two books I read in that period of my life. I may not have understood them entirely, but I’m grateful to have read them then. Rereading them I was amazed to find how integral they still are to the way I look at the world.

At this moment I’m reading Chelsey Minnis’s new collection, Baby, I Don’t Care. It’s a book that plays with the language and tropes of Turner Classic Movies’ Hollywood. The poems, with all of their comical absurdity, have the same quality of witty, louche abandon as some of the dialogue in the best of those movies.

Don’t keep saying “down the hatch” all night long.
Something matters, but what is it?
A window with a very long fall underneath?
One time someone refused to give me a pink topaz and I fainted.
Let me be the first to pour your tears down the drain.
—From “VIPs”

Minnis poems often have an attitude of rebellious mischief. It’s as though the speakers in these poems really don’t care. Except that they do, because, as it says in those lines, something matters even if we’re out of touch with what it is.

Finally, I’m reading another poet I saw perform in London a few weeks ago. Heather Christle’s, The Trees The Trees was published in 2011. Here’s a section from the first poem, “That Air of Ruthlessness in Spring”:  

                             I am hanging on tight

to a swing       when I go up enough I jump   then I
am not touching anything       then the world thinks
I’ve disappeared  

I love the way this and many of the poems in the book have the effect of enacting what they describe. Which is part of what the Minnis poems, by both parodying but also inhabiting and repurposing the Hollywood-movie voice, do. Perhaps it’s what all good poems do.

Roy White
My life as a reader of books is made possible largely by the Library of Congress’ digital audio service for disabled people. Here are three favorites that I have read or reread in the last couple of months:

The stories in Sofia Samatar’s aptly-named Tender often orbit around some loss—lost family, lost faith in family in “Selkie Stories Are for Losers,” or a lost homeland (which is, of course, also a loss of family) in “Meet Me in Iram.”

Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling asks how much of our freedom we would surrender in return for gratification, and appears to answer, “all of it.” Strangely, disturbingly, the novel makes this feel like a good thing.

Whenever I reread Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners, I am gobsmacked by her ruthlessly daring imagination: a convenience store manager, dressed in pajamas printed with tiny Hindenburgs, wonders why the zombies from the Ausable Chasm never buy anything; a suburban woman desperately repaints her haunted walls in increasingly sinister colors, culminating in ghost crab, with trim done in ratfink; and so on.

I often read poetry online with the help of a screen reader. Here are three poems that have recently captivated me:

“Dear Lacuna, Dear Lard” by Paisley Rekdal;
“The Immigrant Drafts a Cover Letter” by Bernard Ferguson;
“Our Father” by Jill McDonough.