From Poetry Magazine

Reading List: June 2019

BY Holly Amos

Originally Published: June 11, 2019
Text reading, "Migrating has no Beginning. --Javier Zamora"

The Reading List is a feature of Poetry’s Editors’ Blog. This month, contributors to the June 2019 issue share some recommendations.

Mary Biddinger
Books currently occupying my nightstand and backpack and desk and bed:

  • A Brief History of Fruit, poems by Kimberly Quiogue Andrews (forthcoming)
  • The Tradition, poems by Jericho Brown
  • Psychopomps, nonfiction by Alex DiFrancesco
  • Gloss, poems by Rebecca Hazelton
  • Burn Fortune, a “novel-in-fragments” by Brandi Homan
  • The Miracles, poems by Amy Lemmon
  • Lima :: Limón, poems by Natalie Scenters-Zapico

Marianne Boruch
Prose poems mystify me. On a most basic level they trigger my suspicions: how is this really poetry? So when poets make this form work, it’s a bit like Marie Curie dropping her glowing bar of radium into a darkened drawer—minus just enough of the poison.

Two such poets are Australians Jen Webb (Moving Targets) and Paul Hetherington (Burnt Umber). Webb’s collection is made of prose poems that beautifully follow a loose personal narrative of day after day unto years—love, failure, realization, mystery, the backward glance, the future uncertain—into high lyric against a rich piecemeal of our larger human history. Hetherington’s book includes three gorgeous sections of prose poems that are wry, quiet, surprising, some containing smaller, stranger sections like secrets. What I love in both recent books is the unique way these writers balance the sturdy, reasonable paragraph against the delicate interiority and suspension of poetry. 

Kayleb Rae Candrilli
Currently reading:

  • Franny Choi, Soft Science 
  • Jos Charles, feeld
  • T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls 
  • Hanif Abdurraqib, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest 
  • Jay Busbee, Earnhardt Nation: The Full-Throttle Saga of NASCAR’s First Family

Always rereading: 

  • Nabila Lovelace, Sons of Achilles 
  • C. Russell Price, Tonight, We Fuck the Trailer Park Out of Each Other 
  • T Fleischmann, Syzygy, Beauty: An Essay 
  • Marguerite Duras, The Lover

Cortney Lamar Charleston
There are quite a few titles that I’ve very recently finished, am currently working through, or have queued up in my to-read list. A few of these aren’t officially released yet, but all hail the Advance Reader Copy!

Available now:

Forthcoming:

  • Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers by Jake Skeets
  • A Sand Book by Ariana Reines

Chard deNiord
I’m intrigued with the radical experimentation that’s going on with the line in a lot of recent poetry, specifically its influence on craft in relation to the body itself as a transformative vehicle for inspiring transcendent expression in hybrid forms that cut across gender and racial boundaries. I’m preparing to write an essay titled “Two Kinds of Lines” on this topic and reading the following poets in preparation for this project:

  • The Next American Essay, edited by John D’Agata, plus his Halls of Fame
  • Matthea Harvey, If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?
  • Eula Biss, The Balloonists and Notes from No Man’s Land
  • Jessica Hendry Nelson, If Only You People Could Follow Directions
  • Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams 
  • Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation  
  • Bending Genre, edited by Margot Singer and Nicole Walker
  • David Shields, Life is Short—Art is Shorter
  • CAConrad, While Standing in Line for Death
  • Lily Hoang, A Bestiary  
  • Bruce Smith, Spill
  • D. Nurkse, Love in the Last Days
  • Jericho Brown, The Tradition
  • Forrest Gander, Be With
  • Natasha Trethewey, Monument

Michael Farrell
These are the best books I’ve finished reading this year so far, sans Australian poetry, which I’ve written about elsewhere.

Poetry:

  • Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Selected Poems 
  • Joy Harjo, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975–2001
  • Gerrit Henry, The Mirrored Clubs of Hell
  • Emmanuel Hocquard, The Invention of Glass
  • Pär Lagerkvist (translated by W.H. Auden and Leif Sjöberg), Evening Land
  • Victor Segalen (translated by Andrew Harvey and Ian Watson), Stèles

Fiction:

  • Jean-Louis Baghio’o, The Blue Flame-Tree
  • Lars Gustafsson, The Tennis Players
  • Denys Johnson-Davies (translator), Arabic Short Stories
  • Alexander Kluge, Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome
  • Tom Lee, Coach Fitz
  • Gerald Murnane, A Million Windows
  • Rudolf Raspe, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
  • Arthur Schnitzler (translated by Horace Samuel), The Road to the Open
  • Peter Stamm (translated by Michael Hofmann), Unformed Landscape
  • Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body
  • E.H. Young, Miss Mole

​Literary studies:

  • Roberto Calasso (translated by Richard Dixon), The Art of the Publisher
  • Robin G. Schulze, ed., Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1907–1924
  • Gabriel Trop, Poetry as a Way of Life: Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century
  • Wai-lim Yip, Ezra Pound’s “Cathay”

John Gallaher
My spring project is to organize my bookshelves. It’s not going well, but it’s reminding me of the books I’ve found most important over the years. So now I’m in a rereading frenzy. Cole Swensen’s Gravesend and Martha Ronk’s In a Landscape of Having to Repeat are the two I’m currently reading, finding all the same thrill I had when first reading them. As Ronk writes: “How perfectly ordinary someone says looking at the same thing or/I’d like to get to the bottom of that one.” One never gets to the bottom of the best things. It’s one of my favorite joys. As for new books, I’m currently reading Kent Shaw’s Too Numerous and loving every second of it. 

Wayne Holloway-Smith

  • WITCH, Rebecca Tamás
  • The Years, Annie Ernaux
  • Whip-hot & Grippy, Heather Phillipson
  • Deaf Republic, Ilya Kaminsky
  • The Half-God of Rainfall, Inua Ellams
  • Kingdomland, Rachael Allen
  • Lanny, Max Porter
  • Eye Level, Jenny Xie
  • ATTA, Jarett Kobek
  • Sweet, like Rinky-Dink, Mark Waldron
  • Mixed-Race Superman, Will Harris
  • Vertigo & Ghost, Fiona Benson
  • The Tradition, Jericho Brown
  • Wonderland, Matthew Dickman
  • The Threepenny Opera, Bertolt Brecht
  • Ways of Coping, Ollie O’Neill
  • Autobiography of Death, Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi
  • Bright Dead Things, Ada Limón
  • Meat Songs, Jack Nicholls
  • Soft Science, Franny Choi
  • Daddy Poem, Helen Charman
  • After the Formalities, Anthony Anaxagorou (due out in September)

Maria Hummel
Here is my list of current reads:

  • Box by Sue D. Burton
  • My Bishop and Other Poems by Michael Collier
  • The Boy Changed into a Stag Clamors at the Gate of Secrets by Ferenc Juhász (translated by David Wevill)
  • Tap Out by Edgar Kunz
  • Ghost Of  by Diana Khoi Nguyen

Jim Johnstone
I recently toured in the UK with James Arthur, whose new book is The Suicide’s Son. James recites his poems from memory, and they really do have a mnemonic quality—I haven’t been able to get them out of my head. If you’ve never seen him perform, he’s masterful.

I’d also recommend Stephanie Warner’s A Violent Streak. A meditation on the inertia of modern living, I admire the book’s swagger and verbal excess, which cohere into feverish, spirited poems.

Clare Jones
Recently I read two poetry collections that I know I will be rereading in the future (a category of book I like to call “evergreens”): Deed by Justin Wymer and Flyover Country by Austin Smith. Both collections were simultaneously opulent and spare, a spellbinding quality.  

I have also happened upon a few works by poets whose lyric voices carried over beautifully into different genres. Thanks to deftly curated displays at independent bookstores and public libraries, I came across and read Kei Miller’s novel Augustown, Ashleigh Young’s book of essays Can You Tolerate This?, and Helen Keller’s autobiographical work The World I Live In.

John Kinsella
Here’s what I’ve read over the last few weeks, a couple being rereads (always part of my reading process!):

  • Mark Eisner’s Neruda: The Biography of a Poet
  • Philip K. Dick’s novel Ubik
  • Thomas Bernhard’s novels The Loser and Yes
  • Marguerite Duras’s novel The Sea Wall
  • William S. Burroughs’s Interzone and The Wild Boys
  • Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations: A Novel
  • Gabriel García Márquez’s novel The General in His Labyrinth
  • Amy Clampitt’s Collected Poems
  • Eliot Weinberger’s translation of Vincente Huidobro’s Altazor
  • Gillian Rose’s Feminism & Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge
  • Geraldine Monk’s Selected Poems
  • Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (volume one), the biography by Simon Callow
  • Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine, edited by Sami Adwan, Dan Bar-On, Eyal Naveh, and Peace Research Institute in the Middle East

I’m starting an interactive process of working closely through Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation.

These I am about to start (they have made it from the “to read” bookshelves to the “bedside zone of reading activation”):

  • Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy
  • Nina Lykke’s Feminist Studies: A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology and Writing
  • Candy Royalle’s poetry collection A Trillion Tiny Awakenings
  • Samuel R. Delany’s novel Babel-17

Dayna Patterson
Poetry:

Nonfiction:

  • adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy
  • Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias
  • Ross Gay, The Book of Delights
  • Sam Kean, Caesar’s Last Breath
  • Stanley Plumly, Posthumous Keats

Fiction:

  • Octavia E. Butler, Kindred
  • Richard Powers, The Overstory
  • Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement
  • Steven L. Peck, The Tragedy of King Leere, Goatherd of the La Sals

Anthology:

  • Andrew Shattuck McBride and Jill McCabe Johnson, editors, For Love of Orcas

Melian Radu
Outside poetry, I’ve wound my way in 2019 through Jasbir K. Puar’s The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. It is critical in the triple sense that the best theory is.

My poem-mind has been winding, meanwhile, toward my birth year: I’ve recently reread Patricia Smith’s Big Towns, Big Talk and Louise Glück’s Ararat. There’s something about the search for capacitable wounds in pieces like Smith’s “Chinese Cucumbers,” I feel.

Megan Denton Ray
I am a really slow reader. I tend to collect a few books at a time and rotate them/savor them for several months. Here’s what’s in my current rotation:

  • Exit Pastoral by Aidan Forster
  • Wolf Centos by Simone Muench
  • Night Errands: How Poets Use Dreams, edited by Roderick Townley
  • Brute by Emily Skaja
  • There There by Tommy Orange
  • Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
  • Turn by Wendy Chin-Tanner
  • Where I Live: New & Selected Poems 1990–2010 by Maxine Kumin

Robin Richardson

Anne Marie Rooney
Here are some of the books I’ve loved this past year:

  • R E D, Chase Berggrun*
  • How Narrow My Escapes, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
  • Dictee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha*
  • ECODEVIANCE, CAConrad
  • Mean, Myriam Gurba
  • American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, Terrance Hayes
  • Tonight I’m Someone Else, Chelsea Hodson
  • Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, Andrea Lawlor
  • SWOLE, Jerika Marchan
  • The Bees Make Money in the Lion, Lo Kwa Mei-en
  • The Descent of Alette, Alice Notley*
  • No Archive Will Restore You, Julietta Singh
  • The Leftovers, Shaelyn Smith

*Read out loud walking to work over months—I recommend this!

Spencer Short
I’m preoccupied by the psychological (cognitive?) overlap between the aesthetic and the political, and so I was happy to discover David Bromwich’s The Intellectual Life Of Edmund Burke, a generous exploration of a perpetually misunderstood thinker, and Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, originally published in 1938 but new to me. That preoccupation also unites the poetry I’ve been reading. In Airea D. Matthews’s inventive Simulacra, form is a staging ground for play between linguistic and cultural forces. In A.E. Stallings’s Like, transience and dislocation complicate illusions of permanence and order. In Dora Malech’s Stet, the formal drive is primordial, applied at the building-block level of the letter. My pool-side reading is less ponderous—last week, John le Carré’s taut Call for the Dead. Next, Camilla Läckberg (The Preacher) and Åsa Larsson (Sun Storm), Swedish crime writers who subvert genre convention but never forget the value of a well-built mystery.    

Cody Smith

Jasmine Elizabeth Smith

  • Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown
  • Please by Jericho Brown
  • Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya Hartman  
  • tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 by Lee Ann Roripaugh  
  • Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple by Malcolm Friend  
  • Moonbath by Yanick Lahens, translated by Emily Gogolak
  • Brother Bullet by Casandra López 
  • ICON by F. Douglas Brown
  • Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Y. Davis
  • Ghost Voices by Quincy Troupe 

And of course, these two poems by these lovely ones:  

Tom Wayman
I’ve been reading contemporary American poetry steadily and as widely as I can for five decades, so I was pretty confident I was aware of which established poems and poets particularly engage me. This winter I was staggered when, on somebody’s recommendation, I picked up the Santa Cruz poet Joseph Stroud’s Of This World: New and Selected Poems. To say I was overwhelmed is an understatement: I read the volume’s three hundred and fifty pages and then immediately reread the whole book—something I haven’t done since Robert Bly’s book of translations, The Winged Energy of Delight. Lessons and inspiration abounded for me in Stroud’s masterly command of form, his vast range of subject matter, and his questioning, accurate, and precise response to everything from classical Chinese poets to doo-wop. Beauty, violence, horror, and love are all convincingly portrayed, along with praise, praise, praise. In Stroud’s “The Old Poets Home,” Homer, Sappho, Eliot, Whitman, Li Po, and more “complain all day” about “the new poems.” And yet, “a few thoughtful, compassionate young poets” stop by with their poems, “and let us stroke them, pet them, remember how once in our lives the poems frisked for us ... full of energy and joy.”

Jane Zwart
Books I’m reading now, give or take:

Books I’m itching to reread:

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

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