Stephanie Burt's NYT Shortlist Includes Dead Fathers, Feminist Icons

Stephanie Burt presents her most notable recent reads in her latest New York Times Book Review "Shortlist." Leading off with Cyrée Jarelle Johnson's Slingshot, Burt notes that it's "a book some readers will find alarming or baffling — and a book other readers may need." More: 

Its rapid verse pivots and zooms among scenes of racial violence, bodily degradation, sexual liberation and overt resistance in an Occupy-like urban demonstration, till “the cops send up pepper spray again.” Johnson, a black nonbinary New Yorker, reminds us that “There are trunks full of people like me,” in poems that address here an oppressor, there a lover: “You oxcart king. You spiked silver seller / turned gold-stroker in the fire and tar woods / behind my house, framed in white flame.” Some a few pages long, and some untitled, the poems present themselves as homemade weapons (like slingshots) against malign parents, authority figures, structural racism and fears of the other. It’s challenging work, in its language, its stories, its subcultural references (“prince died for fem bois”), yet it offers pellucid queer intimacies. Reading a fanzine called Femme Shark Manifesto, the poet “wanted to grow up and be them and then be their friend forever”; speaking to a recent lover, Johnson admits “I hate how much I love / when you suck my toes & I despise you / for making me beg.”

Read what Stephanie Burt has to say about new collections by Daniel Poppick, Maya Phillips, Alexandra Teague, and Hanif Abdurraqib at the New York Times.