Reading List: March 2016

The Reading List is a feature of Poetry magazine’s Editors’ Blog. This month contributors to the March 2016 issue share some books that held their interest.

Francisco Aragón
Christopher Sindt’s The Bodies is the work of a poet from Northern California, which is my way of saying: it feeds from the multiple aesthetics that have flourished there.  It deepens the gesture begun in his chapbook, The Land of Give and Take. I’d describe his poetics as a theology of nature. On the one hand, it’s a lyricism that fiercely resists tidy narratives. On the other, it often relies (in a good way) on other texts as springboard. At the risk of over-simplifying in an attempt to offer something useful in such a reduced space, The Bodies feels like an idiosyncratic alchemy that recalls the best of Robert Hass and Michael Palmer.

Speaking of another text as source of inspiration, The Jane and Bertha in Me by Rita Maria Martinez is the result of a fruitful obsession. I first encountered this project in her chapbook, Jane-in-the-Box. I remember wondering: Will she try to sustain this in a complete book and succeed? The answer is an 81-page YES. Let me put it this way: I haven’t read Charlotte Brontë’s novel, yet I relished Martinez’s book for the way it creates this quirky, yet passionate universe unto itself, one where (to quote Nin Andrews) the “Gothic sensibility of Jane Eyre joins the surreal world of contemporary American culture.”

Grimms’ fairy tales are the lens through which Emily Pérez, in House of Sugar, House of Stone, considers the challenges of love, marriage, and motherhood. My first encounter with Pérez was Backyard Migration Route, a chapbook that depicts, from a South Texas sensibility, the rich complexity of hybrid identity and lineage. Here, as the title subtly suggests, complexity is again given full voice not only in the subject matter at hand, but also in the range of poetic strategies employed, including syntactical ones: “In Which I First Discovered” ends: “So I gathered what I knew / Not the truth, exactly, more of / That was the feeling. And on the strength of it / I undertook to write.”

Felix Bernstein
Kevin Killian’s Argento Series was hatched in 1992, when Kathy Acker suggested thinking about AIDS through the work of Italian horror director Dario Argento. Of course, the screen’s crimson colors don’t draw any “real” blood from the audience. Yet, when death occurs, it often appears in the Technicolor of a funeral wreath. Bloodshed is quite sweet since it signposts the lost lover. Even memories of skin peeling like flaps, hanging corpses, and rotting bodies become mementos. Hence Killian’s beautiful lyricism—“mouth open, apple blossom falling from it / come on and let it snow” (“House of Wax”). AIDS thought through Argento or better yet, AIDS thought through Killian, or through “New Narrative” [as a term it makes more sense then The New Sentence] cuts through to Trisha Low’s drawing of her (“fake”) blood. Quite differently, Harold Abramowitz’s Dear Dearly Departed goes on for 64 pages bed-to-bed without lyric,

Dear Dearly Departed, There are traps. This letter is, perhaps, just such a trap. This letter is just the type of trap we were always talking about. We are always talking about traps, about this letter, about just this type of trap… The world is a trap.

The pompous letter to the beloved, Camp, horror, Goth, and lyricism all misplace the dead. Transgression as fashion forgets the dead. Abramowitz spoofs and enacts these genres, as does Killian. But is genre just a trap? “This letter. A trap?” No, it is rather, “A tension.”

CAConrad
Anne Boyer:  Garments Against Women
David Buuck:  Site Cite City
Melissa Buzzeo:  The Devastation 
Martin Corless-Smith:  Bitter Green
Angel Dominguez:  Black Lavender Milk
Tonya Foster:  A Swarm of Bees in High Court
Peter Gizzi:  In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 1987 - 2011
Emily Hunt:  Dark Green
Saeed Jones:  Prelude to Bruise
Erica Kaufman:  Instant Classic
Dawn Lundy Martin:  Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life
Joseph Massey:  Illocality
Laura Moriarty:  Who That Divines
Fred Moten:  The Feel Trio
Eileen Myles:  I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975 – 2014
Hoa Nguyen:  Red Juice: Poems 1998 – 2008
Matthew Rohrer:  Surrounded by Friends
Christopher Soto:  Sad Girl Poems
Juliana Spahr:  That Winter the Wolf Came
Stacy Szymaszek:  hart island
Susie Timmons:  Superior Packets
Amish Trivedi:  SOUND/CHEST
Divya Victor:  Natural Subjects
Nikki Wallschlaeger:  Houses
Elizabeth Willis:  Alive: New and Selected Poems
Ronaldo V. Wilson:  Farther Traveler
Magdalena Zurawski:  Companion Animal

Eduardo C. Corral
I spent February at Randolph College as the Anne Spencer Poet-in-Residence. I used the time to revise recent drafts, to tinker with “finished” poems, and to leisurely read a few books.

Remains by Jesús Castillo is an ambitious debut: a serial poem that reads like a twenty-first-century pillow book. The boxy stanzas isolate and highlight phenomena, familial and public narratives, and the anxieties of the Millennial generation. Castillo’s voice is persistent and intersectional. His sentences are epigrammatic, richly patterned, and remix language from theory, the high-tech now, the Western canon, and the human heart.

I deeply admire Michael Dickman’s poetry. Green Migraine, his new book, showcases his staggering image-making skills. His surreal and hyperreal descriptions reveal and complicate intellectual and emotional states. Impressionistic, keen, and bewitched by grief and awe, his poems simultaneously stab and heal.

The Dead in Daylight, the second book from Melody S. Gee, mediates on the tethers and the hooks of motherhood and daughterhood. “When I was born, I emptied a mother out/and went to live in my body,” the poet writes. The poems are chiseled and beautiful and full of wonder and questions.

The poems in Father, Child, Water by Gary Dop are funny, wicked, and poignant. These three qualities are visible in the titles. For example: “How to Pretend You’ve Read Moby-Dick,” “To My Love Handles,” “Elegy for Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Lite,” and “Little Girl, Little Lion.” Dop’s poetic gaze is wide-ranging and piercing. The poems about his father engage with the violence embedded in American masculinity and the character-driven poems are empathic and quirky. A highly enjoyable and memorable book.

Kwame Dawes
My consumption of books is eclectic these days, and apparently quite voracious, largely aided and abetted by a new discovery prompted by my increasing eyesight challenges: Audio books. So I consume sixty percent of my fiction on audio books and one hundred percent of my poetry in digital or print books. It strikes me as interesting that in the last six months I have "read" about twelve novels by Phillip Roth (The Human Stain and The Counterlife continue to haunt); Jonathan Franzen’s tedious in part and remarkable in part (everything set in Germany reminds me that the exotic is a kind of preservative, and was inspired I think) new novel Purity; a most beautiful discovery for me, Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love; W.E.B. Dubois's always bracing and unsettling The Souls of Black Folk and the brilliantly and disturbingly relevant essays in his Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1919); a quirky and odd little book Life in Year One: What the World Was Like in 1st Century Palestine by Scott Korb (apparently a very dirty place); A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler (aging is not fun); and, get ready, War and Peace (I can properly confirm that it is a classic for a reason, and it also contains one of the most curious exposés on Freemasons I know of). Of course, there is always poetry, and I can mention that I am reminding myself of C.D. Wright’s assured intellect and music, and for the umpteenth time, Kamau Brathwaite’s The Irritants. Finally, it is not out yet, I don’t think, but I have read uncorrected proofs of Aracelis Girmay’s new book, The Black Maria (that BOA is lucky to be publishing), and let me just say, WOW! She is, simply put, one of the best writing today.

Blas Falconer
My seven-year-old son and I read together most nights, so I am always looking for novels that engage both of us. Turns out, there are plenty. These days, we’re making our way through Kate DiCamillo’s body of work. Most recently we finished The Tremendous Journey of Edward Tulane, the story of a porcelain rabbit that is lost for decades, and now, we’re captivated by The Magician’s Elephant, a beautifully written book, the plot compelling and magical, the characters wonderfully strange.

There is no shortage of good poetry coming out now either. I was lucky to have gotten a sneak peek of Diann Blakely’s soon-to-be published book of selected poems, Lost Addresses, and was reminded of how distinct her voice is, often darkly playful and profound.

Vandana Khanna’s dazzling chapbook, The Goddess Monologues, a rich and vibrant collection of poems, will be released at AWP 2016 with Diode Editions. It’s the kind of book you want to read from beginning to end in one sitting.

My regular order from Four Way Books has recently come in, so I’m well into Cynthia Cruz’s How the End Begins. I’ve been carrying it around with me for a couple of days, reading one or two of its intensely charged poems whenever I get a chance. I’m also excited to dive into new work by C. Dale Young, Jonathan Wells, and Laurel Blossom, among others.

Finally, I must mention Carl Phillips’s Quiver of Arrows, a touchstone book that I return to a few times each year because it reminds me of what’s possible in poetry.

Rebecca Hazelton
I’ve been reading Jorie Graham’s From the New World. More than any poet out there, Jorie Graham is concerned with thinking about thinking. So many of her poems observe the self and its mental perambulations with a clinical, critical eye, always questioning the first and easiest conclusion. The scope of her work, forty years of which is gathered in this volume, is stunning—a recording of the frightening and beautiful possibilities of personal and historical interconnectedness.

I’ve also been very taken with Andrea Cohen’s Furs Not Mine, which does such amazing things with spare and exact lines. Some poets, writing in an aphoristic vein, are merely clever, but these poems are challenging and exacting. I hate when people describe work as "unflinching." But damn it, the first poem in the book, "The Committee Weighs In," really is.

I recently reread Victoria Chang's The Boss and was bowled over once more at how she manages to explore authority in so many contexts, professional and personal. Many of the poems are funny, until they punch you in the gut. The figure of "the boss" that runs through these poems is mercurial, bombastic, and capricious, as many of us would be, given just a taste of power.

Richard Siken’s War of the Foxes was worth waiting for. Even more than being a great book of poems—which it is—it’s a meditation on art and the process of creation.

Outside of poetry, I recently read a graphic novel called Beautiful Creatures by Vehlmann and Kerascoët. Don’t be fooled by the cute drawings; I found this book by turns charming, alarming, and disturbing.

Gretchen Marquette
I know that I’m late to the party, but I’m just now spending adequate time with Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. I’ve been teaching the title poem in my poetry classes for a while now, so it’s a great pleasure to digest the whole book. I’m really looking forward to Hieu Minh Nguyen’s new collection with Coffee House Press, but in the meantime, I’ve been rereading his book This Way to the Sugar; he has an incredible, fresh imagination that is completely exciting. Like so many people, I’ve been savoring Larry Levis’s The Darkening Trapeze–his poem “Gossip in the Village,” is as close to perfect as a poem can get. The work that’s been most inspiring to me lately has been Elizabeth Willis’s Turneresque–I found a selection of poems from that book in an anthology and fell in love.

In terms of criticism and conversation, I’ve been loving the interviews posted on Divedapper. If you don’t already know, they post interviews with contemporary poets every two weeks or so. The most recent interview was with Elizabeth Alexander, and they’ve been developing an amazing catalog. I highly suggest checking them out. I’ve also been reading more fiction these last few months, finishing The Magicians trilogy by Lev Grossman, and moving on to The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer, because after five years, I still heard people talking about it. I’ve just started The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert. Well researched and also companionable, I’ve become engrossed with it.

Dante Micheaux
At any given time, I am rereading two books: The Bible (most often the New King James Version, with all its inaccuracies) and Transfigurations: Collected Poems by Jay Wright—as these are sources of infinite lyricism. Wright has no equal in Anglophone poetry, with regard to range of subject, lyricism, and intellect. Those three characteristics, combined, form what, as a reader, I seek most from poetry: vision. And Wright is the visionary poet of our time, certainly since the death of Édouard Glissant, juggernaut of New World poetics. What serious readers of poetry, those who read the genre for more than mere entertainment, need (particularly, serious American readers) is another volume of collected poems from Wright, who has published five books in the last nine years. I return to him, again and again, because there is so little visionary poetry composed/published in this moment when, arguably, it is needed most.

So, saturated with the visionaries from my personal canon (Walt Whitman, Robert Duncan, Yves Bonnefoy, Glissant, Wright, Jorie Graham, and Carl Phillips), I tend to overdose on intellect. The two most recent collections I have read incidentally evoke Helen of Troy. Eidolon, by Sandeep Parmar, is poem composed in 50 cantos that, as a book, points to its own intelligence with an erudite afterword. Dr. Parmar is most adept, however, when she moves beyond her intelligence about Helen and into the visionary habitation of her in canto XXX—akin to Tolkien’s Galadriel having slipped on the ring for moment. Digest, by Gregory Pardlo, briefly alludes to Helen in the form of a victim of uxoricide but elsewhere … such magic. “Consider the vanity / of sacrifice, the paper tiger of blind devotion fanning / the dander of a timid hand." Or “We will interrogate / the cagey and shifting sign in order to coerce all its false confessions.” Dr. Pardlo wields an astonishing philological grace. Here’s to the sophomore efforts of both poets!

Kristin Naca (Iwayó)
Is all poetry local? These days, international, third world, indigenous, and U.S. poets from a myriad of marginalized communities live and write all around us. I'm reading Twin Cities poets Bao Phi and Wang Ping to jump start new poems to present on a panel about LA music, Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll: Poem Pairings. It's based on Beth Bachmann and Nick Flynn's recent conversations in poetics. Saeed Jones (author of sumptuous Prelude to Bruise) and I join them at AWP.

I'm feeding on the music, emotion, and searing attention of Bao's Phi's Sông I Sing. The poems pulsate even when Bao’s most tender and observant. Keep an ear open for the glimmer of a queer voice. Chipping any of the poems’ masculine edges. Wang Ping's Ten Thousand Waves is the truth. Her images still time just long enough for you to catch a glimpse of yourself in its mirror. Repetition deepens your knowing of yourself, “We loiter in hospitals, courts / dust angels, dust angels / who wears the stars and hearts strung with our tears? / who makes a fortune from our wretched breath?” (“Dust Angels”). Both Bao and Ping’s voices compound my reading of talisman poems, Aimé Césaire’s “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land” and César Vallejo’s “Payroll of Bones,” in the writing of new work.

Beyond that, I go back and forth between Ada Limón’s new collection Bright Dead Things: “All the shouting before / was done out loud, on the street / and now it’s done so shushing-ly” (“Down Here”)—I read and sigh. And, Ruben Quesada’s Next Extinct Animal, with its balance of centrifugal & centripetal lyric forces—or should I call them, vices?

Christina Pugh
For the last month, I’ve been in residence at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy, and so I’ve had the opportunity to read several books from the Foundation’s library of former fellows’ works. I’ve read Henri Cole’s The Visible Man, Phillis Levin’s The Afterimage, and Linda Gregerson’s The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, all of which I would highly recommend. Cole’s book interested me because it shows how to write about Italy (or some other place one is visiting) in an extended way, without sounding like a “travelogue.” Another book that accomplishes this, though from a different perspective, is a wonderful collection of photographs and poems about Genoa, the city closest to the Foundation: Adam Zagajewski, Ahdaf Soueif, and John M. Hall collaborated to create Luci e Ombre di una Città: Immagine di Genova (City of Light and Shadow: Images of Genoa). Also, before arriving here, I finished Phillis Levin’s wonderful brand-new Mr. Memory, and I am currently in the middle of Sarah Arvio’s Night Thoughts: a very interesting sequence of dream poems that is followed by Arvio’s analysis of them.

James Reidel
I tend to read the way some people use a remote control—so I haven’t finished the first book on my current reading list, Lanny Hammer’s James Merrill: Life and Art, which is artfully written such that his voluminous detail all fits and flows despite my glacial way of reading it. If I can report back about it again, I will discuss the occult stuff that is now begin to loom—even if it requires a talking board to reach me for my thoughts on whether I think Merrill and Jackson pulled it off.

On another channel is a rereading of my paperback copy of Sexual Persone by Camille Paglia. This time around, I marvel at the arrangement of material and how it flows. I find it a great cheat sheet for remembering pagan things, the outré, the Gnostic. I am also reading scholarly works tied to my translation work. The first volume of the correspondence of Ludwig von Ficker (Briefwechsel 1909–1914) is proving to be a trove of detail for a biographical essay I am writing and interpolating into my third collection of Georg Trakl’s poetry in translation. There are some wonderful and intense caricatures by Else Lasker Schüler in the addenda. The other book I am reading now is a biography of Trakl’s sister, the pianist Grete Trakl, titled Immer zu wenig Liebe (Always too little Love, 2015) by Marty Bax, in which she attempts to demolish the “incest myth,” which is, at least, necessary given the far too pretty film about it.

I love old books, especially fine press. The one I have on my desk now is an elegantly printed and limited edition of Sonnets by Jane Du Bois (Yale University Press, 1935). She is totally unknown. Or rather, she is known for jumping hand-in-hand with her sister from a de Havilland Dragon in 1935 over a London suburb and across oceans of time into a work-in-progress. Her verses are beautifully and athletically rhymed, her meter scans in a way that Merrill would envy and I would have to repurpose my entire life around. I would describe her style as metaphysical, wrestling with God, demons, Tarot cards (her sister Bette was a cartomancer), and the melancholy of her smart, troubled, and short life. I wonder if she sent any of her work to Poetry. What would the real Harriet have written her? I will have to make it up.

Lastly, I’ve been reading John Ashbery’s Breezeway—and reliving James Tate’s The Lost Pilot in memorium, in my precious first edition. I go way back with them and profit as much as one would reading almanacs. Both books help to lighten all of the above.

Tom Sleigh
Elizabeth Kolbert's book, The Sixth Extinction, is a fierce book without seeming to be: beautifully researched and told with quiet irony, the tale of how we are changing our environment verifies that we're both ingenious and a scourge; and for the most part, unconscious of how our actions are driving thousands of species out of existence every year. And as a species, what does homo sapiens really amount to? From a geological point of view, in a hundred million years when giant rats have inherited the earth, all of human history—our cities and factories, our museums and art, our cultural and technological achievements—will be compressed into a rock layer no thicker than a cigarette paper.

On a more hopeful note, Seamus Heaney’s Seeing Things is a book I dearly love, and love re-reading. I was lucky enough to see these poems as they were being written, and they represent in Heaney's work—especially the second section, Squarings—one of the pinnacles of his career. These poems are loose and associative in their movement, but the language is always grounded in what Heaney once called "the primal reach of the physical."

Nothing is more physical than laughter, and there are plenty of laughs in Askold Melnyczuk’s new novel, Smedley's Secret Guide to World Literature—a work of true comedic genius. If you can imagine Roberto Bolaño meeting up with J.D. Salinger, then you have an inkling of how original and funny and sheerly strange this book is. No one writes better or more entertaining sentences than Melnyczuk, and I wouldn't be surprised if Smedley ends up being a cult classic.

The last writer I'll mention is Aleš Debeljak, the superb Slovenian poet, and political and cultural theorist, who died a few weeks ago in a car crash. His poems combine a fine analytical intelligence with a gift for extended metaphor, in which his use of figuration, like John Donne's, becomes a mode of thought. I love the purity of feeling in the poems and the gravitas. Some of his books have been faithfully translated into English by Andrew Zawacki and Brian Henry (plus, a handful of poems by David Rivard), and they include The City and the Child, Dictionary of Silence, Anxious Moments, and Smugglers.

Carmen Giménez Smith
I have the great pleasure of reading Derrick Austin’s debut collection Trouble the Water, a collection that marries the sacred with the profane against the landscape of Florida. In a long poem called “City of Nights,” he writes, “It is not / mercy merely the sky flinging its gorgeous indifference,” which is fantastic, and one of the best and strangest poems in this collection is “Jezebel” for its ferocity. This first book has tremendous range while maintaining a taut lyricism.

Ruth Ellen Kocher’s Ending in Planes was selected by Noemi Press’s poetry editors for its annual award, and she has a new collection being published by Tupelo in June 2016 called Third Voice, a follow-up experiment to the use of Eliot’s “second voice” in Ending in Planes. Scholar Joy D. Brahme situates Eliot’s idea of subjectivity this way:

The second voice is best seen in a dramatic monologue where a poet addresses ... an audience. The third voice is an indirect manifestation of the second one. Here, the poet uses an imaginary character as a mouth piece, and this character addresses another imaginary character thus, letting the poet have the liberty to speak [her] mind.

Third Voice uses the minstrel show as the architecture for a biting critique of Black (lyric) depiction, and I’m thrilled at the recuperation of Modernism by inflecting it with Black subjectivity and performance. She’s an unsung poetry hero.

Frank Lima’s Collected Poems was published by City Lights recently, and it’s absolutely stunning. Lima is an essential poet in the eclectic field of Latinx poetry, and while his aesthetic is often aligned with the New York School, I hear Pedro Pietri’s New York—both write poems that are brash and tender. It’s also been a pleasure to see how his aesthetic evolved and complicated over the years. I’ve been loaning it out and recommending it to everyone know. I can’t wait to write about it.

Leah Umansky
At the moment, I’m in the middle of a few books: Charlie Jane Anders’s All the Birds in the Sky, which is a dystopian novel a science-fiction novel, fantasy novel, and  fiction novel all tied into one. It is the book I’ve been waiting for this year, something to pick me up and thrust me forward. There is good and evil and even talking animals! Having dystopia on the brain, I also am in the middle of Donna Vorreyer’s new book of poems, Every Love Story Is an Apocalypse Story.

I have a few chapters left of Jeanette Winterson’s Gap of Time, too, a retelling of William Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, because every story is another version of an earlier story. I’m a big Maggie Nelson fan and I’m very much looking forward to starting her reprint of The Red Parts later this month when I’m on spring break.

I’m going to London later this month to visit one of my best friends and I was lucky enough to arrange a few readings to help promote my new dystopian chapbook, Straight Away the Emptied World. I’m planning to pick up some books from a few British poets whose work I admire, such as: Emily Berry, Amy Key, Rebecca Perry, and Claire Trévien. I’ll be reading with Amy, Alex MacDonald, and Jane Yeh. I’m also reading with Josephine Corcoran, whose blog, “And Other Poems,” is one of my favorite literary sites, and Penny Boxall. I think literary community is important, especially across international borders. I love social media, and am so happy to meet new friends and be exposed to new literary journals and new writers, but I’m grateful some of us will get to meet in real life this month.

In terms of upcoming books: I’m very much looking forward to books from Dena Rash Guzman’s second book of poems, JOSEPH, John Reed’s first book of poems, Free Boat, and one of my poetry idols, Sharon Olds’s latest book Odes out in fall 2016.

As always, for inspiration, I turn to museums, the New York Times, the diaries of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, and the poems of Eliot and Berryman.