From Poetry Magazine

Reading List: July/August 2019

BY Holly Amos

Originally Published: July 29, 2019
White text on a blue (almost teal) background that reads "Small words craft a spell" and which is attributed to Anu Lakhan.

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

Hari Alluri
Books brought onto my rooftop “office” for inspiration:

  • Aurora Levins Morales, Remedios
  • Devi S. Laskar, The Atlas of Reds and Blues
  • Faisal Mohyuddin, The Displaced Children of Displaced Children
  • Fatimah Asghar, If They Come for Us
  • Hope Wabuke, her
  • Mercedes Eng, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes
  • Lalbihari Sharma, translated by Rajiv Mohabir, I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara
  • Sally Wen Mao, Mad Honey Symposium
  • Sham-e-Ali Nayeem, City of Pearls
  • Sheree R. Thomas, editor, Dark Matter: Reading the Bones
  • Virgil Mayor Apostol, Way of the Ancient Healer

Books whose final chapter has me in denial:

  • China Miéville, Iron Council
  • Leanne Simpson, Islands of Decolonial Love

Books whose photos bless my screensaver constant:

  • Jean-Claude Michel, The Black Surrealists
  • Nick Carbó and Eileen Tabios, editors, Babaylan
  • Willie Perdomo, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon

Books I lent my neighbor (now haunting my subconscious):

These are all besides Jana Lynne Umipig’s Kapwa Tarot, which I consult daily.

Andre Bagoo
Months before the 2016 US presidential election, Frank Ocean published a poem called “Boyfriend.” This year, days after the summer solstice, I turned to it. Again. It understates its case, burning down a heartbreaking road. It’s a paean: “my boyfriend drives a lil bucket/when it rain it fills up.” Bucket as in pail, as in slang for: a run-down car, a sexual organ, a slam-dunk. To be thus filled is sensual, as is “my boyfriend he gon pick me up.” Pull a date, lift during sex, give a ride, uplift emotionally. Hence the imperative: “don’t distract him at the wheel/in his lane/he’s the only one.” One person’s ego and another’s fidelity are shouldered by the same hot words. Polyvalence and queer body politics fuse. Activism alloys with art: “me and my boyfriend cast our ballot/every kiss reads like a poem.”

J. Mae Barizo
Poetry:

Not poetry:

  • Master Handbook of Acoustics, fifth edition, F. Alton Everest
  • Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse), John Cage (coedited by Joe Biel and Richard Kraft) 
  • How Time Passes By, Karlheinz Stockhausen 
  • Running Away, Jean-Philippe Toussaint 
  • Good Talk, Mira Jacob 
  • Parallel Play: Growing Up with Undiagnosed Asperger’s, Tim Page

Lucy Biederman
Everybody go out right now and get Hawk Parable by Tyler Mills, which is about atomic testing and the long and terrible shadow of human history. Only poetry, and only poetry this great, can show the contours of that shadow. “Zone of noon. Stolen form. I can’t name you.”

On page one of Andrea Lawlor’s excellent novel Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl: “Snow piled up outside the house on North Gilbert Street, piled up on the porch, covering everybody’s bicycles.” Covering everybody’s bicycles! Such a concise, vivid, beautiful, world-making image.

Also recommended:

  • Jessica Rae Bergamino’s UNMANNED, playful and profound
  • This Lucille Clifton poem that I read every day
  • Hilary Plum’s Watchfires, buzzing with genius
  • Dan D’Angelo’s Joy Bloods the Wanderer (from Outta Ink Press), a whole new way of writing
  • “Explorer,” a transcendent Kazim Ali poem
  • Bevil Townsend’s One Hell of a Woman, a lyric and gorgeous dispatch from another world (Texas)

Ching-In Chen
On recent travels, books brought along for sustenance and surprise:

  • Meet Me There: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash. by Samuel Ace
  • AVATARA by Vidhu Aggarwal
  • Love Conjure/Blues by Sharon Bridgforth
  • Swallow the Fish by Gabrielle Civil
  • We Play a Game by Duy Doan
  • SanTana’s Fairy Tales by Sarah Rafael García
  • Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, edited by Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton
  • Commons by Myung Mi Kim
  • Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot
  • from unincorporated territory [hacha] by Craig Santos Perez
  • You Will Always Be Someone from Somewhere Else by Dao Strom, translated by Ly Thuy Nguyen

In recent conversations, out-of-print books I’ve dreamt of, passing from hand to hand:

Cyril Dabydeen
Sylvia Plath’s Winter Trees and Crossing the Water illuminate with metaphor, without hysteria. Then, elegance with Derek Walcott’s The Star-Apple Kingdom and Michael Ondaatje’s mythos in The Cinnamon Peeler. A.K. Ramanujan is alluringly topographical. A Friedrich Nietzsche exhibition in town sends me to Catherine Ahearn’s Thus Spoke Superman and to Rienzi Crusz’s How to Dance in This Rarefied Air.

Yogesh Patel’s Swimming with Whales makes me “Return the drink to/The bartender/Fold the paper serviette/Create the origami whale”—ecology with urbaneness. Marty Gervais’s Table Manners (with sheer naturalness) comes alongside John Newlove’s The Fatman. Seymour Mayne’s Killing Time impresses. Favorites remain Dorothy Livesay’s The Woman I Am, Rachel Korn’s Generations, and Irving Layton’s The Gucci Bag.

Kamau Brathwaite’s Born to Slow Horses is sheer tidalectics (and a Griffin Prize winner), as is Eve Joseph’s recent Quarrels. George Elliott Clarke’s Illuminated Verses seduces. R.A.D. Ford’s personal anthology Russian Poetry has Slavic ease. Monuments, all. 

Nabina Das
Here are my top reads in June and July.

Out of Syllabus by Sumana Roy. At times plaintive and reflective, the poems here are like shamans gushing at an epiphany, in various stages of learning. The lines, a modernist litany, exude aphoristic tales. Roy has personal stories that pan out to universal themes. Between “history curdling to hormones,” “biraha,” and “catalogue of ambitions,” her syllabus presents enviable life lessons.

More knives have cut through me than men.
Insurance agents avoid me: I’m a ‘hospital whore’.
—From “Illness on Instalments” 

Selected Poems: Sananta Tanty, translated by Dibyajyoti Sarma. Tanty is a must-read for those looking to bridge the gap between Indian English writing and other writing in India. I’ll echo what I wrote in a review two years ago: a terrible beauty shines through this poet’s fierce verses on war, freedom, erotica.

The war now depends on a few questions;
for the answers I have postponed life.
—From “Waiting for Some Answers” 

Middles by Monalisa Changkija. These short hybrid commentaries were originally published in between—hence, “middles”—a main feature article and the letters to the editor section on a newspaper’s editorial page. Changkija spins witty takes on various current and personal issues in this new book, gliding beyond mere categorizations such as Naga ethos, etc.

Many, many years ago, after I started my newspaper Nagaland Page ... a friend ... asked me: “Tell me, who writes your Editorials.” I’m still surprised that the friend hasn’t asked me who writes my poems as yet.
—From “But you don’t look it”

Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis
A quick list of books I am reading, have recently read, or look forward to reading soon:

  • Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
  • Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
  • Sonnet L’Abbe’s Sonnet’s Shakespeare
  • Brandon Shimoda’s The Grave on the Wall
  • Alex Espinoza’s Cruising
  • Sarah Gambito’s Loves You
  • Duy Doan’s We Play a Game
  • Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay’s When Everything Was Everything

Gitan Djeli
Mamta Sagar’s performance of “A Poem to Darkness” in Kannada and English, from her collection Hide and Seek, embodies my exploration of voice as poetry—the timbre of language, the roll of the tongue, the musicality of the stress, and also the calligraphy of non-Roman alphabets in the written form. 

Taboo by Melizarani T. Selva and The Cowherd’s Son by Rajiv Mohabir are collections that also disrupt dominant monolingualisms. Their use of Malay, Bhojpuri, and Caribbean English explore the complexity of homing in tongues and the impossibility/necessity of translation.

I return to Audre Lorde’s The Black Unicorn, Assata Shakur’s poems (in her autobiography), Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Commitment, and Shailja Patel’s Migritude for their engagement with the poetic form from a space of political urgency.

On my reading list, I have Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos, Khairani Barokka’s Rope, and Shivanee Ramlochan’s Everyone Knows I am a Haunting.

Biswamit Dwibedy
Living in India over the last 10 years, I don’t get to buy very many books of contemporary American poetry; rather, they come as gifts. Chance rules what I read. 

The summer began with Cole Swensen’s Seventeen Summers, which I keep dipping into regularly. Then, her translations of Jean Fremon’s Now, Now, Louison and Hervé Le Tellier’s Atlas Inutilis, two marvelous books. I’m in the middle of To Look at the Sea Is to Become What One Is: An Etel Adnan Reader, which I bought in Abu Dhabi and will be reading all summer long. Also, Michel Serres, The Five Senses. I’m also doing a synchronized reading of Virginia Woolf’s journals and novels. Also, Creaturely Love by Dominic Pettman. The poet Tishani Doshi’s two novels, The Pleasure Seekers and Small Days and Nights—excellent. Then, the book without a title and page numbers, an installation by the poet Jill Magi, also a gift. Another gift—from my father—a collection of modernist Oriya poetry by Laxmi Kanta Mahapatra. 

Carolina Ebeid

  • 7 Days and Nights in the Desert [Tracing the Origin] by Sabrina Dalla Valle
  • Áqua Viva by Clarice Lispector, translated by Stefan Tobler
  • Cloud-Net by Cecilia Vicuña, translated by Rosa Alcalá
  • Obits. by Tess Liem
  • Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania edited by Jerome Rothenberg
  • The Black Maria by Aracelis Girmay
  • A Sand Book by Ariana Reines
  • The Vault (forthcoming) by Andrés Cerpa
  • The Word Pretty, essays by Elisa Gabbert
  • “Tithonus, 46 Minutes in the Life of Dawn” from Falling Awake by Alice Oswald
  • Sister Urn by Andrea Rexilius
  • What I Knew, a book-length poem by Eleni Sikelianos

Minal Hajratwala
When I’m called to dream beyond my own privilege, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Tonguebreaker and Meena Kandasamy’s Ms. Militancy pierce me. 

When I’m grieving what we’ve done to our planet, Camille T. Dungy’s Black Nature anthology reawakens my senses. Grieving my father, Jane Lin’s Day of Clean Brightness consoled me.

For pure line-by-line loveliness, Eileen Tabios’s HIRAETH: Tercets from the Last Archipelago sates my thirst for intelligence.

When I want to feel unabashed, biased pride, the beauty of next-gen books from the (Great) Indian Poetry Collective give me hope: Terrarium by Urvashi Bahuguna, How Many Countries Does the Indus Cross by Akhil Katyal, and Bird of the Indian Subcontinent by Subhashini Kaligotla. 

When nothing but Bombay will do, poet Jeet Thayil’s novel Narcopolis swallows me.

When I seek headline-fresh poetics, I surf the po’ blogs of Deborah A. Miranda and Bhanu Kapil.  

When future-me has time, she’s excited to dive into Cyborg Detective by Jillian Weise and HoodWitch by Faylita Hicks.

Kanya Kanchana
These books increase the sum total of freedom, beauty, knowledge, and enchantment in this world (and others). Recent reads/rereads:

  • Bhajju Shyam with Gita Wolf, Creation
  • Alejandro Jodorowsky and Jean “Mœbius” Giraud translated by R.J.M. Lofficier, The Incal
  • Diane Ackerman, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral
  • Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Mysticism of Music, Sound and Word
  • Geshe Chaphu translated by Keith Dowman, The Divine Madman: The Sublime Life and Songs of Drukpa Kunley
  • Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, Perfumes: The Guide
  • Ted Chiang, Exhalation
  • Umberto Eco translated by William Weaver, The Name of the Rose
  • Victor Pelevin translated by Andrew Bromfield, Buddha’s Little Finger
  • Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night
  • Roberto Calasso translated by Richard Dixon, Ardor
  • Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks
  • Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
  • Richard P. Feynman, The Meaning of It All
  • George Saunders, Congratulations, by the way
  • Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

Anu Lakhan
If you treat a writer of fiction like an imaginary friend, does that make them more real?

  • Shakespeare’s Kitchen, Lore Segal (soft sofa and crumbly biscuits friend)
  • Daniel Deronda, George Eliot (mentor, confidante)
  • “Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk,” Franz Kafka (paramour)
  • Crocodile, Anthony C. Winkler (uncle)
  • Death in Venice, Thomas Mann (we share a therapist)

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
In January 1890, in the town of Shahzadpur, a man in his late twenties enumerated the junk he saw lying around in the room of his mansion where an English saheb was to spend the night. Among the things it had to be cleared of were “the rusted lid of a kettle, a bottomless broken iron oven, a very dirty zinc sheet, the bottoms of some glass tumblers.” The list goes on for more than a page. In December 1912, the same man published six prose poems in this magazine. “On the day when the lotus bloomed,” went one, “alas, my mind was straying, and I knew it not.” Ezra Pound wrote a note introducing the poems. The poems and description of the room’s contents are both Rabindranath Tagore’s. The poems seem very much of their time; the insignificant list is timeless. It comes from a book I’m reading, Tagore’s Letters from a Young Poet 1887–1895 translated by Rosinka Chaudhuri. 

Nadia Misir
I live in a part of Queens that is closer to JFK airport than the nearest subway station. Commuting has always been a part of my writing process. This summer, when I am tethered to a hard seat on the Q37 bus en route to the A train, I read texts that ground me in what it means to grieve and write grief, to belong and un-belong.

  • Binyavanga Wainaina, One Day I Will Write About This Place
  • Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story
  • Neela Vaswani, You Have Given Me a Country
  • Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood
  • Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls
  • Rajiv Mohabir, The Cowherd’s Son
  • Marwa Helal, Invasive species
  • Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story
  • Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
  • Crystal Wilkinson, The Birds of Opulence
  • Kristin Dombek, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism

Karthika Naïr
Poetry:

Fiction:

Nonfiction:

  • Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe by Daniel Trilling
  • Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas
  • The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai by Ha Jin

Current rereads:

  • Jazz by Toni Morrison
  • Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
  • Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie, because it remains the go-to fable for all seasons, especially seasons such as these where freedom of expression and freedom of imagination are under threat; because this.

Rukmini Bhaya Nair
Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King. On a miracles-are-possible May morning in Atlanta earlier this year, a friend handed me an unassuming paperback in the edible color of chocolate. She said: “you have to read this.” Once I’d devoured the book, I understood why. Here was a compelling text for our hungry, urgent present.

Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule by M.K. Gandhi. At the King Center museum, the directions are tersely metaphorical: “Upstairs, please.” And sure enough, in that high room packed with Indian memorabilia, I feel in my ribs history’s sharpish nudge. For message prose that will stamp itself on your memory forever, like the best poetry, read this punchy Socratic classic by King’s fellow freedom fighter across the Atlantic.

Note for millennials: Gandhi was 40, King 35 when they made these impassioned declarations. Also on my desk, an indestructible old ziggurat:

  • Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable by E. Cobham Brewer (1870)
  • Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive by Henry Yule and A.C. Burnell (1886)
  • The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce (1911)
  • Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society by Raymond Williams (1976)
  • Dictionary of God and Goddesses by Michael Jordan (2005)

If poets are intrepid explorers of the verbal seas, are not lexicographers its valiant mapmakers?

Rochelle Potkar
I look for poems that disturb, those that tranquilize in my forever-coping mechanism over post-truth multiverses.

Books:

  • Creatures Great and Small, Manohar Shetty
  • Frazil, Menka Shivdasani
  • A Clock in the Far Past, Sarabjeet Garcha
  • Raindrops Chasing Raindrops, Paresh Tiwari
  • Letters to Namdeo Dhasal, Chandramohan S.

Poems:

  • Eunice de Souza, “Idyll” from A Necklace of Skulls: “Even the snakes bit/only to break the monotony.”
  • Raghavendra Madhu, “Spring”: “My memory of our pregnancy/is all kinds of red―/Peeling beetroots, chopping carrots/Deseeding pomegranates”
  • Sonnet Mondal, “Karmic Chanting” from the book of the same name: “Around this tree wearing the bangle of wild flowers./I will win the ear to hear/the song of moths”
  • Saima Afreen, “The sea knows the itinerary of pain”: “Its foams clean the alphabetical noise/disturbing the systole, diastole;/the salt stored on islets”

Anthology:

  • Goa: A Garland of Poems with Irish transcreations by Gabriel Rosenstock (edited by me), where voices unify across the Goan landscape of time

Also: Copper Coin and Paperwall publish riveting poetry collections.

Jennifer Robertson
Here’s a list of 13 poetry books I have been reading recently or revisiting consistently over the last few years. I have taken the liberty to include more Indian poets since they don’t necessarily get the accolades or attention they deserve internationally.

  • Urban Myths and Legends: Poems about Transformations, edited by Rachel Piercey and Emma Wright
  • Mean Free Path by Ben Lerner
  • Vanishing Acts: New and Selected Poems, 1985–2005 by Ranjit Hoskote
  • 60 Indian Poets edited by Jeet Thayil 
  • Life and Times of Mr. S by Vivek Narayanan
  • Slow Startle by Rohan Chhetri
  • Five Movements in Praise by Sharmistha Mohanty
  • Escape Artist by Sridala Swami
  • I Dreamt a Horse Fell From the Sky by Adil Jussawalla
  • Three Doors by Dion D’Souza
  • Confronting Love: Poems edited by Jerry Pinto and Arundhathi Subramaniam
  • Fractals by Sudeep Sen
  • Understanding Poetry by James Reeves

Francine Simon
I always come back to:

I am reading/loving:

  • “Everything is a deathly flower,” Maneo Mohale
  • Green Girl, Kate Zambreno
  • Becoming, Michelle Obama
  • Priestdaddy, Patricia Lockwood

I can’t wait to get my hands on:

  • A Sand Book, Ariana Reines
  • The Tradition, Jericho Brown
  • Lullaby, Leila Slimani

Christopher Spaide
In “Secret Labor,” her essay in Poetry six years back, the professor and comics expert Hillary Chute speculated that “the most fruitful analogy to comics might be poetry.” I was repeatedly, gratefully reminded of Chute’s words while reading Mark Alan Stamaty’s unsummarizably bonkers comic strip about New York City, MacDoodle St. (serialized 1978–79; reissued this spring by New York Review Comics). Jules Feiffer called MacDoodle St. the “cartoon equivalent of Perelman and Pynchon riding the subway during rush hour,” but it’s also a great american novel about a poet—namely (and what a name) Malcolm Frazzle, first seen “struggling over his latest contribution to ‘Dishwasher Monthly.’” From his very first words, Frazzle was a poet after my own heart, undertaking the secret labor of rhyming with the methodical absurdity it deserves: “‘hands reaching into sudsy water’……daughter, slaughter, oughter…‘hands reaching into watery suds’……duds, buds, cruds…‘hands reaching into soapy liquid’…rid, squid.”

This year, my most revisited poetry in translation has been Emily Jungmin Yoon’s Against Healing: Nine Korean Poets from the Tilted Axis Press Translating Feminisms series. If (when!) there are libraries filled with these and other Korean poets in translation, anthologies like Yoon’s will seem like the first seams of light peeking around the door. Here’s the end of Shin Hyeon-Rim’s “The Ways You Lonely People Figure Out Love,” which tunes to some sorry erotic static between Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese (“How do I love thee?”) and that contemporary collective unconscious, Google Autocomplete:

How do you love? Everything’s a bother
How do you love? With my covert masturbation
How do you love? Love is difficult, but sex is more so
How do you love? No comment
How do you love? I’m not here

Sridala Swami
Poetry:

  • These Were My Homes: Collected Poems, Vijay Nambisan
  • Love Without a Story, Arundhathi Subramaniam
  • Out of Syllabus, Sumana Roy
  • American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, Terrance Hayes
  • The Thunder Matters: 101 Poems for the Planet, edited by Alice Oswald

Not poetry:

Currently reading/TBR pile:

  • The Old Drift, Namwali Serpell
  • The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction, edited by Tarun K. Saint
  • Romola, George Eliot
  • Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Rob Macfarlane
  • Letters to Namdeo Dhasal, Chandramohan S.

   

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

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