From Poetry Magazine

Reading List: September 2019

BY Holly Amos

Originally Published: September 17, 2019
Gray text on an off-white background reads "What word, what act, / was it we thought did not matter?" The text is attributed to Jane Hirshfield.

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

Aria Aber
Currently I’m in Afghanistan, my parents’ war-torn home country, for the first time in my life, and I took with me books of the diaspora that held me and helped me while I was growing up in exile. Rereading them here rearranges the molecules of my writerly brain, letting me think through formal problems in an enlightening way. 

Dan Beachy-Quick
I’ve spent winter into summer’s end trying to learn how to think. I’m not sure I’ve gained much ground, but it’s influenced my reading in curious ways.

Not-exactly-poetry books that I’m reading:

  • Heraclitus’s fragments, which I’m translating myself
  • Martin Heidegger, Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic
  • Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit
  • Laura Dassow Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life

From recent years’ grappling with Ezra Pound:

  • Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era
  • Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos

And poetry I’ve been much moved by, heart and head:

A.K. Blakemore
I just finished Clarice Lispector’s queer, humane, deeply cute swan song, Hour of the Star—a novella about a girl so poor that all she eats is hot dogs, and “sometimes ... a bologna sandwich.” Next, I have another novella, Nina Leger’s The Collection, translated by Laura Francis. I can’t remember the last time I’ve looked forward to having a novel in my hands so much since Harry Potter (to reassure you, I was born in 1991)—and I intend to read it slowly, with relish, and perhaps a little embarrassment if on public transport. 

In terms of poetry, this month was about baby’s first Alice Oswald—I read Memorial. It was sad and predictably good. And I keep finding myself returning to Daddy Poem, Helen Charman’s pamphlet from Edinburgh’s excellent SPAM Press—a sometimes-devastating, always-lucid account of life under heteropatriarchy, with extra tinned peaches.

Henri Cole
Mary Ruefle’s Selected Poems. What an original sensibility. She untangles poetic propriety. The mundane becomes enchantment. I am so eager to read her new book, Dunce.

Frederick Seidel’s Peaches Goes It Alone. He seems at once innocent and transgressive, solemn and funny, eloquent and refreshing. He is an important American poet.

Eileen Myles’s Afterglow. I adored this book. It’s a prose poem, really, for Rosie, Myles’s beloved dead dog.

Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance. This play is meant to be a new generation’s Angels in America, and it’s possible Lopez has written a masterpiece. I’ve bought tickets to see it on Broadway and can’t wait.

Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast. There are a half-dozen poems in this first book that are knockouts. It’s minimalism that bites.

Marilyn Chin’s A Portrait of the Self as Nation: New and Selected Poems. She writes poems of private feeling, of politics, and of history, but her activism does not prevent her from attending to aesthetics.

James Merrill’s The Book of Ephraim (annotated and introduced by Stephen Yenser). What a glorious American poem, republished with a hundred pages of sensitive commentary by Merrill’s poet friend.  

Kevin Coval
Because I’m an editor for Haymarket Books’ BreakBeat Poets imprint, I stay reading what comes through the door and what’s about to drop in the world.

I’m currently too excited about Idris Goodwin’s Can I Kick It? and the next anthology, BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT, edited by Felicia Rose Chavez, José Olivarez, and Willie Perdomo. I cannot wait to read Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium and Raych Jackson’s Even the Saints Audition. This summer I was reading National Youth Poet Laureate Kara Jackson’s Bloodstone Cowboy, Tommy Pico’s Junk, and Marcus Jackson’s Pardon My Heart, and was listening thoroughly to Little Brother’s May the Lord Watch.

Sadiqa de Meijer
Books that I’ve read lately, or am reading now, and recommend include:

  • How She Read by Chantal Gibson (“My silence is a sentence”)
  • A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott (“It’s the fairy tale that keeps Canada’s conscience clear”)
  • The Western Alienation Merit Badge by Nancy Jo Cullen (“The worst thing about taking the high road was no one knew you were taking the fucking high road”)
  • Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (“There we stood in the cold, damp room, in the frosty vacuum prevailing at this dull, grey time of night, and it crossed my mind that the thing that leaves the body sucks a piece of the world after it, and no matter how good or bad it was, how guilty or blameless, it leaves behind a great big void”)

Eamon Grennan
Here are three Irish books, recently read by me, which others might find interesting. One is Milkman by Anna Burns. The second is Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe. Both deal, in very different ways (the first a novel, the second a very original extended piece of creative reporting) with The Troubles (the Northern Ireland conflict), but each gives an extraordinary account of what it must have been to live inside those terrible years when The Troubles were at their peak. The third book is a novel by Niall Williams, called History of the Rain, which is a remarkable story of a young woman—the narrator—and constitutes a colorfully impressive (in style and substance), deeply sympathetic portrait of aspects of rural Ireland.

C.R. Grimmer
It is almost fall, which means I am reviewing desk copies for potential texts to teach. My process is to reach out to presses and ask them which authors in their catalogue correspond to my courses’ topics, as well as which authors might record a video or podcast episode to accompany teaching their text. They are teachable in part because their work is in that golden zone of exceeding pedagogical explanation. They also heavily influenced my own current projects. Here is in an incomplete handful of those texts:

  • Grand Marronage by Irène Mathieu
  • Grief Sequence by Prageeta Sharma
  • Stay by Tanya Olson
  • The Tradition by Jericho Brown
  • Overpour by Jane Wong
  • Brother Bullet by Casandra López
  • undercurrent by Rita Wong

This year there are also artists, scholars, and poets whose work inspires me to try new methods in my multimodal, interdisciplinary projects:

Carolyn Guinzio
The Lost Girls Book of Divination by Letisia Cruz is gorgeous as both book and object. Evocative, mysterious text is punctuated with remarkable illustrations, and it strikes an elusive balance between intensity and lightness of touch. The opening section, “The River,” concludes with a woman gazing placidly out of the page, bearing signs of tribulation and sorrow, with the caption “There is no river.” Simplicity and energy, balanced. It ends with a gift: a colorful deck of invented divination cards. It must be held in the hands to be truly appreciated.

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather. I love the episodic nature of Cather’s novels, and the leap between her first novel and this, her second, is astonishing. It fills me with hope.

King Charles III by Mike Bartlett. Written in blank verse, this vivid and delicious play opens with the funeral of Elizabeth II and imagines the modern-day reign of Charles.

Gwendolyn Harper
I’m a slow reader and always feel that I should be reading more. I’ve just finished (the idea of “finished” here feeling tentative—perhaps I’ll have to leap back into its uneasy whirl) Lynne Tillman’s novel Cast in Doubt, which I picked up, somewhat mysteriously, at a second-hand bookstore and during a period in which a lot of older bits of my life were hitting me in the face, if not necessarily in a bad way. I opened the book, and my name, Gwen, hit me in the face, too. Well, I said, flustered, buying time. Cast in Doubt is exhausting, marvelous, a game, not to be taken seriously, and yet somehow full of glimpses of the gaps—between two people, between one thought and the next, between a name and a homonym, between what we mean to do and what we find ourselves doing.

Ostap Kin
Recently read/currently reading:

  • Ishion Hutchinson, House of Lords and Commons
  • Joan Murray, Drafts, Fragments, and Poems, edited by Farnoosh Fathi
  • Jana Prikryl, The After Party
  • Anna Świrszczyńska, Building the Barricade, translated by Piotr Florczyk
  • The Poems of T.S. Eliot. Volume 1: Collected and Uncollected Poems, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue
  • Jan Wagner, The Art of Topiary, translated by David Keplinger
  • Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad, edited by Polina Barskova

beyza ozer
These are some works I’ve had the pleasure of enjoying for the first time, and some I circle back to because of the light they provide:

Bruce Smith

  • Stephanie Burt, Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems
  • Maureen N. McLane, Some Say: Poems
  • Lewis Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past
  • Donna Stonecipher, The Cosmopolitan and Prose Poetry and the City
  • Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate
  • Clarice Lispector, The House of the Star and The Passion According to G.H.
  • Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector
  • Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End
  • Tonya M. Foster, A Swarm of Bees in High Court
  • James Longenbach, How Poems Get Made
  • Roberto Bolaño, 2666
  • Tiana Clark, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood

Susan Stewart
In these late summer weeks, I have been reading:

  • The new edition of the poems of Margaret Cavendish, Poems and Fancies (with The Animal Parliament)
  • R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature
  • Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time
  • Mark Williams, Moon: Nature and Culture
  • The Library of America edition of J.J. Audubon’s Writings and Drawings
  • Gregor von Rezzori’s novel An Ermine in Czernopol

And three new books of poetry from China: 

  • Peter Feng’s Speculative Patient, which he wrote in English
  • Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s translation of Ye Lijun’s My Mountain Country
  • Ming Di’s anthology New Poetry from China 1917–2017

Amy Woolard
Usually, when I’m feeling pretty down because “I haven’t been writing in a long time,” the problem is almost always actually “I haven’t been reading in a long time.” These are the ones that’ve taken up residency beside my bed and in my brain of late:

  • Discipline by Jane Yeh
  • Baby, I Don’t Care by Chelsey Minnis
  • The Tradition by Jericho Brown
  • Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom
  • Hold Still: A Memoir with photographs by Sally Mann
  • Human Hours by Catherine Barnett
  • The Wilderness by Sandra Lim
  • The World Doesn’t Require You by Rion Amilcar Scott
  • Grand Marronage by Irène Mathieu
  • Bootleg by Annie Woodford
  • Second Empire by Richie Hofmann
  • Actual Air by David Berman
  • Plasma by Bradley Paul
  • All of Lucie Brock-Broido’s books, always

These are the ones I reckon will join that stack (they’re either not-yet released or just-released):

Finally, killing me softly: Neko Case, Lucy Dacus, and Sharon Van Etten, on repeat.

Matthew Zapruder
The book that made the greatest impact on me recently was one I heard Elisa Gabbert talk about on a podcast. Józef Czapski and his fellow soldiers were (unbeknownst to them, and for unknown reasons) among a few hundred Polish army officers spared execution by Soviet forces in 1940. They were put in a prison camp, and to while away the time, decided to give each other lectures. Czapski lectured on Proust, without any access to any books. Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp is a gorgeous, moving, instructive text, translated by Eric Karpeles, with facsimiles of original notes and diagrams. I’ve also been reading George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and a wonderful biography by Leslie Stainton, Lorca: A Dream of Life. As well as Anthony McCann’s marvelous Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff, an essential book about our weird, current American moment.

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

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