From Poetry Magazine

Reading List: October 2019

BY Holly Amos

Originally Published: October 18, 2019
White text on a pink background. The text reads "No one is possible until everyone is./On this one truth, never compromise." It's attributed to Joshua Sassoon Orol.

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

Dilruba Ahmed
Reading/re-reading:

Reading next:

Eagerly anticipating:

William Archila
Here is a list of some poetry collections, fiction, and nonfiction I’m currently reading, teaching, or planning to read. Some are old favorites that I find myself revisiting through the years. 

  • Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic
  • Francisco Aragon, His Tongue a Swath of Sky 
  • Carolyn Forché, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance
  • Alexandra Lytton Regalado, MATRIA
  • The poems of Wilfred Owen
  • Campbell McGrath, XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century
  • Natalie Diaz, When My Brother Was an Aztec
  • Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
  • Patricia Parkman, Nonviolent Insurrection in El Salvador 
  • Pablo Neruda, Passions and Impressions, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden and edited by Matilde Neruda
  • Eduardo Galeano, Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina

Ruth Awad
I consider these collections to be my recent poetry canon:

Prose I return to:

  • Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
  • My Body Is a Book of Rules by Elissa Washuta
  • Above All Men by Eric Shonkwiler 
  • The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser

And Mashrou’ Leila’s album Ibn El Leil is poetry you can both cry and dance to.

John Lee Clark

  • Emily K. Michael’s Neoteny
  • Petra Kuppers’s Gut Botany 
  • Kelly Davio’s The Book of the Unreal Woman
  • Avery M. Guess’s The Truth Is
  • Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master, edited by Meg Day and Niki Herd
  • Lieke Marsman, The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes, trans. by Sophie Collins
  • Kathi Wolfe’s Love and Kumquats: New and Selected Poems
  • The Bone Setter by Travis Chi Wing Lau

Brandon Downing
Oh man, am I reading. I’m reading poetry—ageless Clark Coolidge’s POET, Blunt Research Group’s The Work-Shy, John Beer’s Lucinda, Eugene Ostashevsky’s The Feeling Sonnets. And not poetry—I am Ashurbanipal: King of the World, King of Assyria, Michael Benson’s Space Odyssey, Jean Stein’s West of Eden, and two immersive classics by Simon Schama—Landscape and Memory and The Embarrassment of Riches, the Knopf editions. That’s kind of what I’m reading.

S.J. Fowler
I don’t read many poems. I have to do that for work a lot so it’s a busman’s holiday now. However, I do want to just list those whose work I know (and inevitably know in person, and like) whom I think are really underappreciated in England, because there are so many of them who aren’t well-known since their work is challenging but without a bio hook. But then I’ve got to choose from hundreds. Really—hundreds. Instead, to tell the truth, these books are good food for my own machine of poems:

  • The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery O’Connor
  • John Barleycorn, Jack London
  • Days Without End, Sebastian Barry
  • The Master of Mankind (Horus Heresy series), Aaron Dembski-Bowden
  • Journey to the End of Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline
  • The Land of Ulro, Czeslaw Milosz
  • The Great Fall, Peter Handke
  • From King of Karachi to Lockdown in the Costa Del Crime: Meet the International Smuggler Who Dominated Europe’s Worst Prison, Chet Sandhu
  • Lanny, Max Porter

Naoko Fujimoto
Here is my un-“tsundoku” of book lists:

  • Mariam Gomaa, Between the Shadow & the Soul 
  • David Welch, Everyone Who Is Dead
  • Carlo Matos, The Quitters 
  • Nick Sousanis, Unflattening
  • Dara Yen Elerath, The Dark Braid (forthcoming)

torrin a. greathouse
Having just started my MFA is affording me the rare opportunity to sit back and read, diving into genres that I have long neglected, plus reading new poetry collections and returning to old favorites. Dream Work by Mary Oliver is the poetic bible of my youth, and reading it again after her death has meant a lot. I’ve also revisited Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds, reading it alongside Ocean’s new novel. I also finally had the opportunity to read Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, which utterly cracked me open. There’s been a glut of great poetry books in my life lately, but a few standouts are Brian Teare’s Doomstead Days, Michael Lee’s The Only Worlds We Know, Ryan Walsh’s Reckonings, and George Abraham’s forthcoming full-length collection, Birthright.

Zoë Hitzig
Jana Prikryl’s No Matter and Jennifer Soong’s Near, At are two stunning collections that came out in the past few months. Some of my favorite moments in both books are inquisitive reflections prompted by collisions between the built and natural environments. In “Utterances of the October Aside,” Soong writes, “here’s a corner I recognize—sunlight/strikes again through my neighbor’s yard. Who’s to say it’s trespass/when the sun’s entered and left the gate open?” Many of Prikryl’s poems are projections, written at “the shores of speculation.” In “Snapshot,” a poem mapping the topography of an underwater New York, Prikryl’s speaker quips, “How pleased is the subway/to lose the distinction/of being alone in being under everything.”

Richie Hofmann
One Lark, One Horse by Michael Hofmann. There are not many poets as singular or enjoyable or profound. I love the beauty, wit, and rareness of these poems.

Song of Songs by Sylvie Baumgartel. A book-length poem showing sexual desire at its rawest: gross, dangerous, beautiful, intense, and shocking—even to me!

Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser. Immense in every way. Moser’s writing is as smart and stylish as his subject.

Find Me by André Aciman. I’m obsessed with Call Me by Your Name, and I’m relishing this indulgent sequel—sex, sculptures, food, villas: everything a person could want from a novel or from life.

Yuxi Lin
I’ve been reading about grief this month, with both personal and species grief in mind. Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of is a powerful work and artifact on grief using poetry and photography. The unique form crosses the boundaries of the page to convey a loss that is at once transgressive and sweeping. The subject of mourning, a brother, is bluntly cut out of family photographs, and the absence makes me imagine the rough nail of death scratching out a life. In the meantime, Anne Boyer’s The Undying discusses a mourning of the self in surviving cancer—how the patient is erased in a relentless, profit-driven system, where “a diagnosed person is liberated from what she once thought of as herself.” Meanwhile, I’m revisiting Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies while mourning the death of our planet. I’m slowly reading it in German and translating it for myself to make sense of the vastness of such grief: “Surely it would be strange, to inhabit the earth no longer,/to no longer practice habits barely learned,/roses, and other promised things/not given meaning of a human future.” 

Joyce Carol Oates
In recent months my reading has had an air of desperation about it. Having difficulty with my “own” writing—still more, with my (disintegrating) life—I find myself turning to the work of others for solace of the most rudimentary nature as well as for other, loftier (i.e. aesthetic) pleasures.  

Poetry:

Prose:

  • Binnie Kirshenbaum—Rabbits for Food
  • Ocean Vuong—On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
  • Etgar Keret—Fly Already
  • Michal Govrin—The Name
  • Dino Buzzati—Catastrophe: And Other Stories
  • Mary Cregan—The Scar: A Personal History of Depression and Recovery
  • Colson Whitehead—The Nickel Boys 
  • Karen Russell—Orange World: And Other Stories
  • Casey Cep—Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

Carl Phillips
Kathleen Graber, The River Twice. Once again Graber brings her signature style of seeming non sequitur to philosophical inquiry, this time especially focusing on America as it is now, which is to say that Graber offers another option for what might be meant by the political poet. This is a quiet, confident sequence of poems that could only come from a life lived deeply and thoughtfully.

Jane Mead, To the Wren: Collected & New Poems, 1991–2019. Mead has been an essential voice for me for more than twenty years. The new poems here confirm that she was writing some of the strongest poems of her career when she died this year. There’s an almost mystic sensibility—the poems are a wonder book, not just from a life, but toward the life that, if we’re lucky, might be possible.

Jake Skeets, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers. The blurbs for this book all avoid saying what these poems are about, which is telling. The poems are strange, make me rethink what words can do, and braid bewilderment with instruction. Autobiography, theme—these can seem beside the point, for Skeets. I feel invited to live all over again, but this time better, smarter for the wounds incurred along the way.

Max Porter
I’ve got three big books by the bed, which I’m dipping in and out of: 

And the collections I’ve most enjoyed recently:

  • Love and I, Fanny Howe
  • Sergius Seeks Bacchus, Norman Erikson Pasaribu, translated by Tiffany Tsao
  • Without Protection, Gala Mukomolova
  • The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, Hanif Abdurraqib
  • Contains Mild Peril, Fran Lock

And the best collection I read this year: The Dream of Reason, Jenny George. It was recommended to me by the poet I love and trust most these days, Rachael Allen, whose first collection, Kingdomland, is one of the best books published in the UK in years.

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
I have always resonated with Kafka’s notion that a book “must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Though how we interpret that frozen sea and what it harbors is up to us. Grief and wound, yes, but also rolling thunderous laughter, the gracious ache of what is beautiful, the ability to think what has otherwise been suffocated from thought, to feel what we’ve been unfelt from. These are writings that have been obsessing me in more recent months.

  • Ross Gay, The Book of Delights
  • Aditi Machado, This Touch
  • Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study
  • Asma Abbas, Another Love: A Politics of the Unrequited
  • Aracelis Girmay, The Black Maria
  • Aimee Bahng, Migrant Futures
  • Ashaki M. Jackson, Surveillance
  • Gabriela Mistral, Madwomen (Randall Couch, trans.)
  • Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman, trans.)
  • Denise Ferreira da Silva, On Difference without Separability
  • Clarice Lispector, Água Viva, (Idra Novey, trans.)

Fred Schmalz
Like many people, I tend to be reading a gang of things at once, for various reasons. Here are some books I’m currently/recently amped about.

Four books at the intersection of art and writing:

Three poetry titles I am digging/re-digging:

  • Safe Houses I Have Known—Steve Healey
  • Trilce—César Vallejo (I’m comparing several translations of this)
  • Deepstep Come Shining—C.D. Wright

Two Cages I am deep into at the moment:

  • I–VI (lectures)—John Cage 
  • Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) (diaries)—John Cage

One book about sound, recording, and ghosts:

  • High Static, Dead Lines: Sonic Spectres and the Object Hereafter—Kristen Gallerneaux

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

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