The Poetry Foundation's 2019 Staff Picks

As 2019 winds down, we take a look at a few of the standout books read by the Poetry Foundation's staff this year.

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Stefania Gomez, Education and Youth Services Assistant

Jericho Brown's brilliant book The Tradition (Copper Canyon) was the best thing I read this year. It might have arrived to him while digging into the dirt out front of his house, where he found a vocabulary to talk about the inherited violence "men like [him] and [his] brothers" both face and themselves enact. Like a garden, what lies below ground in Brown's personal history is complex and unattractive. There is shame, compromise, and above all, complicity: "I love my mother. I love black women/ Who plant flowers as sheepish as their sons." The Tradition is painted with the stark colors of William Carlos Williams poems, and its voices ask pointed, exacting, Gwendolyn Brooks-like questions: "What didn't we want?," men at a card table, and men in general, ask. "What wouldn't we claim?" The result is not bleak, but lush and nuanced, and throughout, Brown's rendering of love and intimacy between Black men sprout like seeds. "My God," he writes, "we leave things green." 

I also loved Sara Borjas's Heart Like A Window, Mouth Like A Cliff, which unfolds like a slow-motion video of a building demolition, with the power of total destruction. Borjas's relationship to the city of Fresno, her family, her Chicanx identity, and intimate partners are the fault lines of the book, threatening to swallow her whole at any moment. We cannot even trust Borjas herself to be stable, to tell the truth or to tell the whole story. "I make things up that I want for myself," Borjas writes, and asks us to live with her in this surprising, devastating, made-up landscape. Heart Like A Window reminded me why the fictions we invent for ourselves can outlast reality, that what is fractured can sometimes be stronger than what is whole. As she puts it: "I once heard/ that the world breaks everyone. That afterwards,/ many are stronger at the broken places. I wish/ a whole woman would wake up inside of me."

Michelle Martinez, Permissions Coordinator

Deborah Landau's Soft Targets (Copper Canyon) explores the cognitive dissonance of living a quotidian, often comfortable life during an era of physical, political, and environmental precarity. The collection is frank about humanity's ills—"We've failed the planet has published our failures. / Our crimes are perpetual methane and sweltering, arrogant and endless"—while refusing to forget that "we were lustrous from time to time." That luster, Landau suggests, may not redeem us, but it might just sustain us.

Jeremy Lybarger, Features Editor

The collection I've returned to most this year is Gillian Conoley's A Little More Red Sun on the Human (Nightboat Books). It's a nearly-300-page compilation of Conoley's restless, often enigmatic poems, and it demonstrates—to me anyway—why she's one of America's most singular voices. Two other books I can't shake: Karl Tierney's posthumously published Have You Seen This Man? (Sibling Rivalry Press), which is an alternately radiant and tragic slice-of-queer-life at the height of AIDS, and The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman (City Lights), which finally gathers, between two covers, the torrential majesty of a poet who should be better known.

Sara Wintz, Harriet Staff Writer

Lee Ann Roripaugh's tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (Milkweed Editions) rocked my world. Creative, tragic, imaginative, and, like the tsunami—it devastates.

Liz O'Connell-Thompson, Media Associate

This year, I really loved Space Struck (Sarabande Books) by Paige Lewis. The way the book moves from moments of everyday breath-catching panic ("On the Train, a Man Snatches My Book") to small and expanding apocalypses ("When They Find the Ark") to sharp celebrations of love ("When I Tell My Husband I Miss the Sun, He Knows") feels thrilling and exactly right.

Katherine Litwin, Library Director

"I": New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press) by Toi Derricotte.

Maggie Queeney, Library Coordinator

Claire Wahmanholm's Wilder (Milkweed Editions) is a strange, stunning, and deeply unsettling book. Set in an otherworld where destruction is transformational, and grief devotional, Wahmanholm's poems sound the limits of the known world, the worlds we build of our knowing, and the dread and awe of living at the end of the world. This lived dissonance manifests formally, in the rhymes that drive many of the poems closed, steady as clock hand, and the diversity of forms, which evoke both wonder and delight by the space and abundance created. At the end of one of the hottest year ever recorded, at the end of the hottest decade ever recorded, an erasure of Sagan's Cosmos, draped along the white space of disappeared language on Wahmanholm's page, resonates: "We know that our universe / is / merely a / glimpse of the / end."

Corina Copp, Harriet Staff Writer

• Me & Other Writing (Dorothy Press), Marguerite Duras, translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan
• An Interface for a Fractal Landscape (Ugly Duckling Presse), Ed Steck
• Hinge Pictures: Eight Women Artists Occupy the Third Dimension Siglio Press + Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans), edited by Andrea Andersson
• Our Death (Commune Editions), Sean Bonney
• Embracing the Sparrow-Wall or 1 Schumann-Madness (OOMPH! Press), Friederike Mayröcker, translated by Jonathan Larson
• The Neckless Spokesperson of the Garden of Unearthly Delights (Face Press, UK), John DeWitt

Michael Slosek, Web Editor

Hannah Brooks-Motl's Earth (The Song Cave) was published this fall, and since its publication this remarkable collection has been a companion that has grown richer with each engagement. I was already an admirer of Brooks-Motl's two previous titles, but Earth feels like a breakthrough, offering poetry that is truly innovative and sets the reader in (wonderfully) unfamiliar terrain, and it makes one wonder how any of these poems became possible (a very satisfying thing). The poems in Earth read as dream material solidifying into something tactile and tangibly present, only to unravel back to elemental points of articulation, and then to continue to animate between these states. Each poem unfolds slowly and spaciously over the course of several pages, giving the reader space to absorb Brooks-Motl's music, intellect, and mastery of language, while activating an exceptionally wide range of what might be possible in poetry. As always, The Song Cave provides a beautiful design that seems to arise organically from the writing and makes the book a glorious object to handle. In 2020 I'm hoping to see more poets and writers engage with Earth, which deserves more attention and conversation than it has thus far received.