From Poetry Magazine

Reading List: April 2020

BY Holly Amos

Originally Published: April 27, 2020
C768ed47fb0d721c6f0a8e5857a52ea89d71ce96

The Reading List is a feature of Poetry’s Editors’ Blog. This month, contributors to the April 2020 issue share some recommendations.

Joshua Bennett
Between mapping out courses for next term, and working on a new book concerned with the relationship between “earth” and “world” in African American poetry—as well as what this distinction has to do with an irreducibly Black vision of the possibilities contained within those concepts, and other, related terms like apocalypse—I’ve been reading and rereading a few different books that I wanted to share with you all:

  • Lerone Bennett, Jr., The Negro Mood
  • João Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment
  • Lucille Clifton, Good News About the Earth
  • David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History
  • St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City
  • Marwa Helal, Invasive species
  • Vincent J. Intondi, African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement
  • June Jordan, Directed by Desire
  • Sylvia Wynter, The Hills of Hebron

Sumita Chakraborty
I’m writing this on March 18, and that marks one week since the university where I teach decided to go virtual, which for me personally was the beginning of my mind becoming a largely pandemic-centric playground. Since then, I’ve become unusually distractible. Maybe that’s true of you, too? I’m grateful to these books for demanding and beguiling and ensnaring what attention I can muster, or having entered my mind immediately before this peculiar now.

Poetry:

Fiction:

  • Ninety-Nine Stories of God, Joy Williams
  • Weather, Jenny Offill
  • War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (for #TolstoyTogether, with thanks to Yiyun Li, Carl Phillips, and Garth Greenwell)
  • Outline, Rachel Cusk
  • Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
  • Real Life, Brandon Taylor

Nonfiction:

  • Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Cathy Park Hong
  • Abandon Me, Melissa Febos
  • Shaming into Brown: Somatic Transactions of Race in Latina/o Literature, Stephanie Fetta
  • Essays One, Lydia Davis
  • Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino
  • American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman, Max Cavitch
  • Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, Saidiya Hartman
  • The Crying Book, Heather Christle

Tishani Doshi
These are the books on my bedside table:

  • Journeys by Stefan Zweig
  • The Years by Annie Ernaux 
  • Death Is Hard Work by Khaled Khalifa
  • Beyond Aesthetics by Wole Soyinka
  • Sudden Traveler by Sarah Hall 
  • Walking on the Ceiling by Ayşegül Savaş
  • The Art of Voice by Tony Hoagland
  • Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton
  • Upstream by Mary Oliver
  • Good Talk by Mira Jacob
  • The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls by Mona Eltahawy
  • The Twice-Born by Aatish Taseer
  • Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz
  • Trances of the Blast by Mary Ruefle

Jeannine Hall Gailey
Here’s a list of books stacked by the bed right now—subjects include witchery, apocalypses, politics, mermaids, meditations on prettiness, and writing. (Zucker’s “Residency” should be required reading before every writer’s first residency.) Spiky, angry, funny, and frightening writing. 

Michael Hofmann
I try to read somehow consecutively, or rationally, like a domino piece. Just now, it was Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, which I balked at as a teenager, but what a tremendous book, full of dimly visible, sharp scenes. So much of it is set at night, or in the gloaming. I followed that with Carolyn Forché’s What You Have Heard Is True, a memoir of her association with El Salvador from the eighties to the present, from ingenue to activist. To begin with, it seemed suspiciously full of dialogue, but by the end I had a sense that there was nothing there that the author didn’t want there. As they say in those parts, “so far from God, so close to the USA.” Two somehow crystalline books. Next up, Joan Didion’s Salvador.

Harmony Holiday
I’m finally reading my yoga anatomy book and taking notes. It’s called Yoga Anatomy. So far I’ve learned the heart is like a third lung. Besides that, The Waves by Virginia Woolf, Fred Moten’s All that Beauty, James Baldwin’s collected interviews in Conversations with James Baldwin, Michael S. Harper’s Dear John, Dear Coltrane, and I’m digging into Marx. The multitasking helps stave off quarantine redundancy and somehow all of these texts have started to collectively improvise in my thinking, which is nice. 

Lucy Ives
I am reading about, and/or reading, a number of things. I don’t get into a lot of contemporary analytic philosophy, but an artist I recently met recommended philosopher Mark Johnston’s book Surviving Death, as well as this interview with him, particularly in relation to my interest in Madeline Gins’s life and writing. And I am reading Cathy Park Hong’s essay on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s death in her new essay collection, Minor Feelings.

Joy Ladin
Lately, my reading has been completely driven by anxiety (I can’t stop reading news updates and commentary) and teaching. For a law school class on unreliable narratives, I’ve read short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Junichiro Tanizaki, and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, poems by Lucille Clifton, Patricia Smith, Robert Frost, and Frank Bidart, excerpts from Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, and C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, Harry Frankfurt’s all-too-relevant philosophical essay “On Bullshit,” and Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility.” For an undergraduate survey of early American literature, I’ve read Red Jacket’s eloquent critiques of white assaults on Native American land and culture, the Declaration of Independence and Danielle Allen’s wonderful commentary, Our Declaration, letters between John and Abigail Adams, and short stories by Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

For poetic inspiration, I’ve turned to Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead, Sharon Olds’s Odes, and Marcia Falk’s translation of the mystical Israeli poet Zelda.

Sally Wen Mao
I’m haunted by the prescient lines in Kim Yideum’s Hysteria (translated by Jake Levine, Soeun Seo, and Hedgie Choi):

I got rid of the idea that I was the only special one.
I’m like any of the billions of germ carriers
who barely missed being selected, another person
who had the luck to live without knowing what my potential was:
a fully-developed disease.

I love that Eileen Chang has a mean narrator in Lust, Caution (translated by Julia Lovell, Karen S. Kingsbury, Janet Ng with Janice Wickeri, Simon Patton, and Eva Hung).

I’m working my way through Bei Dao’s Landscape Over Zero (translated by David Hinton with Yanbing Chen), Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, Lucille Clifton’s Mercy, and Yukiko Motoya’s The Lonesome Bodybuilder (translated by Asa Yoneda).

To-read still:

  • Kim Hyesoon, A Drink of Red Mirror (translated by Jiwon Shin, Lauren Albin, Sue Hyon Bae)
  • Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H. (translated by Idra Novey)
  • Eve Babitz, Black Swans
  • Takako Arai, Factory Girls (translated by Jeffrey Angles, Jen Crawford, Carol Hayes, Rina Kikuchi, You Nakai, and Sawako Nakayasu)
  • Heather Christle, The Crying Book

Shane Neilson
Mark Abley’s The Organist: Fugues, Fatherhood, and a Fragile Mind has been a friend as I write out my own intergenerational memoir of disability. Abley considers his father’s life with a bafflement that I think is an ideal way to approach pain. Why, we ask; and we cannot know, but story serves as answer. A beautiful story is, perhaps, the better answer.

Geoffrey Cook’s Afterwords is a wonderful collection of translations of Goethe, Heine, Rilke, and Brecht. I caught up with Geoff at a Montreal eatery recently and told him I thought the work on Heine was devastating. He responded, “Maybe it’s because I was working on those translations after I had broken my back.” That made sense: Geoff translated Heine’s work composed after the great poet wrote from his bed in the last few years of his life. The arduous sadness of Heine’s words came through in Geoff’s version like this: “Some mornings the poet’s corpse-/like hand tried to record the sweet and ghastly orgia.”

Andrea Charise’s The Aesthetics of Senescence is a genius-level contribution to aging studies that, best thing of all, starts with poetry! Because all good scholarly things (all things, period?) start with poetry.

R.M. Vaughan’s Contemporary Art Hates You is a sharp little chapbook that critiques contemporary art, but is written in the form of poetry. It’s funny, true, and doubles as a critique of poetry culture.

Pascale Petit
Some collections I’ve loved:

  • Notes from the Divided Country by Suji Kwock Kim
  • Dear Big Gods by Mona Arshi
  • Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods by Tishani Doshi
  • Spikenard by Yvonne Reddick (chapbook)
  • When the Tree Falls by Jane Clarke
  • Surge by Jay Bernard
  • A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson
  • Noctuary by Niall Campbell

I’ve been reading as a judge for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize since December, so I haven’t kept up with the current poetry titles, but here are some already out or soon to be published that I’m particularly looking forward to:

  • In the Lateness of the World by Carolyn Forché
  • Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod by Traci Brimhall
  • Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz
  • Notes from the North by Suji Kwock Kim (chapbook)
  • Antiemetic for Homesickness by Romalyn Ante
  • Tongues of Fire by Seán Hewitt
  • Come Down by Fiona Sampson
  • Saffron Jack by Rishi Dastidar
  • Staying Human, edited by Neil Astley
  • Afterwardness by Mimi Khalvati
  • Beethoven Variations by Ruth Padel
  • Rendang by Will Harris

Katie Pyontek
Books I’ve been reading or anticipating lately:

  • HHhH, Laurent Binet (translated by Sam Taylor)
  • Stay, Illusion, Lucie Brock-Broido
  • Queenie, Candice Carty-Williams
  • Slow Lightning, Eduardo C. Corral
  • Kingdom Animalia, Aracelis Girmay
  • Too Loud a Solitude, Bohumil Hrabal (translated by Michael Henry Heim)
  • Human Acts, Han Kang (translated by Deborah Smith)
  • Gathering Moss, Robin Wall Kimmerer
  • Bright Dead Things, Ada Limón
  • My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
  • Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori)
  • Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, Michelle Peñaloza
  • A Nail the Evening Hangs On, Monica Sok
  • Séance in Daylight, Yuki Tanaka
  • I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, Laura van den Berg
  • Stoner, John Williams
  • Eye Level, Jenny Xie

Patrick Samuel
You can only read so many books on the Tarot before they all start to sound relatively the same. I came to this realization after discovering the podcast Strange Magic, hosted by Sarah Faith Gottesdiener and Amanda Yates Garcia, who introduce a much-needed dose of freshness into the ancient archetypes of the Major Arcana. Expanding notions of inclusivity and activism, gender, race and class, Gottesdiener and Garcia guide listeners to their own discoveries in how to apply the lessons contained within the cards to our modern lives. Their re-envisioning of this system seeks to break binary thinking, and is always concerned with evolving the Tarot into new realms. Now known as Between the Worlds, Garcia continues her journey through the Minor Arcana. A must-listen for anyone at any level interested in the Tarot.

Sun Yung Shin

John Shoptaw
I’m jazzed by The Evolution of Beauty. In it, Richard O. Prum persuades us to complicate Darwin’s revolutionary natural selection with his dangerous supplement, sexual selection, which Darwin needed to account for needlessly diverse and even maladaptive ornaments. (“The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail,” he confided in 1860, “makes me sick!”) Sexual selection, usually by the female, is independent of natural selection and utterly different—not environmentally objective and practical but individually subjective and arbitrary. The ravishing display and the refined taste that selected it co-evolve. What might this mean for our aesthetics and poetics? Prum speculates that Mozart similarly changed his audience’s taste for later music. Well, Mozart didn’t simply play up to his audience. But any poet, say, will have other poets and readers in mind (perhaps long flown) for whom they prink and with whose flourishes they line their own bowers of bliss. 

Bianca Stone
Ill-Lit by Franz Wright: “It’s all right to pronounce a few words/when you’re by yourself, and feel a little joy.”

Animal by Dorothea Lasky: “Because while duende is the power core of the I—stripped down to its essence in a sort of erasure—an I is the use of this power to become trickster, a thief, a demon, a little thing, infused forever with purely the occult.” 

What Pete Ate from A-Z by Maira Kalman: “Q/Quick Question. Would you love a dog who ate your lucky quarter, the Q from your alphabet collection, your porcupine quill? Even if for the quadrillionth time you said, ‘Quit it. Don’t EAT that,’ and he did, would you still love that dog? Quite a lot.”

Frederick by Leo Lionni: “And once Frederick seemed half asleep. ‘Are you dreaming, Fredrick?’ they asked reproachfully. But Frederick said, ‘Oh no, I am gathering words. For the winter days are long and many, and we’ll run out of things to say.’”

Joshua Weiner
The graduate poetry workshop at the University of Maryland has been reading eight books organized around the question “what is contemporary?” We started with Major Jackson’s edition of The Best American Poetry, which we’ve returned to as a remarkably coherent answer to the question, one that seems to establish a set of points on one end of a continuum. Down at the other end we’re locating two volumes—The Work-Shy by Blunt Research Group (under the direction of Daniel Tiffany) and Michael Leong’s Words on Edge; unlike most poems in BAP, in which we hear a singular lyric speaker, these two use documentary and recombinatory procedures. Two others that speak to the moment for us are Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied and Airea D. Matthews’s Simulacra. Reaching back to 1961, Adonis’s Songs of Mihyar the Damascene (translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid and Ivan Eubanks) is keeping us in touch with the tension between tradition and modernist innovation in Arabic poetry. And by slipping between genres, Lyn Hejinian’s Positions of the Sun is attuning us to the sui generis possibilities of an “everyday” avant-garde practice. The last book we’ll read together begs no comment, John Berger’s Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance.

Emily Jungmin Yoon
Recently read and recommending:

  • The Galleons, Rick Barot
  • A Nail the Evening Hangs On, Monica Sok
  • Oculus, Sally Wen Mao
  • Whereas, Layli Long Soldier
  • Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media, edited by David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, Greta A. Niu 
  • Bodega by Su Hwang

To read, or to be published soon:

  • DMZ Colony, Don Mee Choi
  • The Magical Language of Others, E.J. Koh
  • Catrachos, Roy G. Guzmán
  • Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Cathy Park Hong
  • Postcolonial Love Poem, Natalie Diaz

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

Read Full Biography