Poetry Roundup at America: The Jesuit Review

Joe Hoover, S.J., Brandon Sanchez, Isabelle Senechal, Emma Winters, and Chloe Gunther of America: The Jesuit Review have shared their favorite poetry collections of 2019. "Not only is the book crammed with startling and compelling writing," writes Hoover about Aria Aber's Hard Damage (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), "it reminds us that, oh yes, there has been a war far away from here ... [f]or 17 years." More:

Her words are challenging little psalms, tiny scriptures of truth sometimes difficult to confront.

In “Asylum”: “Even poverty can be glamorous, if you insist./ Piss rusted on elevator floors so gilded I mistake it for a trinket.” In “Stone” Aber gives voice to a startling admission about having children—wholly unsentimental and close to the bone: “But now, arid as a stone, I can admit/ that I wanted children/ only so I could name them, and thus/ sentence them to an ancestry that I lacked.”

One portion of the book begins by listing virtually every “regime change” the United States has engineered since 1949. 1953: Iranian coup d’etat. 1970-73: Chile; 1976: Jamaican coup; 1979-89: Afghanistan, and so on.“Operation Cyclone” then becomes an extended poem, the most damning and inciting poem in the whole book. It begins with this insane observation: “DEDICATED TO THE GALLANT MUJAHADEEN FIGHTERS rolls down/ the original cut of the saturated/ last scene of Rambo III.”

The poem goes on to explore with exquisite images the inner contradictions and realities of Mujahadeen...

Find all of the "tiny scriptures of truth" here.