Continuing with our series of “Best of 2016″ lists curated by the entire CCM-Entropy community, we present some of our favorite selections as nominated by the diverse staff and team here at Entropy, as well as nominations from our readers.
This list brings together some of our favorite poetry books & collections published in 2016.
In no particular order:
1. Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong (Copper Canyon Press)
“Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition. His poems are by turns graceful and wonderstruck. His lines are both long and short, his pose narrative and lyric, his diction formal and insouciant. From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion.”—The New Yorker
2. Hardly War by Don Mee Choi (Wave Books)
“Choi’s use of hybrid forms poetry, memoir, opera libretto, images and artifacts from her father’s career as a photojournalist in the Korean and Vietnam Wars—lets her explore themes of injustice and empire, history and identity, sifting through the detritus of family, translation, propaganda and dislocation.”—Kathleen Rooney, The New York Times Sunday Book Review
3. The Performance of Becoming Human by Daniel Borzutzky (Brooklyn Arts Press)
“Borzutzky is aware that ‘creative consultants waiting to turn this misery into poetry’ are always waiting in the wings. This is in keeping with the broader Orwellian inversions and distracting gimcracks of the late capitalist police state he describes, where we sext and Skype and surf the experiences of others far away as authorities instruct us when to laugh and when to applaud. The dystopia here results from the very juxtaposition that is the hope of those migrants dying of thirst in the desert: a world of lack versus a world of absurdly overflowing plenty; a world numb-drunk on accumulated resources versus a world heightened in awareness by its own starvation. But that already romanticizes and reduced; Borzutzky is too clever, in any case, to speak for those who lack.”—decomP
4. Look by Solmaz Sharif (Graywolf)
“[Sharif’s] poetry flicks between lyric and lexicon while still sounding like music; in her hands, language is as pliant as warmed wax. . . . It is the central miracle of Look that Sharif shows us the real intensity of her conceit without veering into triteness. She is, in turns, icy and searing, but consistently fierce and beautiful.”—NPR.org
5. Olio by Tyehimba Jess (Wave Books)
“Encyclopedic, ingenious, and abundant, this outsized second volume from Jess celebrates the works and lives of African-American musicians, artists, and orators who predated the Harlem Renaissance.”—Publishers Weekly
6. Night by Etel Adnan (Nightboat Books)
“These poems engage in a daring, meditative exploration of perception and her own experiences. Adnan does this with a courageous interiority that becomes universal as the text unfolds. Memory is a particularly notable leitmotif as it relates to identity, whether personal or collective.”—Publishers Weekly
7. IRL by Tommy Pico (Birds, LLC)
“Pico’s brilliant, funny, and musical book-length debut finds his charming alter ego, Teebs, navigating the joys and difficulties of being a queer hipster ‘NDN’ transplant to New York City from a California reservation. Teebs’s lines channel a rush of Internet slang and emoticons, run-on ramblings and sentence fragments, and poppy lyrical bursts (‘All of these Adams, / all of these Bens n them/ Benz and Rolls Royce’s’). He has a laundry list of beaux with nicknames such as Big-Arms-Ugly-Face and Pompadour, but his true beloved is an artist named Muse, ‘whose / even slight squint bursts/ me into high July.’ Teebs agonizes over Muse’s aloof behavior, quandaries about text messages, and the resigned admission that ‘Museless, I’m useless.’ He is ambivalent about social media, denouncing the maudlin self-pitying Facebook posts of friends while praising his own cleverness: ‘I post a pic of Pangea / on Insta for #tbt.’ Though the poem exudes a summertime party atmosphere, Teebs calls out acts of homophobia as well as atrocities committed against NDNs, from their forced conversion by Spanish colonizers to the microaggressions of corporate cultural appropriation. He also invokes Gertrude Stein and Sherman Alexie as naturally as he does Beyoncé. Pico’s skillful rendering of Teebs’s coming-of-age attempts to create a cohesive identity out of his many selves proves to be entertaining, enlightening, and utterly relatable in the age of the smartphone.”—Publishers Weekly
8. Float by Anne Carson (Knopf)
“Captivating. A stroke of genius. The most stunning example [of Carson’s work] to date. She designs her books to make you rethink entirely the way you read . . . Float invites you to interact with it, to pull it apart and put it back together . . . The way Carson plans the physical reading experience feels like a magnification of what it’s like to read a really good poem: not straightforwardly but absorbing the sense of it, sounds and senses playing off one another . . . The poems themselves are designed as intricately as the box itself . . . Carson’s work is a question of occupying untranslatable and unpredictable silences, and Float is about finding something whole in fragments. She is a strange and immersive poet. It’s only after reading Float in its entirety that you realise its full effect.”—Charlotte Runcie, The Daily Telegraph
9. Black Lavender Milk by Angel Dominguez (Timeless, Infinite Light)
“Angel Dominguez’s BLACK LAVENDER MILK is a poignant debut that brilliantly tethers between alchemist’s notebook and somnambulist’s reflection, where ‘water thickens with memory, and begin[s] to pour…’ In what Dominguez subtitles ‘a failed novel,’ are powerful reclamations of family histories, and self evolutions fused through carefully attuned modes of seeing, dreaming and feeling: ‘I ran downtown and up a mountain, found him sleeping in my bloodstream still smiling as the sun beamed beyond the reach of the pack of clouds bringing down a soft rain…’ Perhaps this fluid notion of failure is bound up in the author’s rendering of memory as what must be held onto, even if it cannot be fully grasped. If this novel is ‘failed,’ then it is necessarily so, delicately captured as ‘—the trace trapped in a molecule,’ Dominguez’s ‘liquid-watch,’ a site of richly widening realization and recognition, where ‘colloidal materials…form a constellation.’”—Ronaldo Wilson
10. The Old Philosopher by Vi Khi Nao (Nightboat Books)
“The poems of The Old Philosopher are keen and bright; sharp like ice in winter, these seemingly fractured lines perform the strangest roles. I believe in all the wicked wisdom contained here. Vi Khi Nao risks much she weights each line with deep spiritual and emotional resonance, yet the voice of the poems never fails to surprise. The opening section of quirky, lacerating lyrics give way to a deceptively quiet series of narrative poems that only serve to show how fully language can come to inhabit lived experience without compromising one stitch of poetry s power to de-center and disturb. The collection closes with a masterful prose sequence that fuses the various approaches of the poems that came before. Political, prayerful, peripatetic, the work of Vi Khi Nao feels so necessary, so intense, so immediately now.”—Kazim Ali, Judge’s Citation
11. Exit Theater by Mike Lala (Center for Literary Publishing)
“[A]n elegiac debut collection meant to be beheld and enacted. This provocative book is designed as an immersive experience, featuring verse that can be classified as poetry only in that it announces itself as such: this is performance, myth creation, and rally cry. In his understated confrontations with forms of societal violence—militarism, climate change, economic collapse—Lala attends to the musicality of language, seductively contrasting the lush with the sparse?. . . . This a dense and challenging yet rewarding read; Lala engages with playful structural elements as he experiments with alternate means of interrogation and representation.”—Publishers Weekly
12. Last Sext by Melissa Broder (Tin House Books)
“Broder has built a career on brutally strange, introspective encounters with language. . . [Her] best poems invoke haunting repetition in an almost ballad-like incantation, allowing her lyrics to make stunning, unexpected turns of brilliance.”—Booklist
13. Safe Space by Jos Charles (Ahsahta Press)
“Sutures sewn and ripped and sewn again, these are the poems you and I know we have been awaiting, the poet Jos whose anvil gets hammered inside us all the way. You are going to smell everything stronger no matter what you smell, you have entered this book because you do not want the world to ever be the same. You have always wanted poems that make better questions for our living, and it is in your hands now.”—CAConrad
14. Still Dirty: Poems 2009-2015 by David Lau (Commune Editions)
“The 53 poems in this collection accomplish the rare feat of critiquing 21st-century economics, poking fun at popular culture and singing poetically all at the same time.… Still Dirty is experimental, socially conscious and extremely contemporary. Read it at your own risk.”—Mike Sonksen, Entropy
15. Tree Talks: Southern Arizona by Wendy Burk (Delete Press)
“Wendy Burk’s Tree Talks: Southern Arizona contains eight interviews with Southern Arizona trees. Documentation and methods join and interweave these entirely readable soundscapes. As the poet explains in the Introduction: “I came to this study as a way to consider ethics, environment, politics, communication, and failure to communicate. In carrying out the work, I asked myself how the underlying privileges and assumptions of my writing are complicit with the dominant culture’s drive to dominate, through warfare, science, or art. The poems in Tree Talks: Southern Arizona take those assumptions to what I hope is a useful extreme.””
16. I Am A Season That Does Not Exist In The World by Kyung Ju Kim (trans. Jake Levine) (Black Ocean)
“Kim Kyung Ju’s poetry operates in a world where no one seems to belong: “the living are born in the dead people’s world, and the dead are born in the living.” Already in its thirtieth edition in Korea, I AM A SEASON THAT DOES NOT EXIST IN THE WORLD is one of the most important books in the movement Korean critics have called Miraepa or future movement. Destructive forces like social isolation, disease, and ecological degradation are transformed into gateways to the sublime—where human action takes on the mythic and chaotic quality of nature. Conflating human agency with the natural order, Kim’s poems have been called by critics both a blessing and a curse to Korean literature. This book will be a startling English-language debut for one of the best-known poets writing in Korean today.”
17. Antígona González by Sara Uribe (trans. by John Pluecker) (Les Figues Press)
“As the families of so many disappeared throughout Mexico, Sara Uribe’s ANTÍGONA GONZÁLEZ roams a convulsed land looking for the body of Tadeo, her brother. As urgent as it is delicate, ANTÍGONA GONZÁLEZ summons the dead and brings them to our tables, for the day we cease sharing memory and language with them, we ourselves will become loss, vanished sign, oblivion.”—Cristina Rivera- Garza
18. There Should Be Flowers Paperback by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza (Civil Coping Mechanisms)
“Espinoza’s debut is a searing interrogation of the world and the self at once. Here, the body is a fixation-as if to look away from it, even briefly, is to risk having it erased. As such, this is a book of unblinking human preservation, and how we trespass ourselves seeking safer spaces. “There is nothing I love more than an honest storm,” Espinoza writes. There Should Be Flowers is a storm to ravage and rearrange us from our crushing certainties. This book doesn’t need a blurb. It simply needs to be read.”—Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds
19. The Wine-Dark Sea by Mathias Svalina (Sidebrow)
“In a clear-cut voice “as simple as ink,” Mathias Svalina’s THE WINE-DARK SEA vocalizes the urge to write oneself alive. Through this lyric journal of taut poems, each titled The Wine-Dark Sea, Svalina breathes life into overlooked places: the driveway a car turns into at the end of a workday, how a tree holds the dirt, the edge of a page on which “I’d always assumed / I’d die alone.” Every poem is a baffled drop, a pulse trying not to be dead, and beneath the spine of each sentence, Svalina hides, carrying us, seeking an exit. It is impossible not to be stained by THE WINE-DARK SEA.”
20. Buck Studies by Douglas Kearney (Fence Books)
“[Douglas Kearney] is at the other end of the century, using a multicultural voice inflected with the concerns of what it means to be a young black man at this time and at this place.”—The Los Angeles Times
21. Remembering Animals by Brenda Iijima (Nightboat Books)
“Iijima weaves biology, taxonomy, and eugenics with news reports, philosophy, and satire in a powerfully dissonant text that is concerned with inter- and intra-species barbarity. . . . This is meant to be a visceral, even unpleasant read, and Iijima delivers a stirring and uncomfortable truth: “we once were animals and now we are animals.””—Publishers Weekly
22. Take This Stallion by Anaïs Duplan (Brooklyn Arts Press)
“I have never before read a book like Anais Duplan’s Take This Stallion. Her major talent is recognizing the self in the other, making for poems that flow forward in a tone of oneness-is oneness a tone?-poems that make evident an ever-expanding world by opening themselves up into that world. This debut does what poets in their fifth or sixth collections are still trying to figure: it balances the intellect, image, music, and emotion in ways so unfamiliar that a blurb couldn’t possible characterize the work.”—Jericho Brown
23. Blackacre by Monica Youn (Graywolf)
“[Monica Youn is] one of the most consistently innovative poets working today. . . . Youn mines [open questions] with precise skill as she circles ideas of barrenness and fertility. . . . Youn’s poems, luminous fictions, also capture the sheer force of imagining the self.”—Tess Taylor, NPR “All Things Considered”
24. Blue Laws by Kevin Young (Alfred A. Knopf)
“Young is one of the most important poets of his generation. Encompassing 20 years of his work, the collection draws from and deepens the African American poetic tradition. Young brilliantly conveys the struggles and triumphs of those oppressed by slavery, economic hardship after emancipation, Jim Crow laws and prejudice that still tinge life today…Tremendous depth and breadth…builds toward the gorgeous work from ‘Book of Hours,’ where the speaker deals with the loss of his father and his own impending parenthood.”—Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post
25. They and We Will Get Into Trouble For This by Anna Moschovakis (Coffee House Press)
“Her style is somewhat similar to Rae Armantrout’s. Both poets are infinitely curious, and not only do they approach each poem with a question, but they often end the poem with a question. There’s rarely a straight answer. . . . I enjoy and appreciate her philosophically bent poetry, her austere use of language, and the sense of violence that charges her poems.”—San Francisco Bay Guardian
26. Double Zero by Chris Hosea (Prelude)
“More than any recent poetry collection, [Double Zero] captures the unlimited economy of text and experience in 2016, a life that is constantly refreshing as our thumbs push forward on our personal screens, “pictures quoted in pictures” as [Hosea] writes in “Little Carbon Book”–or perhaps the clearest catch-all critique of post-internet culture: “The idea is read about rather than looked at.” … A statement for our generation. ”—Chris Campanioni, The Brooklyn Rail
27. Cheer Up Femme Fatale by Kim Yideum (trans. Ji Yoon Lee) (Action Books)
“Kim Yi-Deum’s poetry is the landscape of confession. The confession flows inside the landscape and the landscape soars inside the confession. These two elements of her poetry are interconnected in the way eros gets pulled up to the divine place. Her poetry appears as poetry, it also appears as prose. As poetry, it’s polyphonic, and as prose, it’s defiant. Her poetry is the theater of multiple personality. You hear the voices of hundreds of people, hundreds of things. These naked living things become her poetic subjects. In each poem, the different sensations of each body are invented. She punishes herself and accepts her own unsightly, gutless face. Her poetry is engaged in the difficult process of discovering the other inside her. Her rhythm, which emerges from the fishnet of interconnections, bites power and sets her free.”—Kim Hyesoon
28. Alien Weaving by Will Alexander (Anonymous Energy)
“It is not an understatement to declare that Will Alexander and his writing are not of this plane. Luminous and impossible, ferocious and complex, divine and apocalyptic, invocation and resistance, the linguistic and psychic resonances of Alexander’s writings reverberate, magnetize, and ascend as “transdimensional movement” and neurological transcendence.”—Janice Lee, author of Damnation
29. Overpour by Jane Wong (Action Books)
“Jane Wong’s powerful first book OVERPOUR weaves together seemingly disparate topics such as war and child’s play, language and exile, debt, animals and nature. By doing so, Wong creates a space between—for the reader to enter. At the same time, by creating this space, she makes a space for possibility. For instance, in her poem “Filed Notes Toward War,” Wong writes “The war is not over. / The streets are lined with little lamps of snow, / melting. Water pours without end. / There is a swan bathing in my mouth.” Montage-like, the poems are also a kind of philosophy by which I mean they are curious. They ask questions of the world. Not afraid of being earnest, Wong’s voice is both playful and cerebral, weaving in and out of the world—its wars and its violence, poverty and alienation—making a beautiful and smart, strange and new, word elixir.”
30. Illocality by Joseph Massey (Wave Books)
“Massey is among the most topographically responsive of modern American poets. In a book of, in the main, very short poems he offers a series of compelling meditations on being, dwelling, landscape, and form.”—David Wheatley, Times Literary Supplement
31. Certain Magical Acts by Alice Notley (Penguin Books)
“Certain Magical Acts presents a rich variety of pieces that weave together familiar themes — from the nature of the self and the cultural importance of disobedience — that have distinguished her work since the 1970s . . . What remains constant in this complex work is the speaker’s ease as she moves from one format and style to another, constructing and deconstructing ideas. That facility is one reason some consider Notley one of our greatest living poets.”—The Washington Post
32. You Ask Me To Talk About the Interior by Carolina Ebeid (Noemi Press)
“Carolina Ebeid’s mesmerizingly beautiful first book, You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior, is a book of the blues discovered in the matrilineal line. “We live in a copy of Eden,” she writes, “a copy that depends on violence.” Autism, illness, and lead lend their traces to these poems that pulse, like all blues, with “world-sorrow,” while rising from the root of that sorrow which is love. The voice of mother, of lover, and of friend spills from every page, charged with fierce and protective passion, a passion that is contagious because it is song.”—Julie Carr
33. The Romance of Siam by Jai Arun Ravine (Timeless, Infinite Light)
“It is difficult to describe the experience of reading THE ROMANCE OF SIAM. It is impossible to describe the experience of constitution in a body that disappears under direct gaze. THE ROMANCE OF SIAM is an unqualifiable ‘Death by Dream.’ What is the essence of Siam? To ask that question is to ask what the essence of whiteness is. It is the parable of the blind men and the universal white elephant. At the moment of conception/colonial desire, the ‘abject’ of identity is already lost. A dream dies when it comes true.”—Feng Sun Chen
34. American Flowers by Tyler Flynn Dorholt (Dock Street Press)
“From the winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Fellowship, Tyler Flynn Dorholt brings us a book that is as much poetry as it photography as it documentary. Captured during a cross–country trip, Dorholt wrote and photographed the intimate moments of lives often overlooked. From the boroughs of New York City to the plains of Iowa, from Maine to California the poems and photographs relive an experience as rich and as deep as the country it’s dedicated to. Muscular, intricate, dazzling and ardent, AMERICAN FLOWERS is a gift to lyricism itself.”
35. Gap Gardening by Rosmarie Waldrop (New Directions)
“A page of Waldrop will focus the reader on the intricate (or simple) ways words connect or fail to connect, depend on or defy punctuation, suggest or deny meaning.”—The American Book Review
36. Registration Caspar by J. Gordon Faylor (Ugly Duckling Presse)
“Caspar, a non–gendered entity, only has five hours left before it is executed by its employer. Though it remains to be seen if this execution is biological and programmatic in nature, it’s clear that money needs to be made for the two partners Caspar leaves behind. Enter REGISTRATION CASPAR, at once a log of Caspar’s life within the strangulated housing market of Ceaurgle–where it has taken on a second job as a farmhand in order to supplement another in the meteorological sequestration industry—and the hectic structuration of an income source. It’s already too late for the log, however, infiltrated as it has been by said employer, and so made inextricably more dizzying and deranged than the original. The money is gone.”
37. The Missing Museum by Amy King (Tarpaulin Sky Press)
“Nothing that is complicated may ever be simplified, but rather catalogued, cherished, exposed. THE MISSING MUSEUM spans art, physics & the spiritual, including poems that converse with the sublime and ethereal. They act through ekphrasis, apostrophe & alchemical conjuring. They amass, pile, and occasionally flatten as matter is beaten into text. Here is a kind of directory of the world as it rushes into extinction, in order to preserve and transform it at once.”
38. The Voyager Record by Anthony Michael Morena (Rose Metal Press)
“In the 1970s, Voyager left Earth carrying a Golden Record meant to represent human life to alien ‘recipients.’ At the same time, a generation of children was also launched, into their own lives, each carrying a record of human evolution―its possibilities, leaps of faith, errors, and compromises―in the form of DNA. Anthony Michael Morena’s graceful ekphrastic essay THE VOYAGER RECORD brims with the humility and hopefulness of these twin gestures, and points at the way in which every inmate of our planet is also a galactic Voyager.”—Joyelle McSweeney
39. Unbearable Splendor by Sun Yung Shin (Coffee House Press)
“The splendor on display in Shin’s book consists of an incredibly compact use of commanding and vibrant language which coheres into work that feels restless and deft, as cerebral as it is emotional.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
40. The Corpse Pose by Erik Campbell (Red Hen Press)
“With a bruised and elegiac hindsight, Erik Campbell cognitively maps the existential crevices of history and memory, both personal and collective, in these smart, deft, and delightfully wry poems. Through the fast-paced grainy static of global postmodernity, in which Zeus is overthrown by Google, and the only reliable deus ex machina to a suburban child’s call is the arrival of the Kool-Aid Man, Campbell understands the hard certainties of flux and decay—holding them at bay with a rueful, yet tender, nostalgia for the artful and elegant whimsies of anachronism. Here, the peripatetic rootlessness of an adventurous young couple is held in tension with the more brutal uprootings of an unraveling marriage and a father’s death, and in the midst of this topsy-turvy cartography, Campbell writes, “[u]nless we close our eyes / we can’t find where we used to be anywhere.” Both scathingly hilarious and heart-rending, The Corpse Pose is a gorgeous collection.”—Lee Ann Roripaugh, Author of Dandarians
41. Popular Music by Kelly Schirmann (Black Ocean)
“A meditation on messages, POPULAR MUSIC asks: how does art make itself heard? The poems of Kelly Schirmann’s debut full-length collection offer a unique voice, investigating the spaces between-between the singer and the audience; the lyrics and the message. Like a pop song, these poems encourage and distract, inviting the reader and listener in, wanting to tell you things that seem intimate, while telling them to everyone. They want to know: is anyone listening? And reader, we hope you are.”
42. Chelate by Jay Besemer (Brooklyn Arts Press)
“Jay Besemer’s poetry is ‘the membrane that makes wonder and keeps it safe.’ His ‘hands contain tomorrow.’ As trans people—as any people—it may be true that ‘our bodies [are] forced into matter, unprepared,’ but Jay’s heart is plenty large enough for the task of living when ‘a fragment of certainty breaks off.’ There is no higher praise I can give a book than to say it inspires me to write, which is to say it asks me to bring my attention and care to the world. I read this book and I feel as though I have been breathed into. It is ‘folded paper to rest the head on, again and again.’ I love it. How could I not?”—TC Tolbert
43. Extracting The Stones Of Madness: Poems 1962-1972 by Alejandra Pizarnik (trans. Yvette Siegert) (New Directions)
“The darkly beautiful poems of the great Argentinian writer Alejandra Pizarnik generate an immersive, Gothic atmosphere in which art is both violence and respite, contamination and antidote, hell and paradise.”—The Boston Review
44. A Slice from the Cake Made of Air by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram (Red Hen Press)
“Speaking from ‘where the lasso lashing/ cuts the fig leaf,’ Lillian-Yvonne Bertram considers flesh, considers life, considers loving, considers the cock, and considers ‘the scissoring scheme.’ She asks ‘of what erase/ do I remind myself.’ She asks ‘is heaven colored.’ She asks ‘is heaven without being able.’ And Bertram asks without the question mark—because she doesn’t need, or want, or anticipate, or believe in any answer we might give: she lives, brilliantly, with whole heart, whole mind, and whole body, in the contradictions. In the complexity. In the neverending paradox of a life. She shows us, let’s say, that Illusion is the Medium Which Allows Emptiness to Become Something Special, and I love this book beyond loving.”—Sarah Vap
45. The Consequences of My Body by Maged Zaher (Nightboat Books)
“Totally alive, funny, sharp, shapely, and never dull.”—Wayne Koestenbaum
46. Four Reincarnations by Max Ritvo (Milkweed Editions)
“In Four Reincarnations, Max Ritvo brings us along where poetry needs to go; away from the small confessional and into a big world of death, love, and metaphysics. While allowing for the possibility of a confessional mode in the details, Ritvo’s poems take stock of the nineteenth-century sublime, adding the contemporary death of God, and going forward with bravery, irony, and the most compassionate sense of humor. The relationship he hews between language and the body is both original and hard won. His lyric complicity is between self, dedicatee, reader, and world. Ritvo’s ear for language is beautiful, as is his spirit. His poems defy solipsism and enter a cosmology of unconditional love. How lucky I am that I found Max Ritvo and his poetry; he makes me love poetry again.”—Sarah Ruhl
47. ShallCross by C.D. Wright (Copper Canyon Press)
“Through more than a dozen collections, C.D. Wright pushed the bounds of imagination as she explored desire, loss and physical sensation. Her posthumously published book, ShallCross features seven poem sequences that show her tremendous range in style and approach. As she considers, among other topics, some dark intuitions about human nature, she also nudges readers to question who is telling the story and where one’s thought can lead.”—The Washington Post
48. The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All by C.D. Wright (Copper Canyon Press)
“Wright has found a way to wed fragments of an iconic America to a luminously strange idiom, eerie as a tin whistle.”—The New Yorker
49. Sympathetic Little Monster by Cameron Awkward-Rich (Ricochet Editions)
“Through a combination of lyric, narrative, & fractured essay, SYMPATHETIC LITTLE MONSTER attempts to make a space & a shape for the little girl who haunts our cultural/ personal narratives about blackness & transmasculinity. As a trans coming-of-age text the work is intensely inward- focused, but it resists the imperative of linear autobiography. Instead, it uses the personal as a tool to explore what kind of thing a “self” is, its relation to trauma & objectification, & its capacity to be multiple.”
50. Style by Dolores Dorantes (trans. Jen Hofer) (Kenning Editions)
“Dolores Dorantes’s STYLE is a prose book in which a plural feminine voice narrates the vicissitudes of a war designed to suppress that voice. A voice that represents the war on the Mexico-U.S. border? Guerilla adolescents taking their revenge? Enslaved girls who appear in order to combat a macho presidential figure linked to our current-day Central America? Latin America advancing on a fascist- capitalist government? These are some of the questions that might arise from STYLE. The book was written in 2011, in some dark place in Texas, during the first three months Dorantes was awaiting political asylum.”
51. Marys of the Sea by Joanna C Valente (ELJ Editions)
“She is not dead, but sleeping, Jesus says in the Gospel of Luke; like the sick girl of that verse, the speakers of Joanna Valente’s sharp and urgent MARYS OF THE SEA toss and turn through a series of feverish nightmares that refract lived experiences into prophetic and wild new imaginings. Preoccupied with the consequences of mothering and not-mothering, these fifty-three poems trenchantly interrogate sexual violence and its aftermath, lingering at the site of trauma as though hanging onto the lip of an abyss. Writing becomes power, structure an act of bravery. Like an ancient civilization’s first creation myths, these poems utter light out of darkness as they order a world into being.”
52. Careful Mountain by Sara June Woods (Civil Coping Mechanisms)
“[Careful Mountain is a] vulnerable invulnerable performance of working through the emerging self’s desires and a new relationship to the world.”—Trace Peterson, co-editor of Troubling the Line: An Anthology of Trans and Genderqueer Poetics
53. The Hermit by Lucy Ives (The Song Cave)
“Stray thoughts are the protagonists of THE HERMIT—they might be the aftereffects of intense focus, yet come across as decidedly eccentric in their resistance to systems (i.e. genre) that might dull their prismatic luminescence. Here they deliver proof of parataxis’s poiesis. Ives’s exquisite take on ellipsis as realism is a dream, as both vision and something that fully satisfies a wish.”—Mónica de la Torre
54. Book of Interludes by Grace Shuyi Liew (Anomalous Press)
“To interrupt is to crystallize the line between belonging and unbelonging—in order to shatter it. BOOK OF INTERLUDES is a series of interruptions/interventions in varying forms: here are prose poems that double back into parentheticals, free verses that speak sternly of hesitance and equivocation, and short essays that rise out of specific cities into unspecified doubt. The book incites its readers to interrupt themselves in their readings in order to, over and over, enter a space of intermission and alienation, with all its glaring light and no clear exit path.”
55. The Watermark by Alice Anderson (Eyewear Publishing)
“At turns heartwrenching and redeeming, THE WATERMARK explores an American Southern life gone horribly awry. Rich with star–soaked skies and bayou–sodden locales, the poems propel the reader through hurricanes and heartache. Anderson explores the sharp destruction of childhood abuse and the unruly abandon of love and sex, finding grace within calamity. THE WATERMARK draws a map of the human heart, with Anderson its fierce cartographer.”
56. Restless Continent by Aja Couchois Duncan (Litmus Press)
“Lush with elemental imagery, Aja Couchois Duncan’s RESTLESS CONTINENT communes with a North America that speaks elegiac, celebratory, and melancholic histories human and geological. In this collection, the body of that land and those histories fuses with the body of Duncan’s language, the body of memory, and the physical body. Intertwining English with Ojibwe, this debut collection of poems ominously hails and holds us in its ethereal sound, bearing sharp witness to the ruptures perpetuated by the violences of humanity—bodies and lands colonizing and colonized, naming and othering, stamping life into disappearance—while inviting us to forge with Duncan the mythologies that suffuse her poems with crystalline grace and gratitude.”
57. What Weaponry by Elizabeth J. Colen (Black Lawrence Press)
“Colen is not timid about addressing the perversities of American culture head-on… The subjects are dark, generating perhaps more discomfort than comfort, but Colen reminds us that the human heart is still quite functional.”—D. A. Powell
58. Songs from a Mountain by Amanda Nadelberg (Coffee House Press)
“[Songs from a Mountain is] a wild, careening, conceptually wily (yet somehow ruly) book that refuses to keep its feet on the ground. . . . Through the de- and recontextualization of what was first familiar and is now strange, Nadelberg establishes herself as an exemplar of early 21st-century artistic practice.”—Publishers Weekly
59. Violet Energy Ingots by Hoa Nguyen (Wave Books)
“What our lives permit us to perceive as givens, Nguyen reveals as mere conditions, inextricably tied to and guided by greater forces—from the economy to the environment, from the Mayan predictions to the menstrual cycle, from the weight of history to the burden of the future.”—Michael Brodeur, The Boston Globe
60. Fearful Beloved by Khadijah Queen (Argos Books)
“Let godliness and beastliness crash/ together” urges poet and playwright Queen (Black Peculiar) as she confronts chameleonic forms of fear in this potent collection. She braids several long and formally varied sequences throughout the book, each with its own distinct approach. A series of epistolary poems titled “Dear Fear” offers an exposition on fear in aesthetic terms, as much as philosophical or psychological ones: “your spectrality exists / your infinite veer.” Many of these letters investigate the moments when the emotion eclipses or overtakes the self–“A fan of entropy & encroachment, you exist in the nonparticipatory gleam.” At the same time, the formal dynamic of the epistle casts the speaker as separate from the object of her address,positioning her to question and undermine fear’s power. Other poems convey moments of horror, vulnerability, and despair in piercing lyric terms, as when wailing is described as “the taste of letting go a stolen ingot/ melted down into the essence of a bleached sea–waves/ louder than the night itself.” Queen looks closely at moments of contact among violence, beauty, and seduction without glorifying them. It is through such a nuanced and courageous lyric inquiry that fear becomes the entity against which Queen can “sharpen the leaden blade of her voice.”—Publishers Weekly
