Poesía contemporánea: Debe leer
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“En esta devastadora y hermosa colección, John McCarthy abre '[t] él lastimó y destrozó partes de nosotros,' los lugares en nosotros donde estamos 'gritando ferviente y crudo', para explorar el dolor del abandono y la pureza de eso. soledad, para que podamos entender cómo el trauma genera desolación. '¿Cómo no podríamos / romper el espejo que miramos en la mañana?' ¿Cómo escapamos de la desolación que somos? "Me abrí el cuero cabelludo", escribe, "hasta que pude sentir el humo saliendo de mi cuerpo", y esos momentos brutalmente viscerales en este libro nos recuerdan que "hay muchos tipos diferentes de belleza". McCarthy es un maestro en transformar su mundo en todo tipo ". - Sara Eliza Johnson
“Scared Violent Like Horses es la historia de un 'niño perdido con un dolor silencioso', una historia sobre un niño y un joven que crece en medio del paisaje de un vasto pero específico Medio Oeste lleno de hierba de hierba, espantapájaros, hojas muertas, tierra , fábricas y personas de la familia y la infancia. Es la gente sobre la que el hablante realmente está escribiendo: la conexión y desconexión del hablante con aquellos que pueblan el paisaje y la sensación de ser diferentes o no pertenecer por completo. El impulso de John McCarthy es narrativo, pero este impulso es golpeado por el rayo de sus poderes lingüísticos, como en el poema, 'Switchgrass': 'Un gato destrozado cubre el cigüeñal y el cinturón del ventilador, / está desmenuzado y empapado'. Las imágenes inusuales y el lenguaje figurado abundan: `` Las borlas del campo de maíz son mechas que arden hacia el cielo y los campos / están suturadas por postes que marchan como una procesión de cruces. . . ' En última instancia, lo que queda del lector es una asombrosa superposición de niño perdido y paisaje perdido vislumbrado a través de la lente de las habilidades lingüísticas y narrativas mágicas de un poeta talentoso ". - Victoria Chang
Publicado 2019
"En Bright Dead Things, hay un feroz jazz y sass ('esta vida es un puño / de deseos rápidos atrapados por nada, pero el anzuelo del tirón del mañana') y hay tristeza, un enfrentamiento con la muerte y la pérdida que fuerza la imaginación a una respuesta profunda La radio en su nuevo hogar rural advierte 'mantenerse a salvo y buscar refugio' y, sin embargo, el corazón busca amor, riesgo y extrañeza, y lo encuentra en todas partes ”. Gregory Orr
“Limón hace mucho más que simplemente reflejar el mundo: lo transforma continuamente, revelándose así como una simbolista cotidiana y una facilitadora de duende de alto nivel. Al final de un poema, escribe: '¿Qué quiere el corazón? El corazón quiere / sus caballos de regreso, 'y de repente incluso este lector más urbano se siente salvaje y libre. ”- Matthew Zapruder
Publicado 2015
"La sangre y los rayos de la ciudad de Detroit corren por las venas de Hum, la colección de poesía debut de Jamaal May (Alice James Books, 2013). Lírica, a veces política, pero siempre honesta, leer estos poemas es entrar en una colmena que estalla. con música y sonido, imagen y propósito. Los temas y temas varían, pero rápidamente aprendemos a confiar en la voz que nos guía de la densidad de un poema al siguiente ". --Octavia Quintanilla
"Los poemas exploran la vida de la ciudad donde las balas esparcen el suelo, se encuentran agujas en la hierba, y los niños observan" los dientes / las esposas se cierran alrededor de sus muñecas en el camino / un pájaro posado observa: silencioso, estremeciéndose con sonidos leves ". Con un ambiente tan duro, es realista vivir con las fobias representadas en "Hum", cada niño que crece viendo y sabiendo más de lo que debería ... El poeta cava al fondo de la cultura del centro de la ciudad y revela actos con tal vitalidad de que las emociones y las acciones se puedan sentir a través de las páginas. May revela Detroit roto y la lucha por la vida, el amor y la felicidad con una pasión innegable ". - Revista Grand Central
Publicado 2013
"En todo momento, nos encontramos con artistas y excéntricos obsesionados con los reflejos que emiten, a menudo dando forma al mundo para que coincida con sus ilusiones privadas: un jardinero" canta con / deleite "mientras su arce de azúcar toma la forma de un gallo; una mujer pinta sus rodapiés. color de su perro salchicha. Tristemente cómico y sintácticamente inventivo, los poemas de Harvey son a la vez súplicas de atención ("Sorpréndeme con / lo que sabes. ¿Las lapas realmente se ven / como margaritas antiguas, la estrella de mar realmente / se volvió naranja y púrpura por aferrarse ? ") y elegías para las imágenes que intentamos, pero fallamos, para capturar". - El neoyorquino
"Es un desempeño satisfactorio: ligero y rápido en lugar de pesado y egoísta". --David Orr
Publicado 2000
“Leia Wilson ensambla cuidadosamente un mundo, luego lo desmonta, para que podamos ver su brillante parte inferior. Ilumina los espacios ocultos de la memoria y el cuerpo, descubre fósiles en el tiempo y el lenguaje, busca respuestas en la lejanía. Las estrellas, las estaciones, las ciudades, los pájaros, lo hablado y lo tácito están cosidos y sin coser, con bisagras y luego sin bisagras. Wilson bellamente desarma todo y nos da los núcleos ardientes y brillantes de las cosas ”. ―Jenny Boully
“Quizás solo aquellos poetas capaces de ser acribillados por el deseo puedan crear poemas tan reveladores del Enigma del deseo. La colección de debut de Leia Penina Wilson se ofrece a sí misma como una cartilla en las dificultades del deseo, no un libro de texto con la clave de respuestas en la parte posterior, sino poemas que sufren las intrincadas intrigas de su propia investigación. Wilson muestra cómo el deseo funciona tanto en el daño como en la armonía, cómo la intimidad crea rarezas, cómo el amor se hace extraño a uno mismo y a los demás en el punto mismo de la familiaridad desnuda. La imaginación se mueve a través de la mente como lo hace el anhelo a través del cuerpo, insistiendo en que lo real es un lugar al que solo se puede llegar, insistiendo en que debe ocurrir un cambio, prometiendo que el yo nunca es simplemente el mismo. En formas casi ovidianas, Wilson traza un terreno casi imposible de navegar: cómo el deseo no solo empuja a través del cuerpo, sino que empuja al cuerpo a otras formas. Aquí, la imaginación siempre se está apoderando, y se apodera de la metamorfosis, al confundir la ontología con la incapacidad de descifrar la diferencia entre ser y pretender ser. Wilson busca su ser animal. Parte de ese universo animal es el vago reino en el que la oración se convierte en presa, y el miedo a ser consumido por lo que uno está más dentro (el mundo) encuentra su única compensación en lo que ese miedo también pone a disposición: el reconocimiento de que uno está aquí en lo que es (el mundo) Tales representaciones de nuestra marca de vivienda dañada para sus afortunados lectores la llegada de una voz nueva y necesaria ". ―Dan Beachy-Quick
Publicado 2014
"French philosopher Jacques Derrida once said we must write and speak of the dead 'just enough to prevent silence from completely taking over.' In Floating, Brilliant, Gone, Franny Choi names and praises loss with striking wit and candor; nothing stays gone. Her poems dare us all to live, live, live."
-- Rachel McKibbens, author of Into the Dark & Emptying Field
"Hold Franny Choi's fine first book, Floating, Brilliant, Gone, in your hand as if you mean to flip it, spine-down, like a deck of cards, released into the air at the speed of shuffling. Look down into hard-driving poems, poems in stanzas, in dialogue, verse paragraphs, images nearer to what she describes: butterflies, mantis shrimp, an octopus. After that first sleight of hand, read about loss at a young age, about the grieving, healing & love that come after them; about how family & culture form our identity; about race; about the body; most of all, about witnessing. Franny Choi writes rangy, risky poems. This is a breath-taking debut by a gifted young poet, who is only at the beginning of her transit. How lucky for the rest of us to be around for the ride."
-- Rick Benjamin, State Poet of Rhode Island
Published 2014
“These astounding poems by Jericho Brown don't merely hold a lens up to the world and watch from a safe distance; they run or roll or stomp their way into what matters―loss, desire, rage, becoming―and stay there until something necessary begins to make sense. Like the music that runs through this collection, they get inside of you and make something there ache. It's a feeling that doesn't quite go away―and you won't want it to. This is one of the most luminous and courageous voices I have read in a long, long time.”
―U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith
"Exquisite, incisive, as full of the spirit as the soil, the breath and the body, Jericho Brown’s newest collection The Tradition is today’s essential poetry."
―John Keene
Published 2019--Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize For Poetry
"The story Ruth Awad tells in this gorgeous debut collection is one of history and memory, displacement and estrangement, and perhaps above all, imagination and empathy. It’s the story not only of the Lebanese Civil War—the sky 'unzipping,' the 'whistling bombs you couldn’t see coming…the beehive rounds, whirring metal wings,' the 'woman with half-singed hair…her breath like a sizzled wick'—but also of a family in America and the struggles that continued here. Awad approaches the story—of a country, a man, a family—as if excavating priceless artifacts and holding them up to the light. You will want to lean in close to see them, in all their rich, chilling, and tender detail." —Maggie Smith
"These poems and the people who inhabit them, 'born from the mouth of a bullet hole,' carry a darkness impossible to outrun, the darkness of war, specifically the Lebanese Civil War of the 70s and 80s. For Ruth Awad, the inheritance of such grief remains immeasurable as it fuels 'our bodies, // their infinite capacity for ruin.' Both immigration narrative and meditative lyric on identity politics—'When will you learn my name?'—Set to Music a Wildfire is disturbingly memorable in its intimate and articulate confrontations."
—Michael Waters
Published 2017
"Beginning with the sweepingly inclusive and powerful 'Red Velvet,' a Middle Passage poem for our times, Nikky Finney takes the reader to a wonderfully alive world where the musical possibilities of language overflow with surprise and innovation. Finney has an ear to go along with the wild-ness of her imagination, which sweeps through history like a pair of wings. Her carefully modulated free verse is always purposeful in its desire to move the reader in a way that allows us intimate access to necessary observations about ourselves. These poems, in other words, have the power to save us."
--Bruce Weigl, author of What Saves Us
"With Head Off & Split, Nikky Finney establishes herself as one of the most eloquent, urgent, fearless and necessary poets writing in America today. What makes this book as important as anything published in the last decade is the irresistible music, the formal dexterity and the imaginative leaps she makes with metaphor and language in these simply stunning poems. This is a very, very important achievement."
--Kwame Dawes, author of Hope's Hospice
Published 2011
"Collins's fifth volume and first book-length poem concerns a horrifying lynching in her father's hometown. In Cairo, Ill., in 1909, two men (one black, one white) suspected of rape were murdered by a crowd; local newspapers celebrated the event. In sometimes narrative, sometimes impressionistic modes, Collins moves out from Cairo ("the most southern point in all the North") to the sad history of race relations in southern Illinois and throughout America since the Civil War. Snippets from letters, postcards, statistics, eyewitness reports and other documents mingle with Collins's own appalled voice to create a work that mixes resolve with horror: "Often they cut off parts for souvenirs... Children were often there they were being taught." With debts to W.S. Merwin's The Folding Cliffs and William Carlos Williams's Paterson, Collins (Some Things Words Can Do, 1999) creates at once a compelling, bristling story and a collage of evidence about white guilt. Another strand follows the poet's father (five years old in 1909) through his young adulthood (which may have included involvement with the Ku Klux Klan—common, even ubiquitous, there and then) into his kind old age. "What he had seen/ is also what I was," Collins writes: "I had to know." (June)
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"Through unflinching examination of her father's experience witnessing a black man's lynching, Collins has produced a commanding book-length poem. As a five-year-old in Cairo, Illinois, in 1909, Collins' father sold fruit in front of a restaurant. One November day, he was hoisted on a relative's shoulders to watch a bloodthirsty mob kill a black man and then, in an escalation of its "hunger," hang an accused white murderer. Collins carefully examines the event and its aftermath, especially the effect on her father who later seeks a home in an all-white community. She then extends her thoughtful scrutiny to incorporate newspaper accounts, photographs, personal accounts, and history to expose the way racism permeates all layers of society. Collins employs a staccato, matter-of-fact tone that strikes like a sledgehammer at persistent, if hidden, hate. More than worthy as poetry, Blue Front is also a powerful statement about America and a potent reminder of humankind's terrible potential." --Janet St. John
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Published 2006
"The poems in Sara Miller's SPELLBOUND are deeply imagined, bizarre, and bent toward the light. Unafraid to dissect the animals of the night, the way the natural world beckons, the inner madness that makes us all obsessive creatures, this is a book that risks the confines of time and space to sing a song that feels ancient and endless."--Ada Limón
"...charming and odd Spellbound selected as winner of our 2016 book contest" --Burnside Review
Published 2018
"'Everything beautiful occurs when the body / is suspended,' Helena Mesa quotes a performance artist who hangs his own pierced body in the air. Mesa's poems are artfully suspended between lyric and narrative, between humans and animals, between Latin America and the U.S., between desire and the difficulty of its fulfillment. HORSE DANCE UNDERWATER is an inventive, musical, and powerful debut" --Mark Doty.
"The poems in Helena Mesa's virtuosic first book, Horse Dance Underwater, run with such speed, verve, and alacrity they leave you breathless, exhilarated, and transformed as if the purest kind of song had lifted you into the air. By this quickness of language finding lyric speech, Mesa's poems remind us of art's joyous and ecstatic effects." --Michael Collier, author of Dark Wild Realm and co-editor of The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology
'The world tilts in strange guises. Behold these, love these,' Helena Mesa writes at the end of a long journey. I am moved by her notes to saints, by the way she limns the distance between strangersm by her quest for a sacred grove. There is a deep aura of solitude in this splendid forst book." --Edward Hirsch
Published 2009
“In Vértiz’s poems, Latinxs living in California share “untranslatable” experiences that take place between English and Spanish. Her poems transform displacement and a polluted cityscape into sources of resistance and aesthetic restructuring. The visually and sonically rich setting of these poems may be polluted — by toxic air, water, and soil; toxic masculinity and white supremacy — but Vértiz celebrates what her community grows in this toxic ground and voices their untranslatable experiences.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“I want to dance in Vickie’s SoCal androgynities—her pixelated, hybrid Latinx Los Angeles cosmos, with its ‘factory imaginations,’ its ‘Mexican or not,’ its many lives rushing by and the ‘death stench’ and the tiny rivers of tears into the tacos. A furious pace, a 1,000-degree eye, here Vértiz pours out her deep reflections, her erotic ‘garage’ novelette, her low- and high-rider journey into the various infernos and paradisos. A collage of breathlessness, a nirvana incandescent set of urban and personal illuminations. A groundbreaker, a Chicana world mural tumbling toward you fearlessly.”—Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States
“Vértiz is a powerhouse. Her work is incredibly nuanced with a full sensibility of place without sentimentality, without pity, and without need to justify its worth. These poems are smart, sassy, sonically enhanced, and scintillating. A must-read.”—Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, author of Burn
Published 2017
“These poems can’t make history vanish, but they can contend against it with the force of a restorative imagination. Smith’s work is about that imagination―its role in repairing and sustaining communities, and in making the world more bearable. . . . Their poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy. . . . But they also know the magic trick of making writing on the page operate like the most ecstatic speech.”―The New Yorker
“Danez Smith’s astonishing second collection, a finalist for this year’s National Book Award, is a testament to the collective power of the queer black imagination and to Smith’s individual talent. He is one of the most original and powerful poets working today.”―Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
“Danez Smith’s is a voice we need now more than ever as living, feeling, complex, and conflicted beings. These poems of love extend beyond the erotic into the struggle for unity―not despite the realities of race but precisely because of what race has caused us to make of and do to one another. Don’t Call Us Dead gives me a dose of hope at a time when such a thing feels hard to come by. This is a mighty work, and a tremendous offering.”―Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Life on Mars
Published 2017
San Francisco-based Randall Mann, author of Complaint in the Garden and Breakfast with Thom Gunn, both Kenyon Review prize winners, returns with his third collection, Straight Razor. It contains formal, brittle portraits of men whose cool exteriors bely pain (“I left so many / anonymous denunciations in the lion’s mouth”), as well as conflicting realizations (“I am so sick / of pretending to be me”). Writing about cruising for love in the ’90s, Mann deftly complicates Bacchanalian scenes with shaded emotions. Candor in physical freedom blends with foreboding, both in anticipation of pleasure and in its wake, turning poems on eros into more brutal missives. ~Karen Rigby
“There’s nothing more insidious / than manners,” writes Randall Mann. “The past is the the in the nightclub.” Given to the obsessive and possessive aspects of strict poetic form, the poems in Mann’s third collection, Straight Razor, perform a kind of violence at odds with the decorous. But as in the work of Wallace Stevens—“the the” echoing the close of his poem “The Man on the Dump”—it is in a blemished, brutal geography that we first hear of truth, and from the mess of the actual that we can build a place to revel in. In this interview, conducted over email last month, Mann discusses the sources of his poetry, its influences, the value of form and his experiences as a reader and writer. ~Ricardo Maldonado
Published 2013
"It’s a book of violence, outrage, grief, despair, a book about racism, that generalization we never stop packing with the lives that we destroy... a book of terrible beauty, opulent brutality, immersed in the contradictions that kindle in and around and in reaction to black lives and deaths. It’s hard to imagine art changing anything the book describes—hard to imagine it forestalling the next of these murders or undermining the state’s ability to explain away the next all-too-explainable killing of someone young and brown—but that impossibility makes these poems more compelling..." —The Kenyon Review
"Smith... creates 'incendiary art,' and never have her meticulously structured and fully fueled poems been more scorching than in this acutely visceral, empathetically inhabited, and intimately detailed collection. Smith investigates with excruciating sensitivity and strange beauty the drowning of two baby black girls by their black fathers, accidental street shootings of the innocent, and police shootings of unarmed African Americans. With her latest heroically unflinching poems of incandescent clarity, Smith joins Angela Jackson and Claudia Rankine in the tragically growing chorus of poets decrying racial violence." —Booklist
“Patricia Smith’s moving collection of elegies combines the act of witness with the delights of lyric poetry, intervening with master narratives of history, or sociology, to rescue the suffering subject. The rich sonic texture of the work enables the subtle modulations of mordant wit, anger, and grief throughout the collection, where feeling is tuned by assonance and consonance.” —Averill Curdy, editor, The Longman Anthology of Poetry
Published 2017
"Brimhall’s speaker, in “The Revisionist Gospel,” says it plainly: 'One of my sisters will tell you that in order to love you must humiliate yourself.' This poetry holds firm that love is apocalyptic, and to get close we must doubt it, fumble for it, fear it and ruin it." ~Wesley Rothman
"Poetry for the new century: awake to the world, spiritually profound, and radiant with lyric intelligence." ~Carolyn Forché
"Brimhall fully and thoughtfully knows the world she has authored. Feared and confronted by women, this war-torn country proves brightened by its author’s extraordinary creativity. The women in this collection are raised stronger by their demons, touched by a ruthlessness still characterized by feeling. Ultimately, the collection’s greatest sense of apocalyptic woe is in its use of transformative recyclability: a mother’s heart is buried in a dead lion cub’s ribcage, a man gored by a bull has the animal’s head stitched into his chest. However, these details also make Brimhall’s work what it is: tight, dynamic, and inventive. Brimhall proves that in disillusionment there is also great imagination, a half-lost world that awakens our perceptions to our current one."
Published 2012
"Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib's THE CROWN AIN'T WORTH MUCH leaves me contemplating the meanings of soul: communal soul (peep the breadth of cultural shout outs), rhythmic soul (peep the breadth of sound and syntax), and spiritual soul (peep the breadth of compassion). As titles like 'Ode to Drake, Ending with Blood in a Field' and 'At the House Party Where We Found Out Whitney Houston Was Dead' suggest, Willis-Abdurraqib bridges the bravado and bling of praise with the blood and tears of elegy. The soul of this magnificent book is dynamic, distinguished, and when called for, down and dirty. What a fresh, remarkable debut." ―Terrance Hayes
"The poems are raw: some passionate, some distant, some laden with fear. But as a collection, they create a life that's almost as arresting as it is moving."―Kelsey McKinney, Fusion
"THE CROWN AIN'T WORTH MUCH is not so much a book you read, but one you survive―with Willis-Abdurraqib's compassionate, elegiac lyric gently pushing you forward through heartbreak and violence." ―Indiana Review
Published 2016
“Matthew Wimberley’s deeply intimate and lyrical collection All the Great Territories maps a son’s journey through the landscapes of loss—through empty towns and black mountains and snow-covered fields. Forged by tender observations, these poems seek to uncover personal histories half-buried under layers of dirt and ash. They burn bright with elegy and longing for a father, a home, a memory of a life left behind.”—Vandana Khanna, author of Train to Agra
“The poems in this rich and incisive book are close-held and generous, in both detail and formal expression. Although the poet who has written these fine poems is young, he painfully recognizes the world he comes from is nearly lost. That is the blunt lot of rural America at the present moment. Thus, these poems have a moving, elegiac quality, but also, sublimely and through subtle implication, they acknowledge a hope, perhaps to come from the enduring land itself, where these poems of vital human experience are rooted. This is a book of knowledge, but it comes at us against our current grain, slowly, and in observable detail as it all happens in time.—Maurice Manning, author of One Man’s Dark
Published 2020
“Horsepower, Joy Priest’s debut collection, is a captivating display of might and elegance, a language of astonishing sinew through which the backdrop of place and a compelling life come into vivid focus. Undergirding these poems is a restless, resilient spirit: an urgent grappling with the desire to both remember and outrun the past, with history both personal and communal, and the complexities of American racism in its most intimate manifestation—familial love. Throughout this remarkable debut, Priest shows us what it means to clear the stall, break out of the traces, and run unbridled into life.” —Natasha Tretheway
“Through tragedy and triumph, Joy Priest’s poems thunder in the ears like a supercharged heartbeat. Her landscapes drawn technicolor, intense with paradox and heat, devotion is indistinguishable from rage. Horsepower seethes with so much intelligence and feeling that comparisons to Hurston are inevitable. Jean Toomer also comes quickly to mind, but Priest’s voice is one of a kind. Let these poems comfort you, if you dare, soft as the pillow that hides the gun.” —Gregory Pardlo
“Horsepower tells what it is to be a bridge in one's family between racism and a love forged in defiance of racism; it tells what it is to need to both escape that role and embrace it. And, just as importantly, it tells the arrival of a powerful new poet, a poet to whose stories I will continue to listen.” —Shane McCrae
Published 2020