Contemporary Poetry: Must Reads
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“This timely and imaginative collection by Sonia Greenfield reads like a seer’s post-apocalyptic vision of America. Her poems are lucid, emotionally evocative, and wise. In “Ghost Ship,” the speaker advises us that “when a swirl of colored spotlights sets you / spinning, you have to dance as if / the very act of living depends on it.” American Parable is simultaneously dance and doom—and spin you will.” —David Hernandez, author of Dear, Sincerely
“These poems had me at Lakshmi Singh, one of a dozen or so daily-life characters who invite us into the dicey, irresistible country of American Parable.” —Heather McNaugher, author of System of Hideouts
“By turns both playful and menacing, Sonia Greenfield’s American Parable achieves the near impossible, giving voice and vision to our current politics, offering one roadmap for making sense of our harrowing times. With startling candor, outrage, and a lusty, full-hearted, maternal sense of calling, Greenfield refuses to be silenced or to live in fear. Migrants, refugees, out-of-work clowns, gay men lost to the plague years, missing children, drowned monuments, dead and dying animals: all populate Greenfield’s ghostly, apocalyptic landscape. But they are amplified by Greenfield’s audacious love, imaginative wit, and determined singing: “when music flares up and takes a hold of you,” Greenfield writes, “you have to dance as if / the very act of living depends on it.” —David J. Daniels, author of Clean
Published 2018
“Aase Berg’s poetry is discomforting because it lacks boundaries . . . When I read her I notice how my consciousness tries to separate, divide up and make sense of her almost hallucinatory images, but they always glide back together. I get nauseous and almost seasick from her texts.” —Åsa Beckman, author of I Myself A House of Light - Postmodern Swedish Women Poets
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“Aase Berg’s poems deepdive through the perversity of nature, groping the outer edges of subjectivity. Along this super-charged border dichotomies infest one another—inside/outside, human/animal, animate/inanimate, macro/micro—and desire cannibalizes all. Think Hansel and Gretel on acid, think of the horrors of cookie dough. If this unflinching and awesome collection is the shape of modern poetry, then, as Bob Hope said in his 1965 United Artists modernist classic, ‘I’ll take Sweden.” —Dodie Bellamy
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“Oh, you have taken it too far, Aase Berg, on this field trip to dismember an apocalyptic body that is self-bomb, culture-bomb; you are scratching at the interior of the bomb that has no exterior. Amusedly, bombastically, terrifyingly you scratch. Johannes Göransson’s translation is lush and boldly guttural and the two of you have my intestines by a leash. ‘One by one you turned my faces up/toward the sun’s surface/and drank them like deer water.” —Cathy Wagner
Published 2009
"Haunting is what this debut collection is and does: Isabel Duarte-Gray tracks family history and violent lineages across Western Kentucky’s small towns. Starting from scant archival traces ― quilt patterns, bloodied landscapes, the finest vintages in local gossip ― Duarte-Gray resurrects ghostly testimonies, crafted out of rural dialects and a free-verse line filed to a brilliant sharpness."― Christopher Spaide, The Boston Globe
“Isabel Duarte-Gray’s book is like no other―a text that ‘thinks the spell,’ cut-off tales, callings, sudden leaps in lines ‘split in two,’ perhaps like this collection itself, splicing carefully through the belly, the heart and the sternum―animals, wives and husbands. You choose. The more you read, the more you scrape and peel through the night fallen―‘sniffing for the temperatures of life.’ Isabel Duarte-Gray’s grasp of deep and perhaps forbidden vernaculars, cultural edges and crossings is profound. The place is underground, underwater, under the crackling structures and somewhere inside abandoned, formless barns in a far-off crimson. An immediate prize-winner. A bold, brave, rare, genius, meticulous, deeper and deeper at work.”― Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States, Emeritus
“The creeks the tears the patriarchy. The Osage orange the intelligible terror. The tiny towns. The no towns at all. The dragonflies the bones the lilies. The difficult ongoing work of recovery. The marriages the handsewn linens the burials. The excess. The shortage. The fear, and the ways to get past that fear. The lists. The anecdotes. The scenes set and dismantled. The herbals the escapees the strings .The listening. That's what you'll find, and it's far from all you'll find, in this strong first collection, a song of songs, an evidence of evidence, a manifestation from places some of us know and many more of us should hear. I give thanks for it.”―Stephanie Burt, author of Advice from the Lights and The Poet is You
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Published 2021
“The poems in Arthur Sze’s The Glass Constellation, which span 50 years of a singular luminous career, are a cosmos. What might it mean to exist as a human being in a particular moment in the intricate and interconnected webs of time and space is a quest and a question in poem after poem ...— such is the richness of this precise, fiercely observant, metaphysical and elegant work ... The Glass Constellation is a beautiful and important testament to the significance of that endeavor, an important illumination in poetry’s cosmic vault.” –Lisa Russ Spaar, On the Seawall
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“Arthur Sze offers a stellar collection of lyrical poems that captivate the reader’s heart, even as the personae involved in the individual works also seem affected, sometimes dramatically, sometimes more subtly, but always moved. These poems are full of energy, sometimes boiling below the surface, or recoiling in a desert sunset, but always linking heart and mind with sensation and intellect ... The poems engage the contemporary and the historical. Sze’s vision encompasses an amazing variety of animal, reptilian, and vegetal lives. It conveys a rich variety of ecosystems around the globe. It also reaches the heavenly bodies, the ends of the known universe, as well as an abundant variety of human cultures, but always reconnects to the human attempt to perceive ... The Glass Constellation offers a complete course in not only how to write poetry but, even more, how to read it, to encounter it.” –Ken Hada, World Literature Today
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“…it feels good to see such a book released, and it is as satisfying to read as it is to hold: a weighty thing, substantial. It is rare one finds a book of poetry that they could, upon completion, easily use to bludgeon an enemy ... All of the Szes’ wonder at the world: the big of it, the small of it, the unexpected poetry in even the mundane, could fill a river to rush and then spill its banks…” –B.A. Van Sise, New York Journal of Books
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Published 2021
“Emerson claims in his essay ‘Circles’ that ‘the past is always swallowed and forgotten.’ But Victoria Chang, in her superb first book Circle, interrogates a substantial portion of what Emerson would erase: the tyranny of Maoist China and the Red Brigade, the remote reserve of her Asian American family, her own experience in high finance and the jet-set 90s, and so much more. Nothing’s too large or small for this alchemical poet, from a Kitchenaid mixer to Eva Braun at Berchtesgaden to the most serene rendering of an oceanside landscape. Her technical skills are flexible and powerful, her voice is fearless yet capable of great lyrical tenderness, and her vision—global, principled, sympathetic—is a gift to contemporary poetry in America during a needful time.”—David Baker, author of Changeable Thunder
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“Victoria Chang’s Circle denotes a geometry of enclosure that brings into itself all the fractious identities of contemporary American life. The lives of women, immigrants, artful self-making--all these are investigated and sung into newness by her canny poems. Time and again the astringency of her lines arrives at a clarifying lyricism, restoring a complex mystery to the everyday. This is a book of powerful poems, from a poet we are now very privileged to hear from.”—Rick Barot, author of The Darker Fall
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“[It’s] a real pleasure to find a first book that thinks big, that harbors the best sort of ambitions, not to be acclaimed, but to stretch itself. [Circle] frequently brings Randall Jarrell to mind, both in its wide range of subjects, including art, film, and history, in its many dramatic monologues, and particularly in its fundamental inquiry into the slippery nature of identity. . . As Chang continues her explorations, it will be not only comforting but also exhilarating to watch her transformations toward full maturity as a poet. Certainly, her first book promises delights to come.”—Blackbird
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Published 2005
"Kari Gunter-Seymour's new collection is a timeless array of poems that invites the reader to traverse memories that feel as sacred as scripture. The collection is stunning in its ability to elevate memory and hold singular experiences aloft for perusal. In concert, the poems read like a carefully preserved palimpsest, layered cohesively, suggesting there's always more where that came from. Not a single poem is negligible. This is an airtight intersection of family and kinship, and through Gunter-Seymour's meticulous model, we are asked to consider what we, too, have inherited from the land as much as from our people, and how many, many ways, "Everything alive aches for more." - Bianca X, Affrilachian Poet, Author of Black Mermaid
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"Kari Gunter-Seymour writes with clear, evocative language as she weaves stories of her people, especially the strong women in her life who are portrayed honestly and with compassion. She takes us along on an intergenerational journey through roles as daughter, granddaughter, mother, grandmother, all closely connected to those who came before and those yet to return home. These vivid poems, deeply rooted in place and nature, are filled with images of a life spent in northern Appalachia. Gunter-Seymour writes of planting by the signs and the music of Hank and Dolly, but moves on to contemporary themes like border walls and legacies of war. In these poems, the past meshes with the present, and provides solid footing to face the future. - Jayne Moore Waldrop, author of Retracing My Step
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Published 2020
"This book ripped me the hell open. I felt like these poems written with dirt, bones, blood, and rust were my own forgotten memories that came rushing back into my wound. Sometimes I was afraid to turn the page, but I kept going because I had to, because that’s our lives, our people, our places. Julia Madsen puts us on notice while showing us how to be caring and gracious by sitting and attending to these ignored voices and landscapes that are burdened by clinging to/giving life." – Steven Dunn, author of Potted Meat
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"This utterly stunning debut, as its title tells us, is part manual, part investigation...part documentary, part allegory—both at once—in which “dream-installments” coincide with real documents, the silence of sleepy farmland with the immiserated bodies and voices that work it...Being in this book’s grasp is like a memory both inescapable and just out of reach, a gruesome scene you want to unsee and yet cannot look away from. This book throws into brutal and beautiful relief what it looks like to survive a lack, an unremitted absence, the cost of what we are not paid, into which we are born and have to bear. It is a powerful, essential book. So “hold out your hands,” step into “the blue light / of premonition” that this book has patiently and generously prepared for you, read it, and “take notes.” – Jane Gregory, author of My Enemies and Yeah No
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Published 2018
The Big Smoke by Adrian Matejka
"Matejka's Jack Johnson is a deeply flawed hero of American history -- balanced between heroic success and human failure, between worldwide acclaim and personal evil, between black and white, right and wrong. The tension is so powerful that there's no putting this book down."--St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"[The Big Smoke] is a rich, sometimes disturbing portrait of a fascinating, flawed and complex man." --The Washington Post
"With the lean, long jab and agile step of a boxer, Adrian Matejka delivers this knockout dramatization of the larger-than-life life of heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. In dexterous interpolating voices, and in forms ranging from enveloping sonnets to prose letters and interviews, Johnson emerges as a scrappy, hard-edged hero--troubled by his own demons but determined to win the 'fight of the century,' a fight that underscored the bitter realities of racism in America. These poems don't pull no punches." --2013 National Book Award Citation
"[A]n imaginative work by a commanding poet who engages the history and mythology of larger-than-life boxer Jack Johnson." --2014 Pulitzer Prize Citation
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Published 2013
"[Kaveh] Akbar is exquisitely sensitive to how language can function as both presence and absence. . . . His practice of taking language apart, and harnessing the empty space around it, makes even the most familiar words seem eerie and unexpected.”—The New Yorker
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“Working at and along the outer edges of language, Pilgrim Bell calls us to attention and to attend to that which poetry and prayer share, while simultaneously demanding that we tend to the political, the social, the erotic―all that is quotidian and human. Persimmons and empire; saffron and refugee camps; exile, oleander, and the Rolling Stones―all the stuff of poetry. And of prayer. In Pilgrim Bell, the poet Kaveh Akbar, ‘God’s incarnate spit in the mud,’ takes us down to the ground, to the prosaic, the dismissed and overlooked, the better to talk to the great Silence, bearer of many names including that of God.”―M. NourbeSe Philip
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“This is the invitation Pilgrim Bell extends: to join a conversation in which violence interrupts beauty and beauty interrupts violence, in which doubt interrupts faith and faith interrupts doubt, in which difference interrupts shared humanity and shared humanity interrupts difference, ad infinitum, as well they must.”―Ploughshares
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Published 2021
"To write a series of poems out of extreme illness is a bracing accomplishment indeed. In Deluge... Leila Chatti, born of a Catholic mother and a Muslim father, brilliantly explores the trauma. In a frightening two-year saga of a tumor and the 'flooding' it caused, Chatti finds not disassociation but deeper association with her own experience." --Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times
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"Chatti turns fear and shame into empowerment in her unflinching debut... [She] translates a gritty, traumatizing experience into a hypnotic, transcendental topography of the human spirit." --Publishers Weekly
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"Tunisian American poet Leila Chatti's powerful collection of poems centers her faith, health, embodiment, shame and womanhood." --Ms. Magazine
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Published 2020