What other poetry books have you been reading lately?
I read a lot of poetry, at least 200 books each year. Sometimes they engage me deeply, sometimes it’s just a quick scan. Partly it’s my job with VerseFest, where I’ve been largely responsible for the programming for the past few years. Most of those books are Canadian, but I’ve been reading quite a bit of work in translation as well, and that’s some of the work that moves/provokes me the most these days. I also curate the translation feature in Arc Poetry Magazine and I’m really proud of the range of material we’ve been able to attract. I also read genre fiction (mostly spy novels) and non-fiction (history, biography, theory, etc). As a result, I’ve had to abandon literary fiction, which remains a serious gap in my reading.
Some of the work I’ve enjoyed over the past little while are Ursula Andkjaer Olsen’s Third-Millenium Heart (tr. Katrine Ogaard Jensen), Alice Oswald’s Nobody, Forrest Gander’s new material, Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart, and the Martinique poet Monchoachi.
Canadian books I’ve enjoyed recently include Donna Kane’s Orrery, Rob Winger’s It Doesn’t Matter What We Meant, Lillian Necakov’s il virus, Debris du Sillage from Gilles Latour (although my French is um, somewhat imprecise) the brand new Masses on Radar, by my Ottawa colleague David O’Meara, and some old work from Anneharte Baker.
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