What other poetry books have you been reading lately?
A Facebook friend of mine shared a poem from Brad Aaron Modlin’s Everyone at this Party Has Two Names and I immediately ordered the entire collection. I think it’s a brilliant exercise in extended metaphor. Nickole Brown’s chapbook To Those Who Were Our First Gods was a Rattle Chapbook prize winner; it’s such a smart book about the relationship between humans and animals and our responsibilities to the earth. Very timely. I also have to mention Willa Carroll, who is doing all of this interesting experimental hybrid stuff with music and video and poetry; it’s a direction I haven’t gone in yet but want to. I just finished her book, Nerve Chorus. I also love the work of Al Abonado; if you can get your hands on a copy of Jaw you won’t be sorry; I’m so impressed by how he plays with repetition to build tension; there’s such humanity in every poem, so many familiar images that he is able to defamiliarize. More collections sitting on my desk as I type this: Jericho Brown, The Tradition. Maggie Smith, Lamp of the Body. Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem, Brenda Shaughnessy, Our Andromeda, Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. I’m a pretty voracious reader, so if someone recommends a poet, I buy the collection.
Speaking of which, everyone should rush to buy How to Love the World, Poems of Gratitude and Hope, edited by James Crews. The poems in this are a powerful antidote to the frustration, fear, and malaise brought about by the current social moment and which admittedly, I sometimes find myself tangled up in. Every single poem in the collection—like Sarah Freligh’s widely anthologized “Wondrous”-- makes me feel more grounded, more optimistic. I keep it by my bedside; I try to read one before I go to bed and one when I wake up.
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