Famous Hermits
A profound love for the poetic word pervades every page of Stacy Szymaszek’s poetry collection Famous Hermits. Dialoguing with wordsmiths across history, from Dante to Bram Stoker to Alice Notley, the first half of her collection contains poems that are in and of themselves experiments in structure, rhythm, and white space in the vein of anti-poetry.
The Nursery
Szilvia Molnar’s debut novel The Nursery is visceral and uncomfortable— Molnar presents the reader with a portrait of new motherhood with all its agonies, its unscrupulous disasters. I chose the novel partly because the cover, blurred and simplistic, intrigued me. After reading a couple of pages, I realized the image was that of a lactating breast, a symbol usually associated with nurturing, the beauty of loving and caring for an infant. Yet Molnar’s novel is interested in those moments of motherhood so often glossed over by the glorifying eyes of the reader: moments of intense isolation, physical pain, and resentment towards the narrator’s own child, unsentimentally referred to as “Button.”
Monstrilio
Gerardo Sámano Córdova's fantastic literary debut, Monstrilio, may market itself as a tale of horror, but it feels more like an exploration of desire— strange, queer, burning desire, at its most grotesque and gripping. Out of Córdova's delicate balance between the mythic and the modern emerges a tale of a grieving mother who covets a portion of her dead son’s lung until it grows into something new: not her beloved Santiago, but an insatiable and violently hungry animal, a being neither human nor deniable.
Ghost Music
An Yu’s Ghost Music is one that feels intimately real and hypnotically unreal in equal measure: at its heart, it is a domestic drama, chronicling Song Yan’s humdrum existence as a piano teacher slash failed concert pianist alongside the collapse of her marriage with Bowen as the secrets of his past are brought to light; yet, anchoring Yu’s story is the surrealism of talking mushrooms, strange orange dust that befalls Yunnan, the lulling refrain of Chopin’s Rêverie, and the seeming specter of Bai Yu, a once world-famous, presumed-to-be-dead pianist. Earthly reality and phantasmagoria collide to create a haunting dreamscape that manages to be, at its best, quietly atmospheric and profound.
Couplets
Maggie Millner’s Couplets feels both timely and self-assuredly out-of-place in the landscape of contemporary American poetry. The novel in verse was published in early February, each hardcover copy fitted with a bright red jacket with the title mirrored vertically along the cover––appearing once in pink and once in white––obnoxiously appropriate for the lovers’ holiday which passed a week after the book’s publication.
Bad Education
0 is the exception to many numerological rules. A number cannot be dived by 0, and any product of 0 is also 0. Unlike every other mathematical symbol, adding or subtracting by 0 does nothing. It’s neither positive nor negative, not even nor odd. It fails to be a number in every way. And yet, the value of 1, 2, and all the rest is determined by their distance from 0. Without the null value, we would be missing something integral to our understanding of math. 0 has to be thought alongside every and any number. It is the thing included in the category of “number,” a thing integral to that category, only because it is excluded from number-hood. But enough about numbers. That’s not why you here. Yet, this paradoxical number-ness of 0 is the basis of Lee Edelman’s argument in his new book Bad Education. For Edelman, what is true of numbers is also true of language.
Return Flight
Jennifer Huang’s Return Flight winds itself through retrospection and introspection throughout the fault lines of the home, the body, and the self. Huang writes, “what I know is what I imagine,” and what they know is the elaborate mythologies and topographies of Taiwanese folklore wrapped in an intimate portrait of family history. In shapeshifting gods and spirits, the poems find beauty in the past and probes the meaning of our physicality. Celebrating their culture and questioning the self, Huang’s poems travel the length of their lineage up to the present day, framed by memories and moments.
The Terrible We
The brilliance of The Terrible We is that it manages to approach this difficult question with both an appreciation for the stakes at hand and with a clear sense of purpose. In Awkward-Rich’s words, The Terrible We “is a book that attempts to hold on to certain tools from disability studies—among other fields—in order to open trans studies itself up to different critical protocols.” Rather than merely declaring transfeminist struggles against depathologization or disability activists struggles against the mental-disability-as-flaw conception to be correct, Awkward-Rich instead chooses specific examples that applies some of the strategies and thinking that have come out of disability activism and studies to transness in novel and exciting ways.
Musical Tables
Musical Tables, the newest release from former United States Poet Laureate Billy Collins, is a refreshing embrace of minimalistic, short form poetry: Paired with themes of nature, romance, and mortality, Collins’ distinct humor and light-hearted style leaves the reader with tiny bundles of poetic whimsy. While his poems are playful and cheeky, Collins’ poetic prowess shines best in his serious poems, where he accesses a powerful surrealism that leaves the reader with a more lasting impression.
Duh
Gelfman-Randazzo is 5’8” (she tells us) and also a poet. And she’s reading from her latest chapbook, Duh, in the backyard of a small used bookstore in Prospect Heights. 13 minutes past the start time, my friend finds a fortune in his jacket pocket, “Listen these next few days to your friends to get the answers you seek.” 17 minutes past the start time, they bring out wine. 22 minutes past the start time, we begin.
Bliss Montage
Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage, a collection of eight short stories, is a fever dream spun into reality. From a house with 100 ex-boyfriends to an invisibility drug to a baby’s arm that grows outside of the womb, Ma’s images compose a not-so-blissful montage of worst nightmares and intrusive thoughts. Superimposing the realistic and the bizarre, Ma, author of the 2018 novel Severance, revels unabashedly in the peculiarity of what it means to live in today’s world.
Liberation Day
George Saunders’ newest collection of short stories, Liberation Day, is an intriguing blend of realism and dystopian, but Saunders shines brightest in the stories that defy categorization. Having already shown himself an expert at writing distinct voice in his past works, Saunders focuses his talent on stories that reflect on the chaos and terror of the Trump and COVID years.
Judas Goat
Much like this book’s eponymous animal, Gabrielle Bates’ debut poetry collection Judas Goat takes us toward a place where our humanity meets the hard edge of a violence that feels all too familiar. Bates writes of the quiet (and not-so-quiet) cruelties in our universal intimacies, tracing a path of her relationships with parents, lovers, gods, and land. This collection of 40 poems examines the afflictions of a wide range of species—from humans to lambs to pigs to cows. Her poems additionally detail her experiences of early marriages and early lovers, touches of maternity (or lack thereof), effigies and God, her journey away from the South and back toward it, the seasons, and her (and our) return to nature.
Thirst For Salt
Madelaine Lucas’s Thirst for Salt bilaterally reframes the way one might look at intimacy. On the one hand, we have the tendency to think of intimacy in the sphere of physicality and sensuality—neither of which is absent from this compelling novel. On the other hand, we have intimacy as Lucas explores it in an evermore refreshing way: intimacy as it relates to the temporal passage of a shared love and the memories we gain, lose, and seek to remember on the way. Thirst for Salt depicts the transformation of the self through the memory of the past; specifically, a summer spent on the beach of an Australian coastal town.
The Hurting Kind
Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind is a spellbinding love letter to nature. The collection, separated chronologically into four seasons, opens in the spring with a description of a groundhog on its haunches, stealing tomatoes from a backyard garden. Observing this quotidian scene with unmatched curiosity, the speaker compares herself to the animal, wondering, “Why am I not allowed delight?” From this query onward, Limón revels in the interconnectedness of nature and human experience. Depicting cockroaches, lindens, forsythias, horses, and hawks, she writes of loss, infertility, and cultural and familial legacy with stunning attention to detail.
Civil Service
Civil Service is clearly (and self-consciously) the culmination of many years of what Fred Moten refers to as study (a “devotional, sacramental, anamonastic kind of intellectual practice”): Schwartz writes first and foremost as a reader, and the book wonders seriously and thoughtfully about state power, 21st century capitalism, race, sex, love, and even—maybe especially—metapoetics.
Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence
Homero de Aridjis’ Self Portrait in the Zone of Silence begins with “El Jaguar/ The Jaguar,” a powerful ode to the native Mexican symbol of strength and survival. The poem, composed of five parts, is a confrontation with death: the destruction of the jaguar provokes the reader to contend not only with the colonization of the Americas, but also with the poet’s own mortality.
A Shiver in the Leaves
Crows swirl and gather in Luther Hughes’ A Shiver in the Leaves. As death-omens and figures of blackness, the birds flit through poems that sway with the tenderest desire and still with mourning. This debut collection from the Seattle-based poet memorializes black boys killed by police and black boys and men who were recent victims of anti-gay hate crimes (Tamir Rice, Giovanni Melton, Dwone Anderson-Young, and Ahmed Said among others). Against the pervasiveness of racist and homophobic violence, the poems in this collection ask if the spaces of healing and intimacy provided by queer domesticity can serve as a sort of refuge from the world.
Francisco
Alison Mills Newman’s Francisco, an autobiographical novel chronicling the young actress’ days in Hollywood and the 1970’s Black Arts movement, was first published in 1974. After years out-of-print, having fallen into relative obscurity, it arrives for contemporary readers as a re-release from New Directions with a foreword by Saidiya Hartman, forthcoming in 2023. Francisco chronicles its protagonist-- an unnamed facsimile of Newman herself-- drifting from day to day through California in the 1970s, demarcating time with a colloquial “anyways” addressed to the reader as she goes between San Francisco and Los Angeles after rejecting an early career in acting. Her language is flooded with the vernacular, all lower-case and typically taking on a familiar, conversational tone with the reader that makes her all the more charming.
Stay True
Though Stay True is about Ken—and succeeds as a full, uncompromising portrait—it’s also an attempt to understand why one’s life is the way it is. It’s a typology, a disaggregation of all that has potentially (re)calibrated Hsu’s life: the immigrant story that his Taiwanese parents can be fitted into (and that the book then moves an appropriate distance away from, to its credit); the American music he inherits from them and discovers for himself; his discovery of Asian America; his political involvements; his experience teaching at San Quentin; a few girlfriends and a few academics.