John Elizabeth Stintzi
[isbn]
A book so boundless in its imagination and so utterly itself that it resuscitated a joy for reading I didn't know I'd been missing. Stintzi is a poetic and quietly ecstatic writer whose eruptive foray into something-close-to-eco-horror, both sublime and monstrous in turn, deserves to be widely read.
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Camille T Dungy
[isbn]
Camille T. Dungy is one of the first poets I think of when someone asks me to recommend a favorite nature poet writing today. Not only is she a brilliant conjurer of lyric images from the animal to the botanical (as evident here in the brilliant Trophic Cascade) but she is also known for an expansive body of work that celebrates the historical contributions of Black poets to nature writing, travel writing, and ecopoetics. (For more,... (read more)
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Zeina Hashem Beck
[isbn]
O is a dazzling, heart-forward collection built around an innovative form Beck has created called 'The Duet' — a bilingual conversation between English and Arabic, sung to life from the emergent meeting places that poetry makes possible.
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Jenny Xie
[isbn]
Jenny Xie's The Rupture Tense is a marvel where poetry, history, and photography converge. Collapsing generational timelines, Xie's seemingly boundless forms revisit archives and family histories connected to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, finding within its enforced silences and gaps in memory the persistence of a living language that is mutable, teeming, and always "leak[ing] through." A must read for anyone with an interest in... (read more)
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Sarah Shin, Ben Vickers, Francesca Gavin
[isbn]
Specializing in experimental writing on all things esoteric and mystical, UK-based Ignota Press is one of my favorite small presses to have emerged in the last few years. This book is one of their latest offerings: an anthology of writing on the unknowable reaches of consciousness (think: the occult, the psychedelic, the panpsychic) that will introduce you to a treasure trove of some of the most thrilling contemporary voices writing between the... (read more)
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Maria Stepanova
[isbn]
One of the best books I've read on the paradoxes of memory: how it eludes us even as we draw close to it; how trauma both obscures and sharpens it; how its gaps can trouble us into grief as much as they stir up possibilities for creative processing. Composed of an absorbing assemblage of essay, memoir, family letters, and talismanic objects, Stepanova's familial testament to Jewish life and survival across the war-torn histories of Russia and... (read more)
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Alycia Pirmohamed
[isbn]
Elk in tall grass; a door of glacial water; ghosts in a canopy of pine trees. Such images refract, double, and pool across this aqueous debut collection – a work of deep memory (and counter-memory) whose “rivering toward the light” returns its readers always to the ever-entangled multiplicities of language and selfhood. A diviner of intimate ecological attention, Pirmohamed is a revelation and one of my favorite poets writing today.
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Gabrielle Bates
[isbn]
I’ve been looking forward to a full collection from Gabrielle Bates ever since reading her poem ‘The Dog’ (published a few years ago in The Offing) whose stoic oscillations between brutality and tenderness left me quietly awed and curious for more. Now 'The Dog' serves as the opening poem to her outstanding debut Judas Goat, a rightful overture to a book of granular intensity and wrestling across its weighty core... (read more)
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Rosa Campbell
[isbn]
I'll never forget how it felt to read this verdant meditation on grief, houseplants, and queer home-making for the first time — how moved I was by its warmth and brilliance, how I read it all in a single afternoon even as I wished it wouldn't end. With Pothos as her debut, Scotland-based writer Rosa Campbell reveals herself to be a thrilling and vital new voice, as well as a generous guide towards the small things that can save us.
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Amina Cain
[isbn]
If we look beyond conventional metrics of literary success, what is it exactly that makes a writer a writer? How have the mundane realities of everyday life influenced the creation of the books we love? If, like me, you are fascinated by these questions — perhaps scrolling often to the Personal Life sections of your favorite authors' Wikipedia pages — Amina Cain's latest book is sure to enchant you. Against a backdrop of luminaries, from Woolf to... (read more)
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Caren Beilin
[isbn]
This hallucinatory, macabre, and surprisingly jubilant book about breaking free from cycles of family trauma had me laughing in the laundromat and weeping in the back of the bus. I'm certain Beilin's revenge will feel like a gift to many, but especially to the truth-tellers, the survivors, the exilic by nature; truly to anyone who has learned, at great risk, how to stay alive in spite/despite. Viva the scapegoats.
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Jessica Au
[isbn]
Meandering through the typhoon-soaked streets of Tokyo and beyond, this slim but powerful debut novel condenses with hypnotic precision around themes of family memory, belonging, and the peculiar, disparate weathers of mother-daughter relationships. Australian writer Jessica Au is undeniably one to watch.
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Valzhyna Mort
[isbn]
In this award-winning collection, Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort invokes a harrowing reckoning with historical mass atrocities, bent through the keyhole of family memory. Her poems are precise and angular, tinged with ironies and bizarre details that leave a lasting imprint on the reader — a kind of spooky carousel of whispering chestnuts, rattling bone-keys, faces in household objects (purses, shovels), and ghostly bison. I hesitate to reduce the... (read more)
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Saidiya Hartman
[isbn]
This genre-bending book spotlights the intimate lives of young Black women and their remarkable yet often overlooked contributions to art, music, literature, and social movements in early 20th century New York City. Richly textured and movingly rendered, their stories in Hartman's careful hands indelibly disrupted and expanded my ideas of what historical non-fiction could be, both as a mode of radical attention and reparative imagination.
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Niina Pollari
[isbn]
Within the total universe of this aptly titled collection, grief is neither an amphibious vehicle traveling towards some deeper meaning, nor an element to be alchemized into something beautiful. Admirably, Pollari's stark, unblinking lines, written after the death of her infant daughter, chart a new path altogether by the furious light of the all-too-human capacity to love so much and expect so much. This is, in short, poetry that can bear up... (read more)
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Will Alexander
[isbn]
There's really nothing on this earth quite like a Will Alexander poetry collection. Channeling an oracular, surrealistic mode, his poetry invites something like a close encounter with the numinous, even as it simmers with friction against the muscle and guts of life's relentless materiality. In this mesmeric collection, three long poems stunningly negotiate a difficult physics of time, space, and memory, transporting readers through African... (read more)
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Kaveh Akbar
[isbn]
What I appreciate about Akbar's poetry is his open-handed posture towards mystery and the moments in life that hover just beyond or outside of language. Nowhere is this more evident than in Pilgrim Bell, his second collection, with poems that are devotional, indebted to wonder, furious at all forms of empire, and unafraid to say "the soul".
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Solmaz Sharif
[isbn]
A singular, exacting voice known for poetry that lays bare — historically, linguistically — the grisly seams of American imperialism and the military industrial complex. With this new collection, Sharif returns with characteristic lucidity and rigor, investigating similar themes in relation to contingency, (be)longing, exposure, elsewhereness, and the exilic nature of poetic language itself.
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Liz Howard
[isbn]
"Beauty is my irreparable eye / and today I became geometric."
In her otherworldly second collection, Liz Howard's signature hyper-lyricism traverses a bridge between cosmic and terrestrial realms with all the risky elegance of a high-wire walker. Easily my favourite collection of 2021, its poems of deep time and deep grief exude a kind of music that feels almost bio-luminescent — radiant as they are at the dark crossroads of historical,... (read more)
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Tishani Doshi
[isbn]
Last year I went to an online poetry reading where Tishani Doshi read from this book and I'll never forget how hypnotic, even healing, it felt listening to its sensuous and mystical poems. I think of Doshi as the kind of poet who can quickly become your next favourite, as both a champion against cynicism and a guide to return you back to your body in its full range of grief, joy, rage, desire, and hope.
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Natasha Brown
[isbn]
If you read only one debut novelist this year, let it be Natasha Brown with her brilliant Assembly. Here, a posh garden party serves as a delicious microcosm through which Brown dissects a host of historical (and not so historical) depredations — from systemic racism and the British empire to late capitalism and white-washed neoliberal feminism — all in prose that is lyrical, searing, interrogative, and devastatingly accurate.
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Simone Weil
[isbn]
If I'm ever asked to share a book that's changed my life, it's likely I will mention Simone Weil's Gravity & Grace — a vital, curious text on mysticism, supernatural love, and apophatic approaches to the divine. Camus called Weil "the only great spirit of our time" and this book will help you understand why.
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Diane Di Prima
[isbn]
Few things have rescued me from the inertia of grief this year as much as Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters. Spanning a period of nearly five decades, di Prima's dispatches are vivid, yet meditative, as they imagine and invoke the possibilities of a fully liberated world — the kind of poetry you want to memorize, read aloud to friends, or tuck into your coat pocket as a protective talisman (which the new pocket-sized edition from... (read more)
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Lucie Brock Broido
[isbn]
"I've got this mystic streak in me." Though it may be a cliché to say, in this case it feels all-too true: Lucie Brock-Broido's poetry is unlike anything else I've ever read. Richly variegated, sensuous, maximalist, sonically fascinating. Delphic oracle meets Emily Dickinson. Her work is the kind that evades easy description but — to risk another cliché — will indelibly change how you read (or write) poetry forever.
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Alice Notley
[isbn]
Follow Alette down the subway stairs where your spiraling odyssey begins: journeying through surreal tunnelscapes of faces, into dark enchanted forests "full of beings," and towards the simultaneous "Past, Present," "& Future" of self-transformation. Along the way, Notley's book-length feminist epic will likely have something to say about your own transformation, leaving you dizzied yet fully awake within its mythopoetic universe.
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Jackie Wang
[isbn]
Wang's remarkable debut poetry collection comprises a frothy mixture of poems, prose, and illustrations inspired by her dream journal. Their brief microcosms are mutable, haunted, Dali-esque and darkly playful (see poem ft. an Evil Noodle) — all of them striking in their oblique confrontations with carceral logics, race, class, family, and transgenerational trauma. While I think there's plenty here to meet any reader's interest in the... (read more)
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Carl Phillips
[isbn]
What is the color of memory? With characteristic depth and lucidity, Phillips's poems bend their light through the prism of this speculation, inviting us to approach its crucial, political implications and contingencies through a quantum field of knowing, awestruck presence.
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Linda Gregg
[isbn]
A modern mystic with a straightforward style.
When I think of Linda Gregg, I sometimes think of the astrological meaning of the comet Chiron, which is known as "the wounded healer." Never seeking easy consolation, her poems possess a healing quality precisely because of their capacity to fully inhabit landscapes of loss, pain, and disappointment, making, somehow, for some of the most supremely compassionate, humane poems I've ever read.
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CA Conrad
[isbn]
Reading CAConrad’s poetry often feels like reading my way back into aliveness itself, and their latest collection, the eco-poetic AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration, is no exception. Emanating from a series of (Soma)tic rituals based on the recorded sounds of extinct animals, its poems shape-shift in playful, creaturely forms, even as they broach complex (and interconnected) traumas, from state violence to the AIDS crisis. The... (read more)
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