Annulet’s Year in Reading: 2024
Recommendations from contributors and contributing editors, including Aditi Machado, Temperance Aghamohammadi, V. Joshua Adams, Kelly Krumrie, Tessa Bolsover, Toby Altman, Elijah Guerra, Andrea Quaid, Jonathan Gharraie, and Alicia Wright that highlight selections from Annulet’s issues this past calendar year, alongside books and texts published, read, or found remarkable over these past twelve months of reading.
Aditi Machado
Kelly Caldwell, Letters to Forget (Knopf)
This is Kelly’s first book and it is published posthumously. I knew Kelly a little and not enough. Letters to Forget lets me know her a little more but in the way the best lyric poems forestall its assurances: “The ground gives rise // That is not glass That / Is water but careful it // Breaks with the same facility // Darkness is very pure / But it will no longer talk to me // This is a failure of moral seriousness”
Joyce Mansour, In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems (World Poetry), trans. C. Francis Fisher
There is not enough Mansour in the world (I’m shocked to learn, via the translator’s note, that her books are out of print in France) and these translations by C. Francis Fisher are fantastic. There’s no fluff, no explaining away the furious strangeness of the work, the bald clarities of its assertions: “The midday wind rises in the cafés / My mother’s eyes count a rosary of testicles / Somewhere in the forest / Priapic hanged men sneeze / The scarab buries his ball beneath the livid earth / Winter is prince of olive.”
And here are two favorites from Annulet:
Kai Ihns, “Prayer to the Antibiotic”
Amelia Rosselli, “I rhymed, towards a bank,” trans. Roberta Antognini & Deborah Woodard
Incidentally, I’m in the midst of devouring books published in 2024 (they don’t include the poems above, FYI) by both Ihns (Of, The Elephants) and Rosselli (The Dragonly, Entre Ríos, same brilliant translators).
If I’m allowed to include a performance as text, I’ll add the gift of JJJJJerome Ellis’s performance on November 13, 2024 in Cincinnati from their extraordinary Aster of Ceremonies (Milkweed, 2023).
Temperance Aghamohammadi
The past year introduced death, illness, devastation, and still….hope, love, and ecstasy in the face of it. When my mother passed away in June 2023, I thought I was now completely alone in the world. The following poets (some friends, some I’ve never met) helped prove me wrong in the year and a half since. While there are so many more than I can possibly name or list, I celebrate you all. Thank you for holding and guiding me when I needed holding and guiding.
“In a Cave Where Something Once Happened” by Asha Futterman (Bennington Review)
“i saw a color almost like black / when i was close enough to touch it”
Death Styles by Joyelle McSweeney (Nightboat Books)
“snip snip went the seam / between temperance, intemperance/ they invented tragedy/
then hurled the whole world through it”
“MONTAGE :: WITH YOU AND WITHOUT” by David Ehmcke (Publisher’s Weekly)
“And in the credits, where I love you, no one lingers to see who you’ll be.”
Of by Kai Ihns (The Elephants)
“this is at a loud club of some kind, full of blue light / i can’t decide. when i wake up / the morning / light looks blue and strange.”
“ELEGY” by Syd Westley (The Adroit Journal)
“I find ash in the hollow of my cheek. / Ash in the water. Ash in the air.”
Last One Out by Deborah Richards (Subpress)
“There’s something not quite right about a woman that does not / fit in.”
“North” by Kathryn Hargett-Hsu (Only Poems)
“When I was north / I ate elderberries / & read songs about the sea / as the empire of loneliness.”
Pink Noise by Kevin Holden (Nightboat Books)
“all motion and no motion / freedom and sex are seeds / arching becoming chariots”
“Encounter” by Ariana Benson (Kenyon Review)
“Heat / — yes, we were heat, until / we chose to let ourselves be / more than the pasts holding / our invisible strings”
V. Joshua Adams
Some books that stayed with me in 2024, in loose chronological order:
The Life of Henry Brulard by Stendhal, trans. John Sturrock (NYRB, 2002). Lydia Davis wrote the preface for this edition of Stendhal’s unfinished autobiography, and, reading it, you can see something of Davis’s deadpan in Stendhal’s apparently perfect frankness. The book focuses on the author’s childhood, and goes long on frustrations with the idiocies of provincial life and extended relations. These would appear to be less interesting than, say, having been an officer in Napoleon’s army during the invasion of (and retreat from) Russia. But good prose redeems.
Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams (Vintage, 1988). Spare, mordant, tender novel about a pair of lovers & drifters, amid post-Vietnam malaise. Southern Gothic by way of the Florida Keys. Everything and everyone's been left out in the sun too long. Nothing decays; after it gets soaked in seawater, it just bakes.
The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, trans. Francis Steegmuller (NYRB, 2023). The essentials: procrastination, aesthetic theory, sex, love, misery, triumph, politics. No biographer could capture a better picture of the modern artist (and GF, in his stubborn and admirable insistence on total autonomy, is that). "Madame Bovary, c'est moi?" Not quite, he's in here, in full.
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard (Viking, 1980). What we mean when we say “perfectly constructed”—on the level of the sentence and plot, in its rich and vivid characterizations. A throwback in its moment, certainly even more so now. Wholly unembarrassed by its status as a novel. Remember that?
A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein by Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé (Chicago, 2020). This book reminds us that modernist authors—Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Coetzee—were interested in difficulties beyond those of decipherment, and engaging with those texts requires attuning ourselves not only to a hermeneutical but an ethical project. A landmark in philosophy and literature.
Thirteen Rondels and 2 Epigrams by Brendan White (2023). Formal poems that feel wholly contemporary. Nary a cobweb to be seen; Whitman's achievement in loosening the line here gets properly inverted. Tight, tighter, tightest. Someone needs to greet White at the beginning of a great career.
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, trans. Edward G. Seidensticker (Knopf, 1957). It might have been the cover of the 1981 Perigree printing: three pink blossoms against a white background, with a pink geometric border and (modern) hand lettering. It might have been that it was $1, or that the name Kawabata rang some dusty bell in my memory. (The first Japanese author to win the Nobel, in 1968.) Whatever it was, this novel, which reads as a haiku blown up over 175 pages, and which tells the story of a doomed love affair between a hot-spring geisha and a wealthy dilettante, made me want to read the entire oeuvre.
Pitch Dark by Renata Adler (NYRB, 1983). The ostensible subject of the book is a crisis in a long love affair: “How could I know that every time you had a chance to choose you would choose the other thing?” What it does with this time-honored subject sets the book apart: a blend of journalistic detail and disjunctive narration, which produces a feeling of both plenitude and mystery.
Not Us Now by Zoë Hitzig (Changes, 2024). “Exit Muse,” which channels The Waste Land—“The sunflower you gave me a year ago? / In the mirror I practiced its slow-mo / surrender”—is one of many terrific poems in this collection, which combines lyrics with experiments of all sorts. Exit muse is also, maybe, the book’s ethos: enter the algorithm, as topos and technique, inspiration, breath.
Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner (Coffee House, 2011). Frequently hilarious advertisement by the author for himself and his thinking about poetry, one that doubles as an exercise in self-criticism. Way less annoying than everyone has been making it out to be for the last ten years, or that you might have thought from reading 10:04.
Vulturnus by Leon-Paul Fargue, trans. Terry Bradford (Wakefield, 2024). Fargue is a great post-Symbolist poet in his own right, but 1928’s Vulturnus shows him to be a fellow-traveler of Surrealism, too: “There we were, in the granulosa cell and glassware of the great redemption, a few of the resuscitated, a few of the returned, wretched electric appendages, Manichean seahorses, wretched tadpoles devoid of the genius of their race, aspiring to the genius of God….” Blake on absinthe.
Thank You and Other Poems by Kenneth Koch (Grove, 1962) and The Pleasures of Peace (Grove, 1969). It’s Koch’s centenary in 2025. Not enough people care. The rest of the NYS poets have found their place in the circus of the afterlife, but Koch’s work, so writerly while also managing to sound casually conversational, remains perennially undervalued and under-discussed. Banger after banger in these early books: “On the Great Atlantic Rainway,” “To You,” “The Circus,” “Fresh Air,” “Locks,” “Sleeping with Women,” “A Poem of the 48 States,” “Some South American Poets,” “The Pleasures of Peace,” etc.
Effacement by Elizabeth Arnold (Flood, 2010). Liz Arnold was a wonderful poet and person who sadly passed away earlier this year. A scholar of modernism, she carried forward in her own poetry the lessons of its second generation—Bunting, Oppen, Niedecker—particularly when it came to sound. Joshua Weiner, her colleague at Maryland, remembers her “listening to students’ drafts at the level of the syllable” and her poems—intellectually ambitious, but also attentive to the quotidian and the personal, have the tone of work that will last. Like this little one, from Effacement:
Forms of Poetic Attention by Lucy Alford (Columbia, 2021). Can a book of literary criticism be a cornucopia? This one is: of categories of attention, and of examples of that attention not only represented but performed by poems. We’ve been trained to think it risks philistinism, thinking of poems as instruments. But it might pay off for the art in the long run, when we realize those instruments can be used by readers of all sorts, even outside of the cloister—I mean, university.
Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry by Ryan Ruby (Seven Stories, 2024). In which the ghosts of Alfred Lord and Milman Parry return to guide a copiously annotated, loosely pentameter mock-academic romp through a few thousand years of “Western” poetry. As befits a critic’s passion project, the real action here is in the footnotes, which sometimes dwarf the verse on the facing page. It’s too late to put the genie of technological reproducibility back in the bottle. But, given this poem’s taking the physical form of a codex, rather than floating in the digital ether, maybe we have a wish or two left.
Kelly Krumrie
The Apple in the Dark, Clarice Lispector, trans. Benjamin Moser (New Directions, 2023)
Rules, Lorraine Daston (Princeton University Press, 2022)
Wrong Norma, Anne Carson (New Directions, 2024)
Mice 1961, Stacey Levine (Verse Chorus Press, 2024)
Tessa Bolsover
Annulet, issues 7 & 8:
There are threads of grief, desire. Collected debris, staged movements of the hands. Instead of a list, a net of stolen things:
[a cache: a logical pyramid; a nest
a cache: a hole in the ground, where we store
what is more than we can carry, where it rots; memory] [what cleaves us
this mantilla of doubt that any-
thing can be without
mourning] [We pull ourselves through to the other side.
The stage is a horizontal grid of ropes suspended at eye level and threaded through
the arms and legs of garments] [The sound is one of containment.
In other words, arrival] [a small score of breath beyond the flail of glossolalia]
[Sequence which moves like air from room to room]
[This is a new moon] [Time is a tissue prone to infection]
[the eradicating grey libidinal motor
Of capital’s global rainbow] [The motor replaced does not stand still]
[Even if, even when you don’t exactly know the event,]
[you want to know the mouth of the river] [To supplant the septum
ring] [skin untangled]
[nothing ceases to exist this is crucially important]
[(Water to never close this parenthesis]
+++
Here are the books and chapbooks published in 2024 that I’ve been most excited about:
· Mandible Wishbone Solvent, Asiya Wadud (University of Chicago)
· The Size of Paradise, Dale Smith (Knife Fork)
· Asia & Haiti, Will Alexander (Litmus)
· Soft Water, John Coletti (Spiral Editions)
· Being Reflected Upon, Alice Notley (Penguin)
· WHAT, Robert Kocik (auric press)
· Tomorrow is a Holiday, Hamish Ballantyne (New Star)
· Comeback Death, Jennifer Soong (Krupskaya)
· Liontaming in America, Elizabeth Willis (New Directions)
· Why is That Goddamned Radio On?, Jim Cory (Radiator)
· Alt-Nature, Saretta Morgan (Coffee House)
Toby Altman
JJJJJerome Ellis, Aster of Ceremonies (Milkweed, 2024). No one is making poems like JJJJJerome Ellis right now. Though it feels ungenerous to call Ellis’ work poetry, not in any parochial sense. These are works of music, performance art, and graphic design; they are theoretical investigations into blackness, history, and stuttering which articulate their thesis (an important word in Ellis’ work) in and through the body that performs them. Where their debut album / book The Clearing was expansive, lush, and various, Aster of Ceremonies is slow, durational, meditative—nowhere more than its mesmerizing closing piece, “benediction, movement 2.”
Ronald Johnson, Valley of the Many Colored Grasses (The Song Cave, 2023). Like many people, I mostly know Ronald Johnson through Radi Os, his foundational erasure of Paradise Lost. It is a book that is maybe more interesting to talk about than actually read; to make sense of the poem, you need a deep dive into his idealist metaphysics. (Be honest, how many of us have actually read Ark?). Imagine my surprise, then, to discover Johnson’s early work, recently republished in a handsome edition from The Song Cave. It has all the philosophical grandeur of his later work already. But the early Johnson is also personal, lyrical, embodied, attached to the particular ground of Kansas where he was raised. These are poems of astonishing beauty and crystalline intellect. They make the rest of his canon feel more alive and more approachable.
Aditi Machado, Material Witness (Nightboat, 2024). I feel like the poets who really matter to me are the ones who have a distinctive way of handling syntax, a specific music that organizes their sentences. Think about the early Leslie Scalapino, or Harryette Mullen, or Lyn Hejinian, or, fuck it, John Milton. Anyway, over her first three books, Aditi Machado has announced herself as the composer of such music—specific, strange, hard to describe. There is the erotic immediacy of her work, and the sticky, chewy abstraction; the sense that a body is present and being erased at the same moment. This new book, Material Witness continues to elaborate what such music can do—no more so than in the concluding long poem, “Now.” What can I say about it that isn’t cliché? Machado’s poems resist any kind of generalization about what they are, or what they do—they are too multifarious, too mobile for that. Instead, they demand that you attend, almost at the letter of the level, to the language that oozes around you as you move through her poems.
Thomas de Monchaux, “Fifth Column,” New York Review of Architecture, June 2024. Honestly, just read this. I don’t know how to convince you how to care about Tuscan Columns, the new Wegman’s in Manhattan, The Sopranos. But you should. This article is the loopiest thing I’ve read all year—vast and associative, absorbing all kinds of beige aesthetics into its maw. Reading it felt like falling down a very deep and very mid rabbit hole.
Lindsey Webb, Plat (Archway Editions, 2024). Everything you need is here—grief, pastoral, architecture, the prose poem, houses, urban planning, and bodies. If that list seems unwieldly, overwhelming, the experience of reading is not. Webb braids these varied topics together, or, better, articulates for us the braids that already bind them together. If she manages such a feat, it is a testament to her muscular, charismatic prose: Webb magnetizes your attention to the image, the line, the syntax of the sentence. Then the next line, image, sentence. How can you put it altogether and find the whole? It’s a question the book asks and refuses to answer.
Elijah Guerra
Ellen Boyette’s chapbook Nitrous or My Velvet Knife (Secret Restaurant Press 2024). Where the strange will beguile you into quaalude nightmares of excess (“In the brouhaha we brew contagion kombucha, sexual apples”). Where the surreal walks your benzo body through a field of exorcisms (“I don't know why coins keep coming from my mouth”). Boyette is a poet of the Occult, “searching for current glitches in the ether.” Picture this. You are dragged by Halloween clouds to a hydrogen meadow where you stare at the moon through a deer eating lilacs until you yourself are a deer devouring midnight via flower feast. (Neat, let’s drink.) Reading this chapbook gave me the same thrill as when I read Aase Berg for the first time. Only ten copies left of the second printing, go get it. “Run for the hills that eat you.”
Andrea Quaid
Gabrielle Civil, In & Out of Place (Texas A&M University Press)
Gabrielle Civil’s In & Out of Place is the latest in her series of performance memoirs. The book is a collection of essays, notebook writing, letters, email correspondence, scripts, poems and reviews – all alive with questions and reflections about what it means to be an artist and, specifically, what it means to be a U. S. citizen and Black feminist performance artist making work in Mexico. The text, which also includes photos and visual art documenting her time in Mexico, brings all these modes of writing and thinking and making together. When I read Civil’s work, I encounter an artist who creates a genre – the performance memoir – in which to make and document her practice. In & Out of Place explores place, race, identity and belonging. Civil also invites me to think about collaboration, inspiration, artistic commitment, and the experiences - sometimes painful, sometimes joyful - that contribute to an artist’s ongoing work. Bonus! Poem as close reading as reader response as note to an author about their poetry book.
Tisa Bryant, Unexplained Presence (Wave Books)
I was thrilled when I saw that Wave Books was reissuing Tisa Bryant’s Unexplained Presence, a book I first read when it was published by Leon Works. Bryant’s collection of critical-creative essays is an imaginative, incisive intervention into texts, novels and visual work (including Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Stephen Frears Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Jean-Baptiste Carpeux’s The Four Parts of the World). She foregrounds black presences where they are otherwise marginalized or dismissed. In the essay, “While London Burns …Violent is Blue,” the speaker asks, “And you, Violent? Where are you now? Are you free to love, just not seen doing it?” The speaker continues, is this an effect of being “underdeveloped or cut out?” Bryant makes presence an argument by writing into scenes, narratives, and visual texts. I am eagerly awaiting her forthcoming book, Residual (Nightboat Books).
Madhu H. Kaza, Lines of Flight (Ugly Duckling Presse)
Kaza’s chapbook-length essay is a line of flight. In her text, Kaza shares how she carries Deleuze and Guattari’s phrase with her, (mis)reading the concept as “a line of flight – an unexpected way out of that does not accept the assumptions of the system or the logic of binary thinking…a liberatory impulse.” Her essay embodies this spirit with its refusal of assumptions about translation, scholarly and imaginative analysis that creates connections across multiples times and places, and a formal structure that I read as a liberatory impulse to do scholarship differently. As a work of creative scholarship, her text activates her claims thorough explication, poem, and conversations with friends and scholars, inviting me to think alongside her about how reading moves a writer into deeper modes of research and imaginative wanderings.
Nat Raha, apparitions (nines) (Nightboat Books)
I’m currently reading Raha’s apparitions (nines), a book composed of the niner, a poetic form of nine syllables and nine lines, which is carries through the book’s structure of nine poems in each of the nine sections. Lyric form is transformed. The niner’s syllabic rhythms, line break measures, and punctuation as dis/juncture between words and lines create poems and a poetics that Raha describes as “brief containers to feel through, polemicize, and remember – to communicate the stakes of the everyday harassment and structural violence that are the lives of ourselves, our friends and our loves.” The poems register and speak to/against/beyond structural inequality, harm and racist violence. Raha’s niners also speak of grief, political organizing, mutual aid and the relationships that support resistance and survival. Further reading: I’m looking forward to Nat Raha and Mijke van eer Drift’s Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds.
Dao Strom and Jyothi Natarajan, A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection (Fonograf Editions)
Slowly making my way through this stunning collection.
Nathalie Léger, Exposition: Torino, 1928: Catalogue;Suite for Barbara Loden; The White Dress (Dorothy)
Leger’s books were published before 2024 but I want to include them here to note the welcome experience of finally settling in to read texts that have been recommended to me. Leger’s poetic prose weaves feminist research, speculative narrative and creative nonfiction.
From Annulet
Karla Kelsey, “1931: from Transcendental Factory for Mina Loy”
Reading Kelsey’s excerpt from Transcendental Factory for Mina Loy inspired me to look for the book, published by Winter Editions, which now is on my reading list.
Nora Treatbaby and Rosie Stockton, “Of Edge, Our Depth is Our Debt “and “Note on Process”
Poem and process and collaborative writing. Desire and edge. I find myself returning to the poem again and again.
From the Annulet archives
Alexis Almeida, On Renee Gladman, Plans for Sentences
Almeida’s review is the piece that introduced me to Annulet. I love reading Almeida’s writing about Gladman’s work. I love that Annulet is a project that invites and celebrates innovative critical/creative writing. Another book on my to-read list, which was just published: Roberta Iannamico’s Many Poems, translated by Almeida.
Jonathan Gharraie
James Baldwin, Another Country (1962). Not just my favorite of Baldwin’s novels, but one of the novels of the last century. A narrative of freewheeling crushing despair that leaves a crater in the heart. There are so many surprising turns that proceed from Baldwin’s unerring instinct for the cynicism with which people behave to each other within a milieu but the destructiveness, always leavened by romantic and indeed sexual hope, feels entirely plausible.
Harry Mathews, The Conversions (1962). It starts with a race between phosphorescent worms and ends with an underwater clock (well, and nine pages of German). In-between are chapters about survivors of a plane crash singing madrigals from the early baroque period and the remnants of a strange sylvan cult. Mathews’s first novel deserves more respect and attention than it is usually accorded—yes, it is a tribute to Roussel, but Mathews’s temperament is closer to Nabokov’s, possibly even Monty Python’s. There's an epicure’s conscious delight in the arcane but the highbrow referentiality is put together with a vaudevillian’s nod and a wink.
Elizabeth Taylor, The Sleeping Beauty (1953). Much like Baldwin, Taylor’s special subject is the damage that people can do to each other within the tightest social spaces. Her technique is a part of her subject too, of course, more specifically the way in which she sets up a narrative contraption that you think is going to work in a particular way before it diverges wildly into something weirder and braver. One feels that the novel ends very precisely at the limits of Taylor’s moral imagination and psychological insight but also how few writers can plant themselves there with such confidence.
Alicia Wright
Issue 11 of Tyger Quarterly is beautifully composed of fifteen links to poems, stories, a list of resources, testimonies, lectures, introductions, or essays written mostly by Palestinian or Palestinian-American authors. It is a finely considered wreath that I wish never had to have been made.
Hank Lazer, Opposing Poetries, Volume One: Issues and Institutions (Northwestern University Press, 1996)
It makes more sense to me as I reflect on it now, but I’ve been wondering why, throughout my travels to various conferences and festivals, or over dinner, in noisy bars, on brisk walks, and in other literary conversations this year, I have been asked about what I think is “wrong” with poetry today. Don’t worry, I don’t take those with ghoulish intent seriously. My first response is (of course) to say that complaining about poetry is as much a time-honored tradition as actually writing verse. But my second is to look into what I surmise my querents are really asking about. So I reached toward the first of the two classic volumes by Hank Lazer which clarify the mire of 1980s and 90s poetics—and my current working answer, guided by Lazer’s illuminating handling of the contributing factors of the poetry wars, is that I don’t think we’ve cleared that discursive horizon yet, not even close, even though I doubt that many of us have taken the time to sort through what happened then and see how it informs poetry written now, or that we were encouraged to pursue what’s up with all that in our education. Maybe we should think it forward and claim our place, dismal or not, in literary history (before it ends). Maybe I made a whole special folio call about it to contribute to that process (or even a literary journal).
Blue Bag Press’s “Resources: Interventions and Responses”
Picking up where Eclipse Archive leaves off, Blue Bag Press’s Archive, a subset of its Resources section, is a small and sweet repository, right now mostly consisting of hard-to-find work by Language poets like P. Inman and Tina Darragh, among others, and a little Susan Howe in there as a treat. May it grow and prosper.
“Extremely Online and Incredibly Tedious,” Rhian Sasseen, The Baffler
I don’t think enough about fiction proper to do much more than have incredibly strong but loosely assembled opinions about it, but I suspect that this piece’s disassembly of Brat by Gabriel Smith and the culture that both suffocates and enables it has something to do with why I’m asked about “bad” (in addition to “what’s wrong with”) poetry all the time. More specifically, Sasseen in this review tracks the ubiquitous appearance of the very word, but applied to the protagonist’s dissociated feeling, in Brat:
Being “bad,” feeling “bad,” “bad” poems—we’ve already seen Chelsey Minnis rescue the word for her deliriously amplified gurlesque rhetoric, and the term’s been passed to autofiction to flatline result. I guess what I’m trying to say is that brainrot, and books directly or indirectly about it, are also categorically bad, and this review encouraged my salty thinking on the subject. Brats get everything they want except, apparently, political leadership.
“Modes of Intelligence,” Charles Altieri, Poetics Today 45 (2): 207–214.
This is like The Princess Bride of literary criticism. I worried! I wanted to stop the story! Not the Shakespearean sonnets in the Pit of Despair (ChatGPT)! But it’s a happy, realized ending after all, and I get to go to bed cozy. Phew.
Peter Riley, Alstonefield: a poem. (Carcanet, 2003)
Opening his long poem composed of décimas, set three to a page (except when a stanza is broken across sections), Cambridge School poet Peter Riley grounds the scene:
Stanzas lope across and into thought, meditative and lubric, through its regular form which sometimes stops speculation or rumination’s flow, sometimes propels it. I love a long poem that tracks tracking and its own perambulating tracks—which tracks. Lest I create the impression that it’s all cerebral pastoral fantasy, even as Riley turns the word ‘love’ over like a river stone worried in a pocket, the poem works within its surround, macerated by the late twentieth-century’s industries and politics: “It would be specious to pretend / that any bit of British countryside is anything / but an agricultural factory marked Piss Off.” I’m drawn to Alstonefield for how it processes political, historical, and existential despair amidst what’s cherished, in hand and on foot.
Betsy Fagin, Fires Seen From Space. (Winter Editions, 2024)
With Fires Seen From Space, Fagin airs a set of philosophical concerns similar to Peter Riley:
but her work is calibrated for decades deeper into familiar currents of ruin, and, as the title promises, from space. I’m in the midst of reading this, and I include it in part for its use of serial forms (chapters and strophic stanzas), and tendency to eschew the direct presence of the declarative first person, a savvy premise for alienation and immersion both. Information disfigures you (the view is better from Mars): “What makes him so sure? / Maybe he’s disinformed.” But there’s some inexhaustible source (a “complex / fragile kernel of acceptance”) comprising pessimisms (“I don’t personally future / but support some dancing / again”), propulsive privacies that fuel future movement (”Keep what you think your own”), and an unflinching reserve (“Always // take the money. // I will bury your empire. // Earth, everyone my witness”) that drives these poems, that keeps me hanging on through their celestial vision and enthralling suspicions (“I don’t like the look of / this particular manifestation”)—re-fusing resistance, safety, revolution, into and for new structures of feeling.
Kelly Caldwell, Letters to Forget (Knopf)
This is Kelly’s first book and it is published posthumously. I knew Kelly a little and not enough. Letters to Forget lets me know her a little more but in the way the best lyric poems forestall its assurances: “The ground gives rise // That is not glass That / Is water but careful it // Breaks with the same facility // Darkness is very pure / But it will no longer talk to me // This is a failure of moral seriousness”
Joyce Mansour, In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems (World Poetry), trans. C. Francis Fisher
There is not enough Mansour in the world (I’m shocked to learn, via the translator’s note, that her books are out of print in France) and these translations by C. Francis Fisher are fantastic. There’s no fluff, no explaining away the furious strangeness of the work, the bald clarities of its assertions: “The midday wind rises in the cafés / My mother’s eyes count a rosary of testicles / Somewhere in the forest / Priapic hanged men sneeze / The scarab buries his ball beneath the livid earth / Winter is prince of olive.”
And here are two favorites from Annulet:
Kai Ihns, “Prayer to the Antibiotic”
Amelia Rosselli, “I rhymed, towards a bank,” trans. Roberta Antognini & Deborah Woodard
Incidentally, I’m in the midst of devouring books published in 2024 (they don’t include the poems above, FYI) by both Ihns (Of, The Elephants) and Rosselli (The Dragonly, Entre Ríos, same brilliant translators).
If I’m allowed to include a performance as text, I’ll add the gift of JJJJJerome Ellis’s performance on November 13, 2024 in Cincinnati from their extraordinary Aster of Ceremonies (Milkweed, 2023).
Temperance Aghamohammadi
The past year introduced death, illness, devastation, and still….hope, love, and ecstasy in the face of it. When my mother passed away in June 2023, I thought I was now completely alone in the world. The following poets (some friends, some I’ve never met) helped prove me wrong in the year and a half since. While there are so many more than I can possibly name or list, I celebrate you all. Thank you for holding and guiding me when I needed holding and guiding.
“In a Cave Where Something Once Happened” by Asha Futterman (Bennington Review)
“i saw a color almost like black / when i was close enough to touch it”
Death Styles by Joyelle McSweeney (Nightboat Books)
“snip snip went the seam / between temperance, intemperance/ they invented tragedy/
then hurled the whole world through it”
“MONTAGE :: WITH YOU AND WITHOUT” by David Ehmcke (Publisher’s Weekly)
“And in the credits, where I love you, no one lingers to see who you’ll be.”
Of by Kai Ihns (The Elephants)
“this is at a loud club of some kind, full of blue light / i can’t decide. when i wake up / the morning / light looks blue and strange.”
“ELEGY” by Syd Westley (The Adroit Journal)
“I find ash in the hollow of my cheek. / Ash in the water. Ash in the air.”
Last One Out by Deborah Richards (Subpress)
“There’s something not quite right about a woman that does not / fit in.”
“North” by Kathryn Hargett-Hsu (Only Poems)
“When I was north / I ate elderberries / & read songs about the sea / as the empire of loneliness.”
Pink Noise by Kevin Holden (Nightboat Books)
“all motion and no motion / freedom and sex are seeds / arching becoming chariots”
“Encounter” by Ariana Benson (Kenyon Review)
“Heat / — yes, we were heat, until / we chose to let ourselves be / more than the pasts holding / our invisible strings”
V. Joshua Adams
Some books that stayed with me in 2024, in loose chronological order:
The Life of Henry Brulard by Stendhal, trans. John Sturrock (NYRB, 2002). Lydia Davis wrote the preface for this edition of Stendhal’s unfinished autobiography, and, reading it, you can see something of Davis’s deadpan in Stendhal’s apparently perfect frankness. The book focuses on the author’s childhood, and goes long on frustrations with the idiocies of provincial life and extended relations. These would appear to be less interesting than, say, having been an officer in Napoleon’s army during the invasion of (and retreat from) Russia. But good prose redeems.
Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams (Vintage, 1988). Spare, mordant, tender novel about a pair of lovers & drifters, amid post-Vietnam malaise. Southern Gothic by way of the Florida Keys. Everything and everyone's been left out in the sun too long. Nothing decays; after it gets soaked in seawater, it just bakes.
The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, trans. Francis Steegmuller (NYRB, 2023). The essentials: procrastination, aesthetic theory, sex, love, misery, triumph, politics. No biographer could capture a better picture of the modern artist (and GF, in his stubborn and admirable insistence on total autonomy, is that). "Madame Bovary, c'est moi?" Not quite, he's in here, in full.
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard (Viking, 1980). What we mean when we say “perfectly constructed”—on the level of the sentence and plot, in its rich and vivid characterizations. A throwback in its moment, certainly even more so now. Wholly unembarrassed by its status as a novel. Remember that?
A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein by Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé (Chicago, 2020). This book reminds us that modernist authors—Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Coetzee—were interested in difficulties beyond those of decipherment, and engaging with those texts requires attuning ourselves not only to a hermeneutical but an ethical project. A landmark in philosophy and literature.
Thirteen Rondels and 2 Epigrams by Brendan White (2023). Formal poems that feel wholly contemporary. Nary a cobweb to be seen; Whitman's achievement in loosening the line here gets properly inverted. Tight, tighter, tightest. Someone needs to greet White at the beginning of a great career.
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, trans. Edward G. Seidensticker (Knopf, 1957). It might have been the cover of the 1981 Perigree printing: three pink blossoms against a white background, with a pink geometric border and (modern) hand lettering. It might have been that it was $1, or that the name Kawabata rang some dusty bell in my memory. (The first Japanese author to win the Nobel, in 1968.) Whatever it was, this novel, which reads as a haiku blown up over 175 pages, and which tells the story of a doomed love affair between a hot-spring geisha and a wealthy dilettante, made me want to read the entire oeuvre.
Pitch Dark by Renata Adler (NYRB, 1983). The ostensible subject of the book is a crisis in a long love affair: “How could I know that every time you had a chance to choose you would choose the other thing?” What it does with this time-honored subject sets the book apart: a blend of journalistic detail and disjunctive narration, which produces a feeling of both plenitude and mystery.
Not Us Now by Zoë Hitzig (Changes, 2024). “Exit Muse,” which channels The Waste Land—“The sunflower you gave me a year ago? / In the mirror I practiced its slow-mo / surrender”—is one of many terrific poems in this collection, which combines lyrics with experiments of all sorts. Exit muse is also, maybe, the book’s ethos: enter the algorithm, as topos and technique, inspiration, breath.
Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner (Coffee House, 2011). Frequently hilarious advertisement by the author for himself and his thinking about poetry, one that doubles as an exercise in self-criticism. Way less annoying than everyone has been making it out to be for the last ten years, or that you might have thought from reading 10:04.
Vulturnus by Leon-Paul Fargue, trans. Terry Bradford (Wakefield, 2024). Fargue is a great post-Symbolist poet in his own right, but 1928’s Vulturnus shows him to be a fellow-traveler of Surrealism, too: “There we were, in the granulosa cell and glassware of the great redemption, a few of the resuscitated, a few of the returned, wretched electric appendages, Manichean seahorses, wretched tadpoles devoid of the genius of their race, aspiring to the genius of God….” Blake on absinthe.
Thank You and Other Poems by Kenneth Koch (Grove, 1962) and The Pleasures of Peace (Grove, 1969). It’s Koch’s centenary in 2025. Not enough people care. The rest of the NYS poets have found their place in the circus of the afterlife, but Koch’s work, so writerly while also managing to sound casually conversational, remains perennially undervalued and under-discussed. Banger after banger in these early books: “On the Great Atlantic Rainway,” “To You,” “The Circus,” “Fresh Air,” “Locks,” “Sleeping with Women,” “A Poem of the 48 States,” “Some South American Poets,” “The Pleasures of Peace,” etc.
Effacement by Elizabeth Arnold (Flood, 2010). Liz Arnold was a wonderful poet and person who sadly passed away earlier this year. A scholar of modernism, she carried forward in her own poetry the lessons of its second generation—Bunting, Oppen, Niedecker—particularly when it came to sound. Joshua Weiner, her colleague at Maryland, remembers her “listening to students’ drafts at the level of the syllable” and her poems—intellectually ambitious, but also attentive to the quotidian and the personal, have the tone of work that will last. Like this little one, from Effacement:
XLI.
You can see more as a soul
darkness speeding into darkness.
Earth’s harder.
Like a spacecraft on reentry,
the body has to,
burn its way through the sky’s lens.
Forms of Poetic Attention by Lucy Alford (Columbia, 2021). Can a book of literary criticism be a cornucopia? This one is: of categories of attention, and of examples of that attention not only represented but performed by poems. We’ve been trained to think it risks philistinism, thinking of poems as instruments. But it might pay off for the art in the long run, when we realize those instruments can be used by readers of all sorts, even outside of the cloister—I mean, university.
Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry by Ryan Ruby (Seven Stories, 2024). In which the ghosts of Alfred Lord and Milman Parry return to guide a copiously annotated, loosely pentameter mock-academic romp through a few thousand years of “Western” poetry. As befits a critic’s passion project, the real action here is in the footnotes, which sometimes dwarf the verse on the facing page. It’s too late to put the genie of technological reproducibility back in the bottle. But, given this poem’s taking the physical form of a codex, rather than floating in the digital ether, maybe we have a wish or two left.
Kelly Krumrie
The Apple in the Dark, Clarice Lispector, trans. Benjamin Moser (New Directions, 2023)
Rules, Lorraine Daston (Princeton University Press, 2022)
Wrong Norma, Anne Carson (New Directions, 2024)
Mice 1961, Stacey Levine (Verse Chorus Press, 2024)
Tessa Bolsover
Annulet, issues 7 & 8:
There are threads of grief, desire. Collected debris, staged movements of the hands. Instead of a list, a net of stolen things:
[a cache: a logical pyramid; a nest
a cache: a hole in the ground, where we store
what is more than we can carry, where it rots; memory] [what cleaves us
this mantilla of doubt that any-
thing can be without
mourning] [We pull ourselves through to the other side.
The stage is a horizontal grid of ropes suspended at eye level and threaded through
the arms and legs of garments] [The sound is one of containment.
In other words, arrival] [a small score of breath beyond the flail of glossolalia]
[Sequence which moves like air from room to room]
[This is a new moon] [Time is a tissue prone to infection]
[the eradicating grey libidinal motor
Of capital’s global rainbow] [The motor replaced does not stand still]
[Even if, even when you don’t exactly know the event,]
[you want to know the mouth of the river] [To supplant the septum
ring] [skin untangled]
[nothing ceases to exist this is crucially important]
[(Water to never close this parenthesis]
+++
Here are the books and chapbooks published in 2024 that I’ve been most excited about:
· Mandible Wishbone Solvent, Asiya Wadud (University of Chicago)
· The Size of Paradise, Dale Smith (Knife Fork)
· Asia & Haiti, Will Alexander (Litmus)
· Soft Water, John Coletti (Spiral Editions)
· Being Reflected Upon, Alice Notley (Penguin)
· WHAT, Robert Kocik (auric press)
· Tomorrow is a Holiday, Hamish Ballantyne (New Star)
· Comeback Death, Jennifer Soong (Krupskaya)
· Liontaming in America, Elizabeth Willis (New Directions)
· Why is That Goddamned Radio On?, Jim Cory (Radiator)
· Alt-Nature, Saretta Morgan (Coffee House)
Toby Altman
JJJJJerome Ellis, Aster of Ceremonies (Milkweed, 2024). No one is making poems like JJJJJerome Ellis right now. Though it feels ungenerous to call Ellis’ work poetry, not in any parochial sense. These are works of music, performance art, and graphic design; they are theoretical investigations into blackness, history, and stuttering which articulate their thesis (an important word in Ellis’ work) in and through the body that performs them. Where their debut album / book The Clearing was expansive, lush, and various, Aster of Ceremonies is slow, durational, meditative—nowhere more than its mesmerizing closing piece, “benediction, movement 2.”
Ronald Johnson, Valley of the Many Colored Grasses (The Song Cave, 2023). Like many people, I mostly know Ronald Johnson through Radi Os, his foundational erasure of Paradise Lost. It is a book that is maybe more interesting to talk about than actually read; to make sense of the poem, you need a deep dive into his idealist metaphysics. (Be honest, how many of us have actually read Ark?). Imagine my surprise, then, to discover Johnson’s early work, recently republished in a handsome edition from The Song Cave. It has all the philosophical grandeur of his later work already. But the early Johnson is also personal, lyrical, embodied, attached to the particular ground of Kansas where he was raised. These are poems of astonishing beauty and crystalline intellect. They make the rest of his canon feel more alive and more approachable.
Aditi Machado, Material Witness (Nightboat, 2024). I feel like the poets who really matter to me are the ones who have a distinctive way of handling syntax, a specific music that organizes their sentences. Think about the early Leslie Scalapino, or Harryette Mullen, or Lyn Hejinian, or, fuck it, John Milton. Anyway, over her first three books, Aditi Machado has announced herself as the composer of such music—specific, strange, hard to describe. There is the erotic immediacy of her work, and the sticky, chewy abstraction; the sense that a body is present and being erased at the same moment. This new book, Material Witness continues to elaborate what such music can do—no more so than in the concluding long poem, “Now.” What can I say about it that isn’t cliché? Machado’s poems resist any kind of generalization about what they are, or what they do—they are too multifarious, too mobile for that. Instead, they demand that you attend, almost at the letter of the level, to the language that oozes around you as you move through her poems.
Thomas de Monchaux, “Fifth Column,” New York Review of Architecture, June 2024. Honestly, just read this. I don’t know how to convince you how to care about Tuscan Columns, the new Wegman’s in Manhattan, The Sopranos. But you should. This article is the loopiest thing I’ve read all year—vast and associative, absorbing all kinds of beige aesthetics into its maw. Reading it felt like falling down a very deep and very mid rabbit hole.
Lindsey Webb, Plat (Archway Editions, 2024). Everything you need is here—grief, pastoral, architecture, the prose poem, houses, urban planning, and bodies. If that list seems unwieldly, overwhelming, the experience of reading is not. Webb braids these varied topics together, or, better, articulates for us the braids that already bind them together. If she manages such a feat, it is a testament to her muscular, charismatic prose: Webb magnetizes your attention to the image, the line, the syntax of the sentence. Then the next line, image, sentence. How can you put it altogether and find the whole? It’s a question the book asks and refuses to answer.
Elijah Guerra
Ellen Boyette’s chapbook Nitrous or My Velvet Knife (Secret Restaurant Press 2024). Where the strange will beguile you into quaalude nightmares of excess (“In the brouhaha we brew contagion kombucha, sexual apples”). Where the surreal walks your benzo body through a field of exorcisms (“I don't know why coins keep coming from my mouth”). Boyette is a poet of the Occult, “searching for current glitches in the ether.” Picture this. You are dragged by Halloween clouds to a hydrogen meadow where you stare at the moon through a deer eating lilacs until you yourself are a deer devouring midnight via flower feast. (Neat, let’s drink.) Reading this chapbook gave me the same thrill as when I read Aase Berg for the first time. Only ten copies left of the second printing, go get it. “Run for the hills that eat you.”
Andrea Quaid
Gabrielle Civil, In & Out of Place (Texas A&M University Press)
Gabrielle Civil’s In & Out of Place is the latest in her series of performance memoirs. The book is a collection of essays, notebook writing, letters, email correspondence, scripts, poems and reviews – all alive with questions and reflections about what it means to be an artist and, specifically, what it means to be a U. S. citizen and Black feminist performance artist making work in Mexico. The text, which also includes photos and visual art documenting her time in Mexico, brings all these modes of writing and thinking and making together. When I read Civil’s work, I encounter an artist who creates a genre – the performance memoir – in which to make and document her practice. In & Out of Place explores place, race, identity and belonging. Civil also invites me to think about collaboration, inspiration, artistic commitment, and the experiences - sometimes painful, sometimes joyful - that contribute to an artist’s ongoing work. Bonus! Poem as close reading as reader response as note to an author about their poetry book.
Tisa Bryant, Unexplained Presence (Wave Books)
I was thrilled when I saw that Wave Books was reissuing Tisa Bryant’s Unexplained Presence, a book I first read when it was published by Leon Works. Bryant’s collection of critical-creative essays is an imaginative, incisive intervention into texts, novels and visual work (including Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Stephen Frears Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Jean-Baptiste Carpeux’s The Four Parts of the World). She foregrounds black presences where they are otherwise marginalized or dismissed. In the essay, “While London Burns …Violent is Blue,” the speaker asks, “And you, Violent? Where are you now? Are you free to love, just not seen doing it?” The speaker continues, is this an effect of being “underdeveloped or cut out?” Bryant makes presence an argument by writing into scenes, narratives, and visual texts. I am eagerly awaiting her forthcoming book, Residual (Nightboat Books).
Madhu H. Kaza, Lines of Flight (Ugly Duckling Presse)
Kaza’s chapbook-length essay is a line of flight. In her text, Kaza shares how she carries Deleuze and Guattari’s phrase with her, (mis)reading the concept as “a line of flight – an unexpected way out of that does not accept the assumptions of the system or the logic of binary thinking…a liberatory impulse.” Her essay embodies this spirit with its refusal of assumptions about translation, scholarly and imaginative analysis that creates connections across multiples times and places, and a formal structure that I read as a liberatory impulse to do scholarship differently. As a work of creative scholarship, her text activates her claims thorough explication, poem, and conversations with friends and scholars, inviting me to think alongside her about how reading moves a writer into deeper modes of research and imaginative wanderings.
Nat Raha, apparitions (nines) (Nightboat Books)
I’m currently reading Raha’s apparitions (nines), a book composed of the niner, a poetic form of nine syllables and nine lines, which is carries through the book’s structure of nine poems in each of the nine sections. Lyric form is transformed. The niner’s syllabic rhythms, line break measures, and punctuation as dis/juncture between words and lines create poems and a poetics that Raha describes as “brief containers to feel through, polemicize, and remember – to communicate the stakes of the everyday harassment and structural violence that are the lives of ourselves, our friends and our loves.” The poems register and speak to/against/beyond structural inequality, harm and racist violence. Raha’s niners also speak of grief, political organizing, mutual aid and the relationships that support resistance and survival. Further reading: I’m looking forward to Nat Raha and Mijke van eer Drift’s Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds.
Dao Strom and Jyothi Natarajan, A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection (Fonograf Editions)
Slowly making my way through this stunning collection.
Nathalie Léger, Exposition: Torino, 1928: Catalogue;Suite for Barbara Loden; The White Dress (Dorothy)
Leger’s books were published before 2024 but I want to include them here to note the welcome experience of finally settling in to read texts that have been recommended to me. Leger’s poetic prose weaves feminist research, speculative narrative and creative nonfiction.
From Annulet
Karla Kelsey, “1931: from Transcendental Factory for Mina Loy”
Reading Kelsey’s excerpt from Transcendental Factory for Mina Loy inspired me to look for the book, published by Winter Editions, which now is on my reading list.
Nora Treatbaby and Rosie Stockton, “Of Edge, Our Depth is Our Debt “and “Note on Process”
Poem and process and collaborative writing. Desire and edge. I find myself returning to the poem again and again.
From the Annulet archives
Alexis Almeida, On Renee Gladman, Plans for Sentences
Almeida’s review is the piece that introduced me to Annulet. I love reading Almeida’s writing about Gladman’s work. I love that Annulet is a project that invites and celebrates innovative critical/creative writing. Another book on my to-read list, which was just published: Roberta Iannamico’s Many Poems, translated by Almeida.
Jonathan Gharraie
James Baldwin, Another Country (1962). Not just my favorite of Baldwin’s novels, but one of the novels of the last century. A narrative of freewheeling crushing despair that leaves a crater in the heart. There are so many surprising turns that proceed from Baldwin’s unerring instinct for the cynicism with which people behave to each other within a milieu but the destructiveness, always leavened by romantic and indeed sexual hope, feels entirely plausible.
Harry Mathews, The Conversions (1962). It starts with a race between phosphorescent worms and ends with an underwater clock (well, and nine pages of German). In-between are chapters about survivors of a plane crash singing madrigals from the early baroque period and the remnants of a strange sylvan cult. Mathews’s first novel deserves more respect and attention than it is usually accorded—yes, it is a tribute to Roussel, but Mathews’s temperament is closer to Nabokov’s, possibly even Monty Python’s. There's an epicure’s conscious delight in the arcane but the highbrow referentiality is put together with a vaudevillian’s nod and a wink.
Elizabeth Taylor, The Sleeping Beauty (1953). Much like Baldwin, Taylor’s special subject is the damage that people can do to each other within the tightest social spaces. Her technique is a part of her subject too, of course, more specifically the way in which she sets up a narrative contraption that you think is going to work in a particular way before it diverges wildly into something weirder and braver. One feels that the novel ends very precisely at the limits of Taylor’s moral imagination and psychological insight but also how few writers can plant themselves there with such confidence.
Alicia Wright
Issue 11 of Tyger Quarterly is beautifully composed of fifteen links to poems, stories, a list of resources, testimonies, lectures, introductions, or essays written mostly by Palestinian or Palestinian-American authors. It is a finely considered wreath that I wish never had to have been made.
Hank Lazer, Opposing Poetries, Volume One: Issues and Institutions (Northwestern University Press, 1996)
It makes more sense to me as I reflect on it now, but I’ve been wondering why, throughout my travels to various conferences and festivals, or over dinner, in noisy bars, on brisk walks, and in other literary conversations this year, I have been asked about what I think is “wrong” with poetry today. Don’t worry, I don’t take those with ghoulish intent seriously. My first response is (of course) to say that complaining about poetry is as much a time-honored tradition as actually writing verse. But my second is to look into what I surmise my querents are really asking about. So I reached toward the first of the two classic volumes by Hank Lazer which clarify the mire of 1980s and 90s poetics—and my current working answer, guided by Lazer’s illuminating handling of the contributing factors of the poetry wars, is that I don’t think we’ve cleared that discursive horizon yet, not even close, even though I doubt that many of us have taken the time to sort through what happened then and see how it informs poetry written now, or that we were encouraged to pursue what’s up with all that in our education. Maybe we should think it forward and claim our place, dismal or not, in literary history (before it ends). Maybe I made a whole special folio call about it to contribute to that process (or even a literary journal).
Blue Bag Press’s “Resources: Interventions and Responses”
Picking up where Eclipse Archive leaves off, Blue Bag Press’s Archive, a subset of its Resources section, is a small and sweet repository, right now mostly consisting of hard-to-find work by Language poets like P. Inman and Tina Darragh, among others, and a little Susan Howe in there as a treat. May it grow and prosper.
“Extremely Online and Incredibly Tedious,” Rhian Sasseen, The Baffler
I don’t think enough about fiction proper to do much more than have incredibly strong but loosely assembled opinions about it, but I suspect that this piece’s disassembly of Brat by Gabriel Smith and the culture that both suffocates and enables it has something to do with why I’m asked about “bad” (in addition to “what’s wrong with”) poetry all the time. More specifically, Sasseen in this review tracks the ubiquitous appearance of the very word, but applied to the protagonist’s dissociated feeling, in Brat:
But what, exactly, does it mean to feel “bad” in these contexts? It is a vague word, inexact in its application. The character feels bad, notes it, and then moves on; nothing more is ventured. But observing a thing isn’t the same as saying something about it. Though this might sound obvious, one of the pleasures of literature is the way in which it categorizes and dissects our experiences, rendering the murky wordlessness of feeling into a paragraph or turn of phrase that makes sense out of what is so often senseless. And though we have here a book that is conscious of itself as a book, it is often without linguistic precision or pleasure.
Being “bad,” feeling “bad,” “bad” poems—we’ve already seen Chelsey Minnis rescue the word for her deliriously amplified gurlesque rhetoric, and the term’s been passed to autofiction to flatline result. I guess what I’m trying to say is that brainrot, and books directly or indirectly about it, are also categorically bad, and this review encouraged my salty thinking on the subject. Brats get everything they want except, apparently, political leadership.
“Modes of Intelligence,” Charles Altieri, Poetics Today 45 (2): 207–214.
This is like The Princess Bride of literary criticism. I worried! I wanted to stop the story! Not the Shakespearean sonnets in the Pit of Despair (ChatGPT)! But it’s a happy, realized ending after all, and I get to go to bed cozy. Phew.
Peter Riley, Alstonefield: a poem. (Carcanet, 2003)
Opening his long poem composed of décimas, set three to a page (except when a stanza is broken across sections), Cambridge School poet Peter Riley grounds the scene:
Alstonefield, sometimes spelled Alstonfield, is a limestone village in North Staffordshire as OS grid reference SK132556, on high ground between the valleys of the rivers Dove and Manifold, close to the west edge of the former. Almost all the local place-names are in the vicinity, within a radius of about three miles, mainly to the north of the village. Geologically this area is close to the western edge of a dome of carboniferous limestone about twelve miles across, cut into by stream and river valleys, called the Peak District.
Stanzas lope across and into thought, meditative and lubric, through its regular form which sometimes stops speculation or rumination’s flow, sometimes propels it. I love a long poem that tracks tracking and its own perambulating tracks—which tracks. Lest I create the impression that it’s all cerebral pastoral fantasy, even as Riley turns the word ‘love’ over like a river stone worried in a pocket, the poem works within its surround, macerated by the late twentieth-century’s industries and politics: “It would be specious to pretend / that any bit of British countryside is anything / but an agricultural factory marked Piss Off.” I’m drawn to Alstonefield for how it processes political, historical, and existential despair amidst what’s cherished, in hand and on foot.
Betsy Fagin, Fires Seen From Space. (Winter Editions, 2024)
With Fires Seen From Space, Fagin airs a set of philosophical concerns similar to Peter Riley:
Remembering relational as being
alone, outside, with a sad past.
I always take the river bank one at a time
back to you, your dislikes, hates/and incapacity to shift
where no wonder once was...
but her work is calibrated for decades deeper into familiar currents of ruin, and, as the title promises, from space. I’m in the midst of reading this, and I include it in part for its use of serial forms (chapters and strophic stanzas), and tendency to eschew the direct presence of the declarative first person, a savvy premise for alienation and immersion both. Information disfigures you (the view is better from Mars): “What makes him so sure? / Maybe he’s disinformed.” But there’s some inexhaustible source (a “complex / fragile kernel of acceptance”) comprising pessimisms (“I don’t personally future / but support some dancing / again”), propulsive privacies that fuel future movement (”Keep what you think your own”), and an unflinching reserve (“Always // take the money. // I will bury your empire. // Earth, everyone my witness”) that drives these poems, that keeps me hanging on through their celestial vision and enthralling suspicions (“I don’t like the look of / this particular manifestation”)—re-fusing resistance, safety, revolution, into and for new structures of feeling.