Favorite Poetry Books and Chapbooks of 2017
Kaveh Akbar said in a tweet a while back that we are living in a golden age of poetry and I have to agree. I never struggled with ‘there’s nothing to read’ this year though I did struggle with ‘I can’t keep up with how much there is to read’ quite a lot.
Here are eleven full-length poetry books and eleven chapbooks I loved this year.
Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar (www) (quotes) (Alice James Books)
I’ve made it clear I am not to be trusted with a body
In Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Kaveh Akbar exquisitely and tenaciously braids astonishment and atonement into a singular lyric voice. The desolation of alcoholism widens into hard-won insight: ‘the body is a mosque borrowed from Heaven.’ Doubt and fear spiral into grace and beauty. Akbar’s mind, like his language, is perpetually in motion. His imagery— wounded and resplendent—is masterful and his syntax ensnares and releases music that’s both delicate and muscular. Kaveh Akbar has crafted one of the best debuts in recent memory. In his hands, awe and redemption hinge into unforgettable and gorgeous poems. (Eduardo C. Corral)
Lessons on Expulsion by Erika L. Sánchez (www) (quotes) (Graywolf Press)
What can
you blame but your rootless
eye? Your mind so soft and full
of hysterical light. You’ve already
learned that your body is a lie.
Lessons on Expulsion marks the arrival of a vital new voice in American poetry. With penetrating intelligence and lyrical precision, Erika L. Sánchez makes visible the violence striking down Mexican women living on the border and interrogates the historical and the familial origins of misogyny. Her deft braiding of the beautiful and the grotesque infuses her language with a shimmering rawness and a startling immediacy. Her gaze is unflinching and feminist; it marvels and questions and testifies. Lessons on Expulsion is an uncompromising and singular debut. (Eduardo C. Corral)
Marys of the Sea by Joanna C. Valente (www) (quotes) (The Operating System)
I didn’t tell you how
I used to think all the ways to fall in front
of cars, sacrifice my body to get what I had
before. I used to pray for a new body by moon
light, a return to being human.
She is not dead, but sleeping, Jesus says in the Gospel of Luke; like the sick girl of that verse, the speakers of Joanna Valente’s sharp and urgent Marys of the Sea toss and turn through a series of feverish nightmares that refract lived experiences into prophetic and wild new imaginings. Preoccupied with the consequences of mothering and not-mothering, these fifty-three poems trenchantly interrogate sexual violence and its aftermath, lingering at the site of trauma as though hanging onto the lip of an abyss. Writing becomes power, structure an act of bravery. Like an ancient civilization’s first creation myths, these poems utter light out of darkness as they order a world into being. (Monica Ferrell)
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce by Morgan Parker (www) (quotes) (Tin House)
There are more beautiful things than Beyoncé in these pages because, as Morgan Parker writes in poems channeling the president’s wife, the Venus Hottentot and multiple Beyoncés, “we’re everyone. We have ideas and vaginas, history and clothes and a mother.” The kind of verve the late New York school Ted Berrigan would have called “feminine marvelous and tough” is here, as well as the kind of vulnerability that fortifies genuine daring. This is a marvelous book. See for yourself. Morgan Parker is a fearlessly forward and forward-thinking literary star. (Terrance Hayes)
Please Bury Me in This by Allison Benis White (www) (quotes) (Four Way Books)
I am writing to you as an act of immolation, relief.
The speaker in Please Bury Me in This grieves the death of her father and the loss of several women to suicide while contemplating her own death and the nature of language as a means of human connection that transcends our temporal lives. This book is also concerned with the intergenerational trauma of the children of Holocaust survivors.
Sugarblood by Liz Bowen (www) (quotes) (METATRON)
a book published when i was 16 asked
‘are women human yet?’
around that time, i was already
considering myself partly a computer
A kenning is a figurative expression of two subjects that gives special value to a common word. It is a way to see the word not through its economic function but through ecstatic vision. Such is the experience of reading Liz Bowen’s Sugarblood. Here, its kennings operate beyond disease and into (through) sexual frenzy.
In this collection, the body opens, dismantles, orgasms, and desiccates; the mind wants to get wet and fuck like the body and then it does because ‘it is my body and not / by extension.’ For Bowen to give language to humanity, she must also spell its animate failures. She remarks, ‘people are afraid of being animals / the distinguishable churn / of a body alive.’ The body is a literal frothing animal or it is a theory of the cyborg or it is the insulin pump falling out mid-run. ‘The blood is not a metaphor,’ Bowen tells us. ‘It is blood.’ Bowen teaches us the uses of metaphor in these poems to prove that she is happy to throw them away. In Sugarblood, we are made to see and it is ‘appallingly legible.’ (Natalie Eilbert)
A Place Called No Homeland by Kai Cheng Thom (www) (quotes) (Arsenal Pulp Press)
you are what
is left behind
you are the thing
he could not take away
you cannot be stolen, ransacked, looted
like an emptied bank account or an burgled house
you are the tough old tissues, the exquisite scars
you are the thing that would not die
This is a book I have been waiting for even before I knew it would come to be, and a crucial addition to the growing cannon of trans women of colour literature and Canadian queer and trans people of colour poetics. Thom’s poems write the roadmap that trans femmes of colour and queer and trans people of colour desperately need — one that maps our femme of colour bodies’ fiercest wisdom and the places called ‘nowhere’ by the cis colonial imagination that are the grounds where we dream the futures that will bring us all home. Your white cis boyfriend won’t save you from the end of the world, but these poems remind us beautifully that we already are saved. (Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha)
The January Children by Safia Elhillo (www) (quotes) (University of Nebraska Press)
i am afraid of my body & the ways / that it fails me
The first sound of what will be a remarkable noise in African poetry. Safia Elhillo has already laid out in this collection a complex foundation for a rich and complex body of work. What is unmistakable is her authority as a poet—she writes with great control and economy, but also with a vulnerability that is deeply engaging. Above all, her poems are filled with delight—a quality of humor that is never trite but always honest and insightful. (Kwame Dawes)
Ordinary Beast by Nicole Sealey (www) (quotes) (Ecco)
Had you asked, I could’ve
told you I’m not doing
especially well at being alive.
The sorceress Sealey … serves up an impossible cento that punches the daylight from your chest. Nothing ordinary here. But beast? Yeah, that’s it. This thing has teeth. (Patricia Smith)
Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith (www) (quotes) (Graywolf Press)
let ruin end here
let him find honey
where there was once a slaughter
let him enter the lion’s cage
& find a field of lilacs
let this be the healing
& if not let it be
These poems can’t make history vanish, but they can contend against it with the force of a restorative imagination. Smith’s work is about that imagination—its role in repairing and sustaining communities, and in making the world more bearable… . Their poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy… . But they also know the magic trick of making writing on the page operate like the most ecstatic speech. (The New Yorker)
Landscape with Sex and Violence by Lynn Melnick (www) (quotes) (YesYes Books)
She’s going to go where no one knows they can’t see her.
She’s going to go where no one is getting high off her suffering
The poems in Landscape with Sex and Violence explore what it means to exist within a rape culture so entrenched that it can’t be separated from the physical landscapes in which it enacts itself. Lyrically complex and startling—yet forthright and unflinching— these poems address rape, abortion, sex work, and other subjects frequently omitted from male-dominated literary traditions, without forsaking the pleasures of being embodied, or the value of personal freedom, of moonlight, and of hope. Throughout, the topography and mythology of California, as well as the uses and failures of language itself, are players in what it means to be a woman, a sexual being, and a trauma survivor in contemporary America.
The Doll Factory by Nicola Maye Goldberg (www) (quotes) (dancing girl press)
I am not interested in enduring this.
Bone Light by Yasmin Belkhyr (www) (quotes) (Akashic Books)
I have a recurring dream in which my father breaks the neck of every pigeon in the park. I help: a good daughter. I snatch them from the air & tear out the feathers. Bloody. In the story, there was a king named Ibrahim & he loved his god. No one calls me foreign but I know that’s what they mean. In the stories, girls like me sweat out the fevers, drop dirty guns in the trash chute. We rip the rabbit’s heart right out of its fucking chest. All that red-soaked skin under our fingernails. All I do is think about stories. About history, or his story, or my story. They’re all the same story really. Someone always ends up holding something mangled.
Vintage Sadness by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib (www) (quotes) (Big Lucks)
I have walked into the field, mouth open, begging to be undone.
I’ve heard Hanif say that many of these poems were inspired by songs he didn’t know were about sex: how you start with that conceit & end up with poems that move me to get up & yell is beyond me. They say some days you need the music, and other days, the lyrics. Hanif gives us both. As Richard Pryor, in incandescent & open mouthed despair, gave humans the stretch of their own possibility, so does Hanif in every poem, every book, every group chat message. Look: Hanif is a maker of worlds, of tender and urgent moments. When Hanif writes of nostalgia, I want to live forever in nostalgia. Vintage Sadness reminds that we don’t listen to songs so much as to what’s behind them, which, gasp, is always us. Hanif reaches deep into the core of a riff and reveals its red-hot interior: desire, loss, the doubled-edge of mortality, how it gives and steals away. No one sets music to music like Hanif. Blessed are we to hold in our hands, and place on our bookshelves, this collection by Hanif. Who speaks always with a wealth of patience, lyric precision, and measured sight. (Sean DesVignes, José Olivarez, Angel Nafis, Danez Smith, Safia Elhillo, Desiree Bailey, Cortney Lamar Charleston, and Aziza Barnes)
Portrait of the Alcoholic by Kaveh Akbar (www) (quotes) (Sibling Rivalry Press)
I ached to be so beautiful / I hardly knew anything yet—
Was it Jung who speculated that alcoholism might be an attempt at a material solution for a spiritual problem? Kaveh Akbar seems able to contain both—he’s a demotic, as well as a spiritual, poet (the only type of either I trust). Each word in this little book might rise up from somewhere deep in the earth, but they turn into stars. (Nick Flynn)
calorie world by Caroline Rayner (www) (quotes) (Sad Spell Press)
It’s hard to describe how much I feel / how much I reach towards / covered in red thread / Caroline Rayner’s calorie world. This morning a photo by Francesca Woodman falls across the TL like pain or lightning. A girl draped in a mountain of a dress / A girl draped in dirt or the sea stuck to her / A girl stuck to the extreme corner of the world / holds an orb of a plate in front of her face / a sharp moon. She is hunched and a bulbous tortoise crawls close by / looking at her. “i just embellish whatever the earth teaches me / my myth goes like this i was plucked from clover as half of a half of a half,” says Rayner hunched and extreme and bursting with violent love / with violent urge. The Starving Girl / The Woman Ironing / they shake themselves, the world. Who can bear it? They do / She does. She bears it and bears it and plunges and heaves and bears it to you / gives it to you. “& when a girl / puts on ambient music / & bakes a birthday cake / i get real / & we burn /the house down” The excruciating boundaries of life / Rayner eats them and refuses to eat them. She does everything she can to understand how she could love her body so much / she might end up destroying it / or being rescued by it. (Carrie Lorig)
Symptoms of Teething by Eloisa Amezcua (www) (quotes) (Paper Nautilus)
Here is a book of poems that is, at every turn, deeply invested in the kinds of love we share—with each other, with ourselves, with our pasts, and with our futures. In one moment, “we fall asleep / and there is no more falling.” In the next, the morning where “we fabricate each / other into being.” I am so grateful to Eloisa Amezcua for all her fabrications, for building us this little museum of love. (Kaveh Akbar)
Mount Carmel & The Blood Of Parnassus by Anaïs Duplan (www) (quotes) (Monster House Press)
Something else I have to say: you will alienate everyone you love, systematically, as a practice.
Reading Anaïs Duplan’s chapbook, you realize you are more than an assemblage of ideologies, a cellular plan, or even an estranged, familial relation possessing the accoutrements of a melancholic nation, but also, too, the glorious product of dense, self-referential layered texts that call to the surface your loneliness and feelings of kinship. Here are poems that revel in post-hybridity and borderless threnodies, and go straight to the stillness of the heart, to performances of language that are fierce and juicier than a papaya, and frankly, that one would only expect from a brilliant, young mind as theirs. (Major Jackson)
BLK/STILL/LIFE by kiki nicole (www) (quotes) (self)
( how often we let our bodies speak for us )
Blk/Still/Life is a series of poems by kiki nicole after the photographic work, Kitchen Table Series, by Carrie Mae Weems. It explores what it’s like to be left at a table where love is no longer being served, through the context of a black non-male identity. How to pick up your seat & set the table for your own damn self.
Therǝ is a Case That I Ɐm by torrin a. greathouse (www) (quotes) (Damaged Goods Press)
how do i explain
there is no bravery in running
from a house on fire.
that this story begins with a body
born boy
like animal skinning itself in reverse
& sewing itself up wrong.
that dressing like this feels less
like dressing up & more like dressing
a wound.
I want every poem I read to feel as urgent as the poems in torrin a. greathouse’s new collection. I want the stakes always to feel this high. “i am afraid of disappearing by morning,” she says, “how often we swallow this fear / whole.” With prodigious formal innovation and ferocious verve, torrin charts her inner cosmology with astonishing clarity. When she writes, “there is a line where i both exist / & unexist,” I feel so grateful to be here, now, existing alongside her remarkable poems. (Kaveh Akbar)
Like a Beast by Carly Joy Miller (www) (quotes) (Anhinga Press)
I never
considered the cathedral
a body needing to break.
These poems are so full of flesh and guts that they have their own crazed pulse. In the most decadent combination of the carnal and the divine, of human and animal, the body is dismembered and remade into brocade and “skin jeweled from the start.” At once these poems are hymns, spells, blessings, wails, and elegy. Miller is not just a poet – she is a mystic, a soothsayer, a sorceress. She will show you the beast you are, the beast you will become. What a holy horror, and “Amen for fright.” Amen, amen, amen. (Meghan Privitello)
Lifeline by Jennifer Givhan (www) (quotes) (Glass Poetry Press)
Once I fell into a river but wouldn’t drown
If limbs are made of splintered oars
& hearts of apple blossoms
this world’s for me
The poems of Lifeline are deliciously alive, even while mercilessly dissecting trauma and loss. Givhan’s searing imagery and candor depicts womanhood in its most raw and honest form — as a gritty mosaic of fractured ghosts held together by blood and resistance. (Rachel McKibbens)
I can think of so many amazing sounding chapbooks that came out this year that I haven’t read yet like Death by Sex Machine (Franny Choi), Mexicamericana (Eloisa Amezcua), al youm (George Abraham), etc., etc. and like what feels a mountain of full-length books. Maybe next year.
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