22 Poetry Titles You Might’ve Missed in 2016
2016 was mostly a miserable year for the Earth, but it was a brilliant, bountiful year for poetry. In the glut of major releases, here are some important titles you might’ve missed, in no particular order.
francine j harris, play dead
“and we were not winter. all dark and thick and full of mouth. // We were not wonder. all dark and thick. our mouths / got us kicked.”
Jos Charles, Safe Space
“what chemicals are in ur body / today”
Tommye Blount, What Are We Not For
“I have the tongue / of some endangered animal. No one can understand me.”
Sun Yung Shin, Unbearable Splendor
“We are a colony of one.”
Zeina Hashem Beck, 3arabi Song
“One has to dress / for this earth. You still haven’t seen my wings.”
Marie Ponsot, Collected Poems
“We make love and other excuses.”
Tiana Clark, Equilibrium
“Took me thirty years to say / I’m glad I don’t pass for white.”
Nicole Sealey, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named
“Two of nothing is something, if they’re white.”
Philip Metres, Pictures at an Exhibition
“Every empire dies, entering its own dilated eyes”
Jane Mead, World of Made and Unmade
“How will you spend your courage?”
Jane Wong, Overpour
“For certainty, I knock softly / at my fate. For grief, I listen with all my limbs.”
Luis Muñoz translated by Curtis Bauer, From Behind What Landscape
“The rocks, much more, / the chestnut trees, plenty. / The rushes, the wasps, / much less.”
Carolina Ebeid, You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior
“what is this art if not the hunt / for meat, the animal lanced / & hauled across the tundra”
Fanny Howe, The Needle’s Eye
“The evidence of a successful miracle is the return of hunger.”
Mohsen Emadi translated by Lyn Coffin, Standing on Earth
“Death is when the heart does not beat and the clock beats. / Love is when the heart beats and the clock does not beat."
Gretchen Marquette, May Day
“I’m sorry, you said, and let it hurt.”
Anaïs Duplan, Take This Stallion
“Choose your own / disappointments. Amass them in your secret place.”
Marianne Boruch, Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing
“Because it’s ancient: there is / no progress, only a deepening. Or not even that.”
Justin Boening, Not on the Last Day, But on the Very Last
“When I say I / I mean the things I do.”
Cynthia Cruz, How the End Begins
"What ruined me once / Will ruin me always."
Donika Kelly, Bestiary
“There isn’t an abstraction you believe in and you are sad for it.”
Lewis Mundt, The God of the Whole Animal
"People are also, rightfully, terrified of poison."
Lucia Perillo, Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones
“This was a hymn / that we sang on our knees"
