Feast your eyes and your shelves on September’s
SPD Recommends *Backlist*,
ten titles that continue to rock our world. Maybe they’ll rock yours too…
1. You Are Not Dead - Wendy Xu
“There's a wild and wondrous poet plundering-through our lives, collecting the oddest and most significant things, turning our thoughts toward things we couldn't have known before she turned us toward them. YOU ARE NOT DEAD is precisely how this book can get you to feel and that is an almost otherworldly power. The poet who imagines and builds these poems is irresistible.” - Dara Wier
2. Stars of the Night Commute - Ana Božičević
“STARS OF THE NIGHT COMMUTE haunts in three dimensions, knit by a below-words rumble in the sure rhythm of dreams.” - Annie Finch
3. Rules of the House - Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
“Dhompa's potent suite of poems elucidates the humanness and adversities of the Tibetan diaspora. You enter the immigrant girl-child's bifurcated world, coming and going, language to language, culture to culture, from childhood to sexuality. A lovely explication of 'dharma—things as they are, and how precious they are, no special pleading.” - Anne Waldman
4. King of Shadows - Aaron Shurin
“Aaron Shurin gets it so right in this collection of essays. He slows down the heedless world and takes a good look. Sometimes he jumps on the moment with predatory glee, other times he fashions wreaths of words with it. I watch and admire these flights that are way over-the-top and yet scrupulous. At some point his watchful explorations become autobiography and the whole scrupulous, over-the-top, magnificent man steps forward.” - Robert Glück
5. Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium - Jean Day
“Occasionally a book pulls me in to the exclusion of all others, demanding that I read it straight through. The sensation almost feels like a drug. I find myself looking forward to my next possible moment with the book and experience intense pangs of sadness once I’ve completed it, as though a friend has passed...Jean Day’s ENTHUSIASM: ODES & OTIUM is just such a volume. Reading it is one of those knock-down take-the-top-of-your-head-off experiences...” - Ron Silliman
6. (Soma)tic Midge - CA Conrad
“My idea for a (Soma)tic Poetics is a poetry which investigates that seemingly infinite space between body and spirit by using nearly any possible THING around or of the body to channel the body out and/or in toward spirit with deliberate and sustained concentration. My first investigation into (Soma)tic poetry is a series I am calling (SOMA)TIC MIDGE. This is a 7-poem cycle where I fully immerse myself in a single color for a day. The order of the 7-poem cycle being the natural order of color, starting with RED, then ORANGE, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE, PURPLE, then ending with WHITE. PURPLE being the transformative, natural pivotal color which is born ONLY WHEN the starting color RED (which is the first element of the Zodiac, Aries, or ORIGINAL FIRE) and the last color BLUE (which is the last element of the Zodiac, Pisces, or ADVANCED WATER) bleed together.” - CA Conrad
7. Thank You for the Window Office - Maged Zaher
“Maged Zaher: my favorite discovery, so far, of 2013. His poems are totally alive, funny, sharp, shapely, and never dull. A great pleasure to read this effervescent, awake book.” - Wayne Koestenbaum
8. Black Peculiar - Khadijah Queen
“In the 19th century, those unwilling to face the incongruities of a nation espousing freedom while simultaneously perpetuating terror used the phrase our peculiar institution as code for slavery. Here, with equal part precision and aplomb, humility and humor, erudition and absurdity, the work in Khadijah Queen's BLACK PECULIAR decodes, uncovers, and recasts such lexical wound dressing, exposing the abraded, scarred flesh of a consciousness both beset upon and liberated through language. Unabashedly experimental, Queen continually bends form to the breaking point, reveling in the absence of authority revealed through hybrid genre: epistolary interrogations of a prismatic self; prose poems blurring narrative and parable; a wild verse play, whose lineage encompasses everything from Ubu Roi to Dutchman to The Vagina Monologues. 'I unlocked my chorus of archetypal women from their chains,' Queen tells us. 'They rubbed their raw wrists with aloe and set to work.' Would that we could all be subjects under one whose rule is so emancipatory.” - Noah Eli Gordon
9. not so, sea - Mg Roberts
“NOT SO, SEA is a matrilineal book of jungle and seasons of wet and dry, a bloodline haunted by the legacies of imperialism and militarization. From the intersection of vivid sensory memories and the dislocations of immigration these startling poems come full of contradiction: longing, violence, sweetness, and anger. I want to praise their clipped syntax, their insistent fragment and stutter, the hesitance that happens at the edges of translation between languages, cultures. I want to praise that their vocation is neither witness nor song but rather sheer will, a steely dedication 'to the arrangement of things in historical context,' even if such an arrangement 'makes it harder to fly in some cases.' I want to praise Mg Roberts' insistence on a poetics that both maps diaspora and attempts to regather what's been scattered: 'Pages turn creating distance. I must retell myself, until I can see us in color.' This is a brave and vital book." - Brian Teare
10. All the Garbage of the World, Unite! - Kim Hyesoon
“Kim Hyesoon writes flowingly and choreographically a panorama of hovering hatelove for the birthing body, for cruelty and existence and for the expansive thinking and dizzyingly borderless universe-geography. Kim Hyesoon writes hatelove as a stone-hard feminist life-and-death dance. As garbage, love and death accumulate in her poems, your world will be changed for real!” - Aase Berg