Feast your eyes and your shelves on July’s
SPD Recommends *Backlist*,
ten titles that continue to rock our world. Maybe they’ll rock yours too…
1. Don’t Drink Poison - Sarah Anne Wallen
“Through a sly directness that seems inspired by Williams, the New York School, Sylvia Plath, and Ariana Reines, Wallen crafts a punk female poetics located in the weird slippery surface of tone. Compressed, smart and raucous, the poems shimmer as they turn language back on its strange self.” - Karen Weiser
2. Diary of A K-Drama Villain - Min K. Kang
“Min K. Kang's The Diary of a K-Drama Villain is alive and subversive: each line undermining misperceptions of the Asian female condition with vinegary wit. Kang reclaims the lyric for the digital age; her style is the Engrish IM, the confessional missive as late night text, shredding that Anna May Wong avatar with vengeance. A startling and vibrant debut.” - Cathy Park Hong
3. Go Find Your Father | A Famous Blues - Harmony Holiday
“The voice in A Famous Blues / Go Find Your Father is so absolute and addicting and completing (Holiday, you complete me!) and enduring. And yet there is a specific politics underlying the poems in this book regarding the ‘work made for hire’ clause in many recording contracts. The poems in A Famous Blues feel like direct confrontations with this fact, but that’s mainly from interspersed texts telling the story of Holiday’s father, Jimmie Holiday. This half of the book spells out the concept of inheritance in concrete and explicit terms. Literally, Holiday has been in dispute for royalties she and her mother should be earning from her father’s songwriting. And so the concept of father as artist present in Harmony Holiday’s artistic life takes on a concrete character. It’s a point which A Famous Blues takes further when it speaks to influence with a listing of artists in ‘Lament for the Brilliance of Wolves.’ And I would say it’s this conceptual interlock surrounding the idea of inheritance that allows for so much centripetal motion in the poems. They hurl themselves outward in syntax and content and sentiment and everything, please. Yet they still hold together.” - Kent Shaw, The Rumpus
4. Essay Stanzas - Thomas Meyer
“A life of such patience must have led to Thomas Meyer’s Essay Stanzas (The Song Cave, 2014). In long poems in which each stanza offers itself as a discrete meditation, Meyer creates a book in which the largest of universal truths find themselves manifest in the minutiae of daily attention. My favorite of the poems, ‘Caught Between,’ opens the collection, is an exalted catalog of the things of existence—from light to ocean to river to tree to, most movingly, the animal kingdom—one that knows no list can be complete, and highest praise of the ten-thousand things must be modest enough not to strive to compete with the world of which it sings. Meyer renews poetry’s oldest dictate, placing upon his shoulders Caedmon’s own mantle: Now must we praise. Such praise isn’t a form of faith necessarily, not a religious tenet, but a kind of light, so that song brings to the eye what all there is that can be seen.” - Dan Beachy-Quick
5. Tender Points - Amy Berkowitz
“’Trauma is nonlinear,’ writes Berkowitz. I am impressed by the sensing form she makes. That has the day in it, as well as the night. The body, that is, in variable settings, frames and weathers. The stairs that ‘climb up my arms and neck.’ The ‘I am bitterly jealous of people who can always go back to being a barista for a while.’ This book is a kind of clutching and being there for real, and that is what I like. A book. That takes up. A visceral form.” Bhanu Kapil
6. Rumored Place - Rob Halpern
“Rob Halpern implodes new narrative tenets, collapsing all views of our condition and the means to express these views into each sentence at once: learned, aroused, mournful, and full of hope. His book conveys the intolerable crush of the ongoing, the grand brawl of contending institutions and concepts hectically alive past their deaths. Meanwhile the self continually gains and loses ID. The intensity of what is said displays the extent of what can’t be said. This emptiness travels along with the story in the future perfect tense, a negative space that has not been, an arcadia that cannot have been lost, beyond knowing but not beyond needing. It is also an orifice in the mind or body where the unspeakable of history might enter and speak.” - Robert Glück
7. Neighbor - Rachel Levitsky
“Levitsky interrogates just about every nut and bolt that goes into community, civic and otherwise, and incorporates political theory gently into Neighbor, particularly Giorgio Agamben (and her sly and irresistible sense of humor certainly makes us aware of the double entendre behind The Coming Community). ‘God or the good or the place does not take place, but is the taking-place of the entities, their innermost exteriority,’ Agamben writes. The neighbor insists on the private made public, public made private, and in that movement, inflicted upon both self and other, is the taking-place, taking of place.” - Marcella Durand, Jacket2
8. The Book of Light - Lucille Clifton
“Clifton's latest collection clearly demonstrates why she was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. These poems contain all the simplicity and grace readers have come to expect from her work. The first few pages set the title in a larger perspective at the same time that they announce the book's premise: ‘woman, i am / lucille, which stands for light.’ This is a feminist version of Roots, charged with outrage at the sins done to women of previous generations. There are the typical heroes and anti-heroes: Atlas, Sisyphus, Leda, biblical women—but even these tired figures are given a new, often comic, twist: Naomi, for example, doesn't want Ruth's devotion, just to be left alone to ‘grieve in peace’; several poems are addressed to Clark Kent as the speaker comes to terms with the realization that he doesn't have the power to save her after all. And what do today's women have instead of superheroes? Jesse Helms; fathers who ‘burned us all.’ Though it is based more or less in traditional Christianity, the poetry also is concerned with how spirituality can be personal. Low key and poignant, poem after poem takes the form of a conversation, whether woman to her dead parents, Lucifer to God, or poet to reader.” - Publisher’s Weekly
9. Heath Course Pak - Tan Lin
“The book is interesting in that it’s specifically not interesting, it’s successful because of the way it fails, it succeeds so adequately at what it sets out to do that as a book it becomes a mere chore, an exercise. But the stamina required is beautiful, and Lin’s trajectory through the world of literature, as an outlier questioning things completely different than anybody else, is entirely necessary.” - Impossible Mike, HTML Giant
10. i be, but i ain’t - Aziza Barnes
“Barnes commandeers the page in her startling debut, putting into language a range of lived experiences that expose crucial gaps in language and history. These poems brim with black voices, so with some winking irony she marks the collection's five sections with quotes from Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, including his final words: ‘Let us cross over the river & rest under the shade of the trees.’ Demonstrating a firm grasp of the interplay of form and content, Barnes varies tone and structure to meet her needs. Her opening poem emulates the shape of a framed picture of Miriam Makeba used to kill a centipede in her apartment, ending with ‘a colonizer's thought’: ‘if I don't kill it now, how will I find it again?’ The collection rolls from there. With justified annoyance and amusement, Barnes expounds on sexual and racial identities, fraught social interactions, and various modes of desire. As the poems shift location (New York City, Los Angeles, Mississippi, Ghana), those issues reveal their interrelatedness even as they manifest individually.” - Publisher’s Weekly
