2013 was an extraordinary year for poetry! Choosing books for Split This Rock's fourth annual "recommended" list was harder than ever -- an embarrassment of riches to choose from. Poets are writing daring, innovative, gorgeous books that challenge the status quo and remind us of the power of language to wake us up, to give us strength.
We also know this list is by no means comprehensive. Please "comment" below to help build the e-library of essential 2013 books. Thank you!
Yvette Neisser Moreno and Sarah Browning compiled the list this year.
Split This Rock Recommended Poetry Books of 2013
Calling
Home: Praise Songs and Incantations, Naomi Ayala (Bilingual Review Press)
“Ayala does the best that poetry can do. She is the poet to
whom things speak, no matter how they are called. . . . Simply put, Calling Home is the best book of poetry
you’ll read in a long time, by a Latina or any other.” –Lorna Dee Cervantes
The Switching/Yard, Jan Beatty (University of
Pittsburgh Press)
“One of Pittsburgh’s most dynamic poets ‘juxtaposes lyricism
with brutality’ as she navigates the human heart. … Beatty mixes the real and
the unreal in her portraits of life in Pittsburgh, her search for her birth
family, and her musing on the gods that guide and torment us."
–Hester Kamin, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
What We Ask of Flesh, Remica Bingham (Etruscan Press)
“[F]ew crimes are as consequential as those committed to our
bodies, and this is the great weight of Remica L. Bingham’s powerful new book What We Ask of Flesh. Bingham profiles many
women and girls, all victims of rape or other physical abuses, to revive them
(and her audience, I suspect) to consciousness.” -Marianne Kunkel, Prairie Schooner
Star of David, Rick Black (Poetica Magazine Chapbook Contest Winner, Poetica)
“Rick Black writes with the honed elegance of a poet so in
command of lyric sentiment and the efficient evocative use of language that
what results is indeed as urgent and vulnerable as true prayer ... There is
something profoundly human and completely necessary about Star of David.”
- Kwame Dawes
Icarus in Love, Antoinette Brim (Main Street Rag)
“Antoinette Brim's Icarus
in Love is a stellar collection full of the mythology of living. Utilizing
vibrant, recurring images that braid their way through our hearts and memories,
Brim raises hard questions of survival and offers hope to us all.” -Jacqueline
Jones LaMon
After This We Go Dark, Theresa Davis (Sibling Rivalry Press)
“I felt like this book was written for me. [Davis] tackles
everything I process as a Queer Black single mother dealing in love, politics,
transitioned loved ones, sensuality, missed opportunities, and reclaimed
empowerment.” -Wise Edits
\blak\ \al-fe bet\: Poems, Mitchell L. H. Douglas (Persea)
“Haunted by questions of contemporary blackness, this second
book by Douglas is packed with risk and conflict, but also beauty.” -Publishers
Weekly
Unpeopled Eden, Rigoberto González (Four Way Books)
“The latest from the energetic and versatile Gonzalez (Black Blossoms) has a tight focus with
potentially a broad appeal: its four long poems look hard at the victims and
the antiheroes of the U.S.–Mexico border troubles … He also never limits
himself to one subject, working hard to let in all the readers he can.” –Publishers
Weekly
Autogeography,
Reginald Harris (Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Prize
Winner)
“In Autogeography, Harris gives us
the gift of quickening the treasure of black culture in poems that touch the
enduring spirit of black people. … The poet celebrates black life and the way
it connects to humanity, the bright woven cloth of all our lives.” –Afaa
Michael Weaver
Hemming the Water, Yona Harvey (Four Way Books)
“There is no rest in this extraordinary debut book by Yona
Harvey. It is a book in which the devastation is still very much alive. … We
are taken to dizzying uncertainties, a place between what’s real and what
isn’t, what’s intimate and what’s strange, between evil and good.”
–Toi Derricotte
Kohl and Chalk, Shadab Zeest Hashmi (Poetic Matrix
Press)
“The bride who contemplates her half paralyzed face on the
eve of marriage … is emblematic of the larger story of Pakistan: an ancient
culture fractured by new and divergent identities. The poet, like the bride
whose face is divided into ‘lit’ and ‘dim’ halves, gazes into the mirrors of
history and politics to make sense of the disjunctive parts that refuse to come
together as a whole.” (Publisher’s synopsis)
Senegal
Taxi,
Juan Felipe Herrera
(University of Arizona Press)
“This [is a] startling
new collection of poems in prose and verse in which [Herrera] adopts the voices
of those suffering through or perpetrating the violence that has racked
Sudan. … Herrera has the unusual
capacity to write convincing political poems that are as personally felt as
poems can be.” –NPR
Pitch Dark Anarchy, Randall Horton
(TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press)
“These are poems of breakage and
re-assemblage, dislocation and re-affirmation… I admire the verve and the
intellect, a voice poised on the edge of a precipice, speaking what is new.”
–Mead Magazine
The Only Thing That Matters, Kim Jensen (Syracuse University
Press)
“In a time when the ordinary and the predictable prevail in
poetry, this collection by Kim Jensen gives us a truly original poetry of
witness. … Finely crafted and marvelously inventive, these poems sing and hiss
and howl. They enliven and push and love.” –Naomi Ayala
Darktown Follies, Amaud
Jamaul Johnson (Tupelo Press)
“Poses as a
kind of mock minstrel show, one that records the ways in which blackness and
black Americans have been exploited for the sake of entertainment.” –
Slate
Render,
Collin
Kelley (Sibling Rivalry Press)
“An autobiography in verse, Render ... is one of the best, if not the best, poetry book I have
read this year. ... [T]he poems in Render give readers a good idea of what
it is like to grow up gay in America.” –Helen Losse, Wild Goose Poetry Review
Black Stars,
Ngo Tu
Lap, trans. from Vietnamese by Martha Collins (Milkweed)
“Reading
Ngo Tu Lap’s poems, terrible nostalgia wells up in me— nostalgia for a lost
time and a far-gone country, nostalgia for people I’ve loved, and for creatures
of forests and rivers. … I feel gratitude too. War is over. Peace arrives with these
beautiful poems.” –Maxine Hong Kingston
The Big Smoke, Adrian Matekja (National Book Award
Finalist, Penguin)
“Jack Johnson, the first African-American world heavyweight
champion, is a figure of mythological proportions; in this new collection, poet
Adrian Matejka gives the boxer a voice that's wholly human. The poet examines
race and racism from Johnson's singular perspective.”
Hum, Jamaal
May (Beatrice Hawley Award Winner, Alice James Books)
“Linguistically acrobatic, these poems render the violence
of a body’s undoing—by war, by drugs—and the mind’s in ways that are
beautifully crafted … This book relentlessly explores power and forgiveness,
love and fear.” -Publishers Weekly
She Has a Name,
Kamilah
Aisha Moon (Four Way Books)
“The opening pages of She
Has a Name identify the collection as a ‘biomythography,’ a term created by
Audre Lorde to describe a narrative based on myth and history, fact and
fiction. Kamilah Aisha Moon’s biomythography tells the story of a young woman
with autism from multiple points of view.” (Publisher’s synopsis)
The Light of the Storm/La luz de la
tormenta, Carlos Parada Ayala (Zozobra
Publishing)
“Carlos Parada Ayala’s inventive and even startling language
makes new the immigrant tale, the worker’s struggle, the lover’s terror. I
would follow this poet anywhere.” – Sarah Browning
“Everything is
intentional in the landscape of this well-structured volume. For Primack, the
rights of animals are human rights, and vice versa.” - Pank
Gospel of Dust,
Joseph
Ross (Main Street Rag)
“As with all burnt offerings, in Joseph Ross’ poems
something is also rising. We are offered again the stark choice: ashes or
bread?” - Rose Marie Berger
Calendars of Fire, Lee Sharkey (Tupelo
Press)
“An extended elegy whose
grief is political as well as personal. Across barriers of tribe, history, and
mortality, her poems carry us home with their music to a dwelling place in our
own resonant bodies.” – Common Good Books
The Forage House, Tess Taylor (Red Hen Press)
“Every so often there is
a book of poetry that reminds us how well verse can speak history. Taylor, a white
descendant of Thomas Jefferson … patches quotations, blanks, and context into a
carefully tessellated structure.” – Oxford American
Tenuous
Chapel, Melissa Tuckey (Winner
of the ABZ Press First Book Contest)
“Tuckey is a pacifist poet who has given the world she'd
like to save the gift of beauty. The poems of Tenuous Chapel exist
in order that our existence might become a little more humane and a touch more
tender as we reflect on the meaning of our brief stay on earth.” – The Journal
Speaking Wiri Wiri, Dan Vera (Winner of the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Press
Poetry Prize)
“Full of longing and
bittersweet humor, these poems are lyrical, narrative, poignant, and always
powerful. In his own search for who and what he really is, Vera has given us a
true portrait of the confused and often contradictory place that is modern America.”
– Linda Rodriguez Writes
No, Ocean
Vuong (YesYes Books)
“Honest, intimate, and
brimming with lyric intensity, these stunning poems come of age with a fifth of
vodka and an afternoon in an attic, with a record stuck on please, with starlight on a falling bomb.” – Traci
Brimhall
Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar
Evers, Frank X. Walker (University of Georgia Press)
“In these beautifully
crafted poems, Walker conducts an unusual choir. This choir sings history,
sadness, hatred, and hope…These voices skillfully offer the reader a picture of
Mississippi’s culture of racial hatred.” – Joseph Ross
The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a
Fish, Joshua Weiner
(University of Chicago)
“Explores how
consciousness can be consumed by war, illness, and work… Weiner, in cataloguing
what 'the pastoral cannot contain,' uncovers the sharpest lyrics in this
masterful book, at once poised and relentless.” – Publishers Weekly
Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and
Other Poems, Ghassan Zaqtan, trans.
from Arabic by Fady Joudah (Griffin Poetry Prize winner, Yale University Press)
“[Zaqtan’s]
poetry awakens the spirits buried deep in the garden, in our hearts, in the
past, present and future. His singing reminds us why we live and how, in the
midst of war, despair, global changes.” – Griffin Prize Judges’
Citation
Anthologies:
The
Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, ed. Deborah Ager and M.E. Silverman
(Bloomsbury)
“It
is fascinating to see just how our younger poets make their way through
language and history, their own heritage, a digital world that has changed all
of us in how we communicate, and has condensed history in ways that are new.
Let us learn from them.” –Myra Sklarew
Flicker
and Spark: A Contemporary Queer Anthology of Spoken Word and Poetry,
ed. Regie
Cabico and Brittany Fonte (Lowbrow Press)
“We sometimes can browse the world but sometimes we need
detail. We need to know the ugly why and the beautiful why. The poetic Queer
why is often neglected. I believe this anthology will go some way to uncover
and decorate our eclectic and diverse wheres and whys.”
–Gerry Potter
This
Assignment Is So Gay: LGBTIQ Poets on Teaching, ed. Megan Volpert (Sibling Rivalry Press)
“[T]hese
poetic works serve as a beacon, a lighthouse of sorts, not just for the LGBTIQ
community but for anyone who has ever been seen as ‘other.’” –Shellie
McCullough, World Literature Today
Some
2014 books we eagerly anticipate:
Difficult
Fruit,
Lauren K. Alleyne
Shadow Play: A Novella in Verse, Jody Bolz
Split, Cathy Linh Che
The Love Project: A
Marriage Made in Poetry, Wanda Coleman & Austin Straus
Day Unto Day, Martha Collins
Mexican Jenny and Other Poems, Barbara Brinson Curiel
Thieves in the Afterlife, Kendra DeColo
Seam, Tarfia Faizullah
We Didn't Know Any Gangsters, Brian Gilmore
I Am the Beggar of the World, Eliza Griswold, ed.
Zion, TJ Jarrett
Prelude to Bruise, Saeed Jones
Patter, Douglas Kearney
Hustle, David Tomas Martinez
The Heart of a Comet, Pages Matam
Haiti Glass, Lenelle Moïse
Once, Then, Andrea Scarpino
Nude Descending an Empire, Sam Taylor
The Fateful Apple, Venus Thrash
Comprehending Forever, Rich Villar
Abide, Jake Adam York
Day of the Border Guards, Katherine E. Young
