I’m uncomfortable using the word “best” on a list — in part because I am just one person whose tastes are subjective. More so, to me it implies that I’ve read every book that came out in 2020 and can therefore rank them like brands of peanut butter (which seem more finite). I didn’t read them all, or even close — I wish my life made that possible. Still, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk about some poetry books that I loved this year. My column gives me limited space, so apart from the books I’ve already had a chance to recommend (like Don Mee Choi’s National Book Award-winning “DMZ Colony” or Chessy Normile’s great debut), here are several collections that I wasn’t able to write about in full or otherwise feel deserve more attention.
AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY: 250 YEARS OF STRUGGLE AND SONG, edited by Kevin Young. (Library of America, 1,110 pp., $45.) One of the most exciting anthologies I’ve opened in years, this volume collects work from the earliest days of the African-American poetic tradition (opening with a poem by Phillis Wheatley, who was renamed, as Young writes in the introduction, “after the ship that stole her”) through Emancipation, the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, the Black Arts Movement and the Dark Room Collective, and bringing us into the 21st century. As Parul Sehgal notes in her review for The Times, the poems “slyly annotate one another” within and across eras. Angelina Weld Grimké’s image of a “straight black cypress” as a “finger / Pointing upwards” prefigures Gwendolyn B. Bennett’s memory of distant “slim palm-trees, / Pulling at the clouds / With little pointed fingers” and both prefigure the fingers in poems by Jericho Brown (“We thought / Fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt”) and Tiana Clark (“Tracing my / finger along the boomerang shape of the Niger River for my blood … red finger pointing up at my dead”), written almost a century later. A wonderful reference, a wonderful gift.
ARENA, by Lauren Shapiro. (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 79 pp., paper, $18.) I’m one of those people who prefer sad music when they’re sad, and sad poetry too — someone else’s pain to harmonize with mine. These poems revolve around a single terrible moment (“I was getting a haircut when I received the call. Then I kept receiving it forever”), a reminder of poetry’s filmic ability to slow and stop time: “I opened my arms / to touch the beautiful butterflies / as they landed like leaves coming back / to a dead tree. I was the tree. / I could only understand the present. / I can only understand the present.”
CARDINAL, by Tyree Daye. (Copper Canyon, 57 pp., paper, $16.) A slim collection of beautiful poems about moving (leaving, returning, remembering) — “cardinal” as in the bird but also as in direction. The poems echo one another, with the title of one appearing as a line in another, and echo poetry in general, borrowing lines from Whitman, Rilke, Larry Levis. “The dead know / the work they have done, / and if they are not careful their hands / will stay in the shape of that work.” Among the poems are what appear to be family photographs (slightly blurry, like memories), which deepen the feeling of the book as both elegy and archive.
EMPORIUM, by Aditi Machado. (Nightboat, 112 pp., paper, $16.95.) “Wordplay” isn’t quite the term for what’s going on here; it’s more like linguistic athleticism. If you always choose Scrabble over Risk, crosswords over sudoku, you’ll get so much pleasure from the rhymes and slant rhymes (“The body is pronounced bawdy”; “It’s like innocence way off / in the distance”), double and triple meanings, conjugations and declensions, repetitions that evoke a sense of déjà vu — “Fold this” or “Fold it” or “I fold,” etc., occurs as a refrain that seems to half-reset things, like cutting a deck of cards, or twisting them into a Möbius strip. “The camera is deft, so I am dire. / I look into the mounting of desire … surely, the darkness, metonymic, shall / proceed. / I fold this.”
INHERITANCE, by Taylor Johnson. (Alice James, 69 pp., paper, $18.95.) The voice of these poems hooked me right away — poised between conversational and elevated, with a kind of elegant swagger. Johnson writes about longing and “impossible desire,” about poverty and precarity (“No one like me gets old, or so I thought, even as I watched the days fade into each other. / Was I no one?”), about the struggle and joy of becoming oneself: “Every day I build the little boat … O New Day, I get to build the boat! / I tell myself to live again.”
MUSIC FOR THE DEAD AND RESURRECTED, by Valzhyna Mort. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 95 pp., $25.) A child in Belarus bears the weight of an accordion and countless repetitive war stories, nightmares of blood and bones and radioactive soil. Mort’s poems tell a secret history (“Silence beats language out of us”); they have the haunting quality of a nursery rhyme in a minor key, the dark magic of a snow-dusted forest. “I, too, am meat braided into a string of thought. / I pray to the trees.”
MY DAILY ACTIONS, OR THE METEORITES, by S. Brook Corfman. (Fordham University, 70 pp., paper, $22.) Poems of fear and foreboding that live with the knowledge of climate crisis, without resorting to self-righteousness or self-flagellation. The form is mostly prose blocks, built of elusive, mysteriously fascinating sentences that often hinge on apparent contradiction, the simultaneity of seemingly opposite states: “Even if Tuxedo Mask kissed me back to life, all Endymion, I think I would stay dead.” “I am a bad imitator and yet this is a good imitation.” “It is hard to talk about. And yet I have filled a notebook.”
WICKED ENCHANTMENT: SELECTED POEMS, by Wanda Coleman. (Black Sparrow, 221 pp., $25.95.) I came to Wanda Coleman through Terrance Hayes, who took her “American Sonnet” form as inspiration for the poems in his own book “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin” — so I was happy to see that he edited and introduced this new selection of her work in verse (she also wrote fiction and nonfiction) across 20 or so years of her career. These poems are wildly fun and inventive, in the manner of Lewis Carroll or César Vallejo, and frequently hilarious; they seem to cover every human experience and emotion (often anger or just annoyance), as well as states that blur the line between experience and emotion, like pregnancy (“i’m 99% body”), horniness, the freedom of driving a car, perseverance (“i will. with difficulty / but i will”). I love the way she uses a line break so it’s not quite enjambment and not quite an end stop — “i want to go home and wonder how long it’ll take me to hoof it / maybe twenty minutes” — invisible punctuation.
"best" - Google News
December 12, 2020 at 05:00PM
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Best Poetry of 2020 - The New York Times
"best" - Google News
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