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Shifting the Silence
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Etel Adnan. Nightboat, $14.95 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-1-64362-030-5
“I am not in a hurry to live, am not in a hurry to die, but just talking to you,” Adnan (Seasons) admits in her musing and reflective collection about life at 95. Her conversation with the reader covers history, personal recollections, philosophy, mythology, love, and war, with the breadth and generosity of a period in her life in which she claims she has “more memories than yearnings.” Here, sorrow is illuminated by a buoyant honesty. “The pain of dying,” Adnan writes, “is going to be the impossibility of visiting.” Life is revisited again and again in these pages; old friends are named, places from Mount Shasta to Paris are explored, and final hopes are offered (“I dream of a room with no furniture, of a past with very few friends, of a country with no weapons”). Each paragraph in these prose poems pushes against the idea that there is “no resolution to somebody’s final absence.” “I’m telling you:” she writes, “we’re carried by tornadoes we barely notice, whirlwinds we barely feel, aggressions we barely acknowledge, because we’re half awake.” This memorable collection continues Adnan’s legacy as a poet of the personal, political, and cosmic. (Oct.)
House of Sound
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Matthew Daddona. Wandering Aengus, $17 trade paper (64p) ISBN 978-0-578-71192-8
The ruminative debut from Daddona considers the role of departures in shaping the arc of a life. In three sections—“House of Sound,” “Last Night, the Caterwaul,” and “Human Touch”—Daddona investigates the roles of family and loss in personal identity, as well as that of time’s relentless proceeding. “House of Sound,” the opening poem, illustrates this concern: “Because a shadow/ wants to leave you/ but doesn’t know how—/ it takes light/ years to grow dark/ away from itself.” Elsewhere, in “The White Dog,” the speaker declares, “I watched snow dissolve/ on heels of impenetrable flowers.// These are only symbols of time.” Many poems contemplate the domestic sphere, and several are about or addressed to the speaker’s dog. Anticipating the creature’s departure from the family, the speaker says, “lie down dog lie/ down land where dogs/ roam divot to fence/ sun-spotted,” to which he draws a parallel to selfhood: “we have the same back/ we are the same/ man is an image in himself.” Occasionally, these sorts of metaphorical connections feel overstated, though they are in keeping with the collection’s restlessly probing quality. The 28 carefully crafted poems in this debut offer a glimpse into a mind on the search for answers. (Oct.)
Stella Hayes
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One Strange Country. What, $15.95 trade paper (92p) ISBN 978-0-9889248-9-5
Hayes’s restless and searching debut addresses the pain and disorientation of assimilation alongside the comforts of family. In three sections, these poems jump between locations in Europe and the United States, as if unable to settle too long in any place: “I was invaded/ by dry sickly heat of either Utah or Arizona./ The desert held in its teeth, like a lizard/ or a mountain mouse.” In the ghazal “Don’t Tell the Women,” she repeats the word unrequited, building a collage of one-sided imaginings: “I am lost to distance, quietly weaving a carpet./ Loom with me a fugue made of love threads, unrequited.// Don’t tell the women, the moon & sun will be hushed./ Put into place, for an uncertain life, unrequited.” Meditations about Hayes’s displaced mother and poems on her sister (a painter) are emotionally resonant and insightful: “To your discomfort she paints without artifice/ Her small knife cutting in the parts/ Of you she believes conceal.” This debut provides an honest and moving tribute to the immigrant experience. (Nov.)
Snow Approaching on the Hudson
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August Kleinzahler. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25 (96p) ISBN 978-0-374-26627-1
Modernist slice-of-life vignettes abound in this atmospheric collection from Kleinzahler (Before Dawn on Bluff Road). Eclectic points of interest converge, from the novelties of high society to the lives of prominent figures and strangers. Kleinzahler is adept at creating images that express the emotional qualities of environments: “Passenger ferries emerge from the mist/ river and sky, seamless, as one—/ watered ink on silk// then disappear again, crossing back over/ to the other shore, the World of Forms.” He particularly excels at animating strangers; in an empathetic and humanizing portrait, he describes a homeless man that shares the same park: “Shadow Man is out there now, always out there./ I can tell you where by the hour on the clock,/ under which tree, what corner of the park, almost as if he’s waiting for someone,/ someone who, when ready, will know to come find him there.” At times his tempo, plethora of references, and meagerly contextualized dialogue can alienate the reader. Nevertheless, Kleinzahler’s collection is akin to a bountiful meal—substantially pleasing and worth the investment if consumed at a leisurely pace. (Nov.)
Light for the World to See
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Kwame Alexander. Houghton Mifflin, $14.99 trade paper (96p) ISBN 978-0-358-53941-4
In his essay “A Report from Occupied Territory,” James Baldwin writes: “People are destroyed very easily. Where is the civilization and where, indeed, is the morality which can afford to destroy so many?” In his taut, lyrical book, Alexander (Booked) writes from that “occupied territory,” a world in which “we can’t see our home/ we can’t breathe our air.” Alexander explores and brings to life a world where so much exists in the negative: “we can’t be ourselves/ we can’t be at home/ we can’t be alone,” never shying away from the use of a collective “we” in his report of racial experience in America. There is sorrow here, as well as critique that develops toward hope. Channeling Gwendolyn Brooks, Alexander writes: “This is for the unbelievable./ The We Real Cool ones.” Throughout, he enters and calls upon a chorus of voices from past and present, pushing toward a future of liberation and equality. This serves as an apt and timely reminder of the ongoing inequities in America, as well as of the power of collective hope. (Nov.)
My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems
Yi Lei, trans. from the Chinese by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi. Graywolf, $18 trade paper (152p) ISBN 978-1-64445-040-6
In the introduction to this stunning collection, Smith writes that Lei “astounded readers in China when, in 1987, she published a long poem entitled ‘A Single Woman’s Bedroom’... this at a time when cohabitation before marriage was still illegal in China.” But the poem in question isn’t simply about erotic desire—a topic Lei writes poignantly about—it’s on agency and freedom of the mind, as well: “I imagine a life in which I possess/ All that I lack. I fix what has failed./ What never was, I build and seize.” Lei’s poems fearlessly and thoughtfully explore sensuality, celebrating physical pleasure in spite of societal restrictions. Her poems also praise the beauty of the natural world, as in “Glorious Golden Birds Are Singing,” in which she paints a vivid scene through unusual juxtaposition: “Glorious golden birds are singing/ In heavy hexagonal snow./ Gold, brass, bronze, zinc, copper and tin. All are my kin.” Lei’s frankness and lyricism make her a significant voice in Chinese poetry, one that rightfully deserves a wider international audience. (Nov.)
Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan
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Paul Celan, trans. from the German by Pierre Joris. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $40 (608p) ISBN 978-0-374-29837-1
This ambitious bilingual edition completes Joris’s herculean effort to translate all of Celan’s poetry into English. Celan’s experiences of trauma as a Holocaust survivor permeate poems such as “Todesfuge” (“Deathfugue”): “Black milk of dawn we drink you at night/ we drink you at noon death is a master from Deutschland/ we drink you evenings and mornings we drink and drink.” Celan expresses the propulsive, hypnotic unraveling of the world through his fragmented refrain. Elsewhere, he paints himself as a perpetual outsider: “Blacker in black, I am more naked./ Only as a renegade am I faithful./ I am you when I am I.” The importance of seeing and witnessing comes up again and again throughout: “Gaze-trade, finally, at untime:/ imagefast,/ lignified,/ the retina—:/ the eternity-sign.” Joris’s introduction and commentary provide useful historical and literary context. This admirable translation presents the early work of an eminent German language postwar poet to a new audience. (Nov.)
What Kind of Woman
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Kate Baer. Harper Perennial, $16.99 ISBN 978-0-06-300842-7
Baer debuts with a meditative exploration of her identity as a woman, wife, and mother, disrupting mainstream assumptions about femininity. Broken into three sections, the poems center on the roles of lover, wife, and mother, yet as she notes, “You do not have to choose one or the other.” For Baer, being a woman is itself a kind of powerful, dangerous magic: “I can be beautiful/ if I want to. I can take your/ rabbit ears and disappear/ them with my tongue.” In “Female Candidate,” she creates a linguistic collage of key phrases used repeatedly to describe women in positions of power: “I like her but/ aggressive tone/ it’s not that she/ now that I have daughters/ if only she would.” In “For the Advice Cards at Bridal Showers,” she turns worn-out pieces of advice upside down: “Go to bed angry. Wake up with a plan. When/ someone asks for the secret to a happy marriage,/ remember you don’t know.” Baer’s poems unearth the difficulties of marriage, as well as the body after it has given birth (“a deflated balloon. Bruised fruit”). In these confident and fearless poems, Baer suggests that the deepest and most vulnerable love is found in life’s imperfections. (Nov.)
Dearly: New Poems
Margaret Atwood. Ecco, $27.99 (144p) ISBN 978-0-06-303249-1
Atwood (The Testaments) returns with a sardonic and sagacious masterpiece to add to her significant oeuvre. Fantasy, love, sex, feminism, and mortality are explored with discursive poise and narrative cohesion. Atwood has a knack for creating piquant emotional textures, infusing ideas, experiences, and objects with palpable life, as when she envisions the negative space that will remain after the death of her partner: “That’s who is waiting for me:/ an invisible man/ defined by a dotted line:// the shape of an absence/ in your place at the table,// ...a rustling of the fallen leaves,/ a slight thickening of the air.” Time is perhaps the most ubiquitous variable in her poems; Atwood fuses past and present, resulting in prescient nostalgia for the current moment and for the future. But there is hope here, too, in spaces created by voids. In “If There Were No Emptiness,” she writes: “That room has been static for me so long:/ an emptiness a void a silence/ containing an unheard story/ ready for me to unlock.// Let there be plot.” Combining dignified vulnerability, lyrical whimsy, and staunch realism, Atwood offers a memorable collection that emboldens readers to welcome disillusionment. (Nov.)
And So Wax Was Made & Also Honey
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Amy Beeder. Tupelo, $18.95 trade paper (76p) ISBN 978-1-946482-36-5
The historical and fantastical mingle in gleeful harmony in the richly imagined third collection from Beeder (Now Make Me an Altar). Inventive titles suggest the poet’s varied sources of inspiration; “Letter from Inmate 0709-609” is a riff on a missive from an incarcerated person seeking advice about his poetry. It grows darker as the writer confesses his crime: “...the boys who finally/ found her thought at first dog bones but/ then a sneaker.” Beeder has a penchant for scientific phenomena and the occult, as evidenced in several poems titled “A Practical Guide to Hand Analysis.” Her talent for combining evocative images with rich sensory language is on display in the Thomas Hardy–inspired “Sir Say Pray,” featuring milkmaids “cream-skinned, gathering toad-spume on skirts relentlessly cracking the snails underfoot.” In “Lithium Dreams,” the poet writes an origin story for the salt flats of Bolivia: “Once, volcanoes walked & talked like/ humans. Married. Quarreled & gave birth./ When the beautiful Tunupa’s/ husband ran away & took their only child/ she mourned:/ ...until she made this sunken bed, a dry &/ ragged ice-white sea.” These intriguing poems are a pleasure to read. (Dec.)
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