Does poetry tickle your fancy? Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky and check out these few different lists of the best poetry books of 2015, from sources like The Guardian and Tin House. Our own Year in Reading series is also chock full of poetry recommendations.
Best of Poetry
The Billionaire Speaks
“It’s true that when the world did not end when I predicted it would, at the end of last year, in my Netflix special Ragnarok, I realized a number of things, one of which was that I had not made a lot of professional or creative plans on the contingency that the world would continue. I just figured that it would end.” Greg Hunter talks with John Hodgman at The Rumpus.
If I Were a Boy
“I like a lot of things about being a woman, but there are times and ways it’s a prison, and sometimes I daydream about being out of that prison.” The Guardian has a crack Rebecca Solnit essay about clothing, gender, and of course, mansplaining. Pair with our review of Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby.
Anne Frank’s Legacy
“Nathan Englander’s characters have invented ‘the Anne Frank game’ whose major question is ‘who would hide you if there were another Holocaust.’ By making this a game, the characters demonstrate their affective distance from the event, but at the same time Englander illustrates that the Holocaust remains a touchstone for the marijuana-smoking, Orthodox Jews who bring the game to their secular Jewish friends.” On the fictional afterlife of Anne Frank.
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Writing through Dementia
Recommended Reading: Gerda Saunders’s essay “My Dementia: Telling who I am before I forget” on being a writer with dementia. “Looking back at the chapters I’ve completed, I ask myself, ‘How come I can still write? Could I be faking dementia?'”
McGregor Takes the IMPAC
Jon McGregor has won the International Impac Dublin Literary Award, otherwise known as the richest literary prize in all the land*, for his novel Even the Dogs. To check out the rest of the pool, you can revisit our coverage of both the long and shortlist for the prize. (McGregor’s tweet about this whole affair was pretty grand, by the way.) [*Ed note: a reader in the comments below has disputed this claim.]