August is an especially strong month for debuts, and includes the collected poems of an essential American voice. Here are seven notable books of poetry publishing in August.
Depression & Other Magic Tricks by Sabrina Benaim
Benaim’s debut is charged and honest, but the reader is eased into this journey through a direct invitation voiced on the first pages. True to the title, this is a book about depression, and about the occasional magic tricks that spur us against anxiety. “explaining my depression to my mother a conversation” is masterful, the type of poem I wish could reach so many teenage ears. “mom, / my depression is a shape shifter”—the narrator struggles to distill her world, but her mother’s interrogations are skeptical and curt. Benaim captures the complexity of depression, how “insomnia sweeps me up into its arms, / dips me in the kitchen by the small glow of stove light.” She tries going on walks at night, but her “stuttering kneecaps clank like silver spoons” and “ring in my ears like clumsy church bells, / reminding me i am sleepwalking on an ocean of happiness / i cannot baptize myself in.” So many of these poems made me pause on the page, with quotable lines aplenty: “when my father tells me i am beautiful, / i always hope it’s because i remind him of my mother” and “i don’t know how to connect in a world like this; / in times like these, / where i can’t even speak about myself in first person.” This is a book to share, a poetic window into someone “standing in line / behind you / the girl you’re pretending not to notice.”
Rummage by Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa
A powerful debut, structured around four themes: shame, identity, physicality, and spirituality. “Kwansaba For My Mother” is a seven-line wonder, the type of poem to read again and again to reflect on its weight. A woman’s body “tenses at his / cold touch under her Easter dress, lace / stained by trusted hands.” But this is a praise poem, and a daughter is praising the resolve of her mother, wounded by the past. In “Portrait of Memory With Night Terror,” another poem of shame, a family drives to a carnival “three counties over.” The children want to go on rides, “to slick their fingers with sugar and grease,” but the adults “hadn’t come for fun. / We needed them to feel at home among the grotesque.” They bring the children to the sideshow, teaching them that the mere action of perception often results in objectification. I also think of lines later in the book, when the narrator says she remembers “how good the glint of the strange can be // when you stumble / toward it.” In Rummage, there’s a constant movement closer, as in the palpable “How Not to Itch:” “You have learned how slow // the pulse of grief beats.” Just when I felt settled into the tangible, Oputa turns to the spiritual. I loved “The Prophet Wants to Atone,” which begins “Ask me what it’s like to be a world / always in need of rescue.” What truth.
Dots & Dashes by Jehanne Dubrow
The heart of Dubrow’s poems originate from an autobiographical truth: her husband is a career Navy officer, so much of their marriage exists at a distance. While that subject is apt for personal narrative, Dubrow taps into a general feeling of longing that makes her poems feel in the tradition of works about lovers separated by war. Dots & Dashes is a nuanced take on patriotism and service, and the anxiety created by distance. In “Old Glory,” the narrator watches as a neighbor’s flag “jittered in the rain” during the night. The narrator knows a flag “shouldn’t be torn or crumpled;” although she sees the neighbor “drop it, / leave a mudprint on the corner,” she says nothing, leaving “the stars unthreaded / on his patriotic lawn.” Inert and silent, the narrator of “Old Glory” helps the reader understand the unique anxieties of milspouses, who can feel inert while their other halves travel. Dubrow evens-out those emotions with moving love poems like “The Long Deployment” (“I breathe his body in the sheet / until he starts to fade, made incomplete.”) and “Liberty” (“I believed / in the seam our bodies made, / but when in the morning he put on / his uniform, it was what I’d sewn / myself that held, miraculous, / our warmth.”). Despite the pain in many lines of this collection, there’s a genuine thread of inspiring hope for reunion.
So Where Are We? by Lawrence Joseph
Joseph’s poems are necessary, immediate, somehow absolutely now and eerily ancient. Themes of his previous collections—Lebanese and Syrian Catholic faith and culture, the memory of Detroit, life in New York City—are resurrected here, but this new book feels like a stake in the ground. The interrogation of the title is whispered throughout as a fear. Maybe we are in a moment unlike any others? If so, Joseph has the care and reach to document our present. Poems like “And for the Record” are tight and heavy, capturing surreal moments—a man babbling in the street—that contain unfortunate truths. After all, “the mind, / like the night, has a thousand eyes.” Joseph documents the shadow of the 9/11 attacks, how the “flow of data // since the attacks has surged. / Technocapital, permanently, digitally, // semioticized, virtually unlimited / in freedom and power, taking // billions of bodies on the planet / with it.” It is not paranoid to feel that something is happening. There is “Too much consciousness / of too much at once, a tangle of tenses / and parallel thoughts.” Harried and brutal, we’ve reached “the point at which / violence becomes ontology.” Joseph is the kind of poet who helps us parse the prophecies from the noise.
Testify by Simone John
Whenever I see the word “testify,” I think of a scene from James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain when the congregation joins Brother Elisha on the church floor: “the tarry service moved from its first stage of steady murmuring, broken by moans and now again an isolated cry, into that stage of tears and groaning, of calling aloud and singing.” John’s method in this notable debut is incantational. She mixes court transcripts and dashboard recordings with prose poems and personal narratives to create poetic testament. The book is a memorial to Trayvon Martin and Sandra Bland, to black transwomen and more lives taken early (in “Back Seats,” John writes “We know we age in dog years” and “We savor our youth knowing / midlife ended in middle school.”). This is a book of anger and lament, as in the searing “Trayvon,” how the narrator says she saw her own brother “Fall prey to baited / traps. Some boys can overcome, / but that requires // the luxury of / time.” In Testify, there is not much time. Poems like “Mourning Rites (Or: How We Bury Our Sons)” are acknowledgments that we’ve heard these threnodies before, and they continue to wound as they accumulate. “When the sound of Jays on concrete / makes a sob crawl up your throat, finger // the nylon like prayer beads.” John’s book offers poetry as solace, knowing it is only a temporary salve for the pain. “Eventually you’ll develop / an inner compass to navigate / this path,” one narrator says to her son. “I am laying the groundwork / to keep you alive long enough to get there.”
A Doll for Throwing by Mary Jo Bang
In a concluding note to this volume, Bang writes “These poems are not about her but were written by someone who knew of her.” She is referring to Lucia Moholy, a Czech-born photographer whose work was infamously used without attribution (Bang notes this was done to raise the prestige of the Bauhaus school). While A Doll for Throwing is certainly not meant to be autobiographical, there is the spirit of a photographer throughout. Many of these prose poems are dream-like, philosophical takes that require time and reflection (this is a collection to move through slowly). It is a book about creation, art, and distance, and begins with “A Model of a Machine,” and lines out of an ars poetica: “In the blank space between the following day and the previous night, you see the beauty of a propeller, for instance, and think, yes, I want that silver metal to mean something more than just flight.” These poems reach that ambiguous space. I returned to “Two Nudes,” a tight example of Bang’s style. The narrator escapes work by going on a walk with a friend. The poem seems like it will be a casual jaunt through a day, but by the end of the second sentence, she’s married. Her poems splice time—“Every day was a twenty-four-hour standstill on a bridge from which we discretely looked into the distance, hoping to catch sight of the future”—as easily as they split identity. “I constructed a second self,” she writes. “I photographed myself as if I were a building.” With those second selves, those photographic negatives, Bang can make her narrators find the surreal moments from their pasts that ring curiously true: “The cheek waits to be kissed by air as it was once kissed by the dark-haired boy in the boathouse whose late-night lesson was that the distance between what had been described and what was now happening was immeasurable.” In that distance lies poetry.
Half-Light (Collected) by Frank Bidart
A massive book that covers 50 years of words, Bidart’s collected contains enough routes and themes to produce years of reading. His style—capitalized words, italics, shifting speakers, personae, autobiography—result in a modern mythmaker who channels the old masters. A poet finely attuned to the contours of sensuality, he can simultaneously be spare and weighty, as in “In the Western Night:” “Two cigarette butts— / left by you // the first time you visited my apartment. / The next day // I found them, they were still there— // picking one up, I put my lips where / yours had been.” Bidart’s Catholicism has always been central and generative to the tension in his poems. He’s said “something very fundamental to the Catholicism that at least I grew up in was the notion that there is a kind of war between the mind and the body, between the spirit and the body…there is tremendous disparity between the demands of the spirit and the demands of the body, between what the body can offer the spirit and what the spirit wants or needs.” Art “is the closest thing I have found to God. Art is the way I have survived. It has deflected the hunger for the absolute.” Art has been a way of crafting his own sense of a soul, as in “Queer:” “For each gay kid whose adolescence // was America in the forties or fifties / the primary, the crucial // scenario // forever is coming out— / or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. Or not.” Perhaps what allows Bidart to so fully, and sometimes so shockingly inhabit the lives of others through dramatic monologues is that longing for the absolute in a world with incorrect guideposts: “A journey you still most travel, for / which you have no language // since you no longer believe it exists.”
