April
Human Time: Selected Poems by Kim Haengsook, translated by Jake Levine
Haengsook is an essential South Korean poet, and this is the first selected volume of her work, which spans five books. She writes in both lineated and prose forms, and frequently engages with the work of fiction writers and critics, from Franz Kafka to Cleanth Brooks, often employing a unique and jarring second-person narrative (“I haven’t lost the qualities that make me a bed. My little squeaking sounds are also part of me.”). As translator Jake Levine notes, Haengsook writes in a style she calls “precise ambiguity,” a paradox that creates disarming, unique verses. “You can’t tell top from bottom,” she begins “Summoning the Soul.” “I threw you into the river. / I scattered you into the air.” Her haunting lines—“You don’t know the way to me / but come to me from anywhere”—are twice appended with an enjambment: “I love you.” We all want to feel the poems are written for us, but Haengsook’s second person has the alchemical feel of invitation, as in “The Chorus”: “Stand in front of us,” she writes, “and sing like you could fly, sing like you could fall.”
Freedom House by KB Brookins
This dynamic full-length debut from Brookins begins with the atmospheric “Black Life Circa 2029,” which features successive stanzas justified on opposite margins, offering a frame for an imagined, idyllic future. “Clean fridge. / Spacious, carpeted living room. / Newly swept floors. A wooden desk. Designated / lunchtime every day at noon. / SZA playing on vinyl.” In this world, “Black men gleam gold teeth,” they write, “& there are no police.” The poem’s final lines affirm hope: “I love my land, comfortable; I love this life, loud. / I have a living— / I have a room.” Freedom House skillfully bounds among themes, from work to tokenism to nature, as in “What Still Lives” (after Texas Winter Storm Uri): “The hackberries, / perfectly aligned on the wooden pointless fence. What is a fence / but a boundary, but a harsh message to stay out?” Through rich imagery, deftly-constructed lines, and a gift for narrative pacing, Brookins crafts a compelling collection; as the wordplay of the final poems in the book suggest, Freedom House is a poetic manifestation—and lyric manifesto—of being alive.
May
The Animal in the Room by Meghan Kemp-Gee
“I want the future to remake my life,” Kemp-Gee writes in an early poem titled “The Brontosaurus.” “I want them to find my scattered pieces / in Wyoming” and “I want / fundamentalists to call me a hoax.” Wry and folkloric, The Animal in the Room is a singular, confident collection, where absurdity marries wisdom. There’s a poem here for every taste. Word and line play in “The Vancouver Island Marmot”: “an island / can be a / lifeboat a / life can be / a lifeboat too.” Recursive clarity in “The Giant Pacific Octopus”: “If you’re hungry for wisdom, write your proverbs in dead languages; / they’re dangerous in living mouths.” Apocalyptic revelation in “After the Storm”: “The freeway underpasses / will be a good place / to decide the new anatomy, what each part // means. The heart was once the seat / of love. Now it will / be the liver, or / love will live in the fingers.” Sonorous invitation in “Bishop”: “I believe equally easily in / your memory of the sound of rain and what / you mean when you say wake up together, / wake each other up to belief without / thinking and find it is a marvel to / mean that I believe in everything you say.” Kemp-Gee is a gifted satirist, whose wandering and wondering eye makes The Animal in the Room a fully unique book.
West: A Translation by Paisley Rekdal
We often sample poems devoid of their lineage and placement within broader collections, and that’s likely a venial sin: a poem read aloud, or shared online, is a good thing. Yet there’s significant power when a poet—especially one at the top of their form—undertakes a project that is both stylistically ambitious and historically enlightening. West: A Translation, written while Rekdal was Poet Laureate of Utah, began as a commissioned poem to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad, and synthesizes with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a ban on Chinese laborers immigrating to America (as well as placing new restrictions on Chinese laborers currently in the states). West is a beautifully-made book, with striking photographs and unique layouts that complement Rekdal’s elegiac, experimental verse does justice to her significant subject matter: “If falling leaves return to roots, what grows / when leaves cannot be gathered? / What returns if not the body?” As noted in the companion website to the book, Chinese migrants “were detained at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay and held for extensive interrogation, sometimes up to 22 months,” and some died by suicide. The book begins with a poem in Chinese by one such detainee, and Rekdal unpacks and deconstructs that poem via her own varying narratives. A striking collection, from start to finish–one anchored through poems like “Antiquity”: “What am I searching for in this dead wreckage, / trestles of bone-spart webbed by orb weavers? / To thumb a slice of ginger bottle, or scratch black / up from burnt opium pipes?” After a series of questions, the narrator wonders if they could “wring the song / note by note out of the bird, isolate the dance / from the dancer” in a “sepia postcard of a Navajo / performing himself for East Coast tourists.” The conclusion: “I want to put that dancer back / into the privacy of history. But he’s got his own future / He’s out there now, working on the railroad.” This is a book that belongs in—that is itself—a museum.
June
Delicates by Wendy Guerra, translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson and Esperanza Hope Snyder
Cuban poet and novelist Guerra’s work has not often been translated into English, so this volume is a welcome gift to Anglophone readers. She often writes of Cuba’s separation from the world, as in “Peninsular Psalm”: “you who stretch to where the limit cannot kiss / who make of fish the purest food for humankind / you who sustain ships and worlds / who make an offering of saints to the wind’s violent tenderness.” Guerra invites, rightly, comparisons with Anaïs Nin via an epigraph, and plays with the delicate and ephemeral nature of what remains under, hidden. There are also profoundly solemn moments, as in “A Face in the Crowd (Graffiti),” a poem of the narrator’s parents who “were once of sound mind” and who “brought me into the world in a room filled with cots.” Gently, she writes: “Saturday nights we watched the same movies / weeping along with a country subtitled in black and white.” Yet, “when finally left to themselves,” the narrator’s parents finally “lost their minds.” This sense is reflected in a later poem, “Sea of Tears.” “I’m doing fine,” the narrator affirms. “I’m all prayed out and I drown pianos on the shore / attempting to get there.” She thinks of how “we humor this hopeless latitude.” “I’m doing fine,” she repeats, “Shivering among panes of glass.” The range of emotions and tones in Delicates speak to the comprehensiveness of Guerra’s poetic approach: a compelling book of longing and loss.
Hydra Medusa by Brandon Shimoda
Shimoda is always inventive, both in form and feeling. Hydra Medusa considers the lives (and ghosts of) Japanese Americans in the desert, including in internment camps: “The women of Delta Utah / are talking / on the sidewalk / about the Japanese man who was murdered / on the edge of their town. // He was hard of hearing, they said / He was walking his dog / He was picking flowers.” Shimoda’s epigraph comes from Etel Adnan, whose absence is still newly felt: “The desert shimmers at moments as if it owned the whole planet, and we needed it to be so.” As poet and thinker, Shimoda demonstrates how the desert is a place of documentation and resonance; he wrangles and lays bare paradoxes without neutering their tensions. Through Shimoda’s vision, the desert is preternatural, mystical, terra and terrifying: “bomb // where the shape is deepest / an interior, conjugation of hell // shapes the eye(s), / from which life forms emerge.” Includes several prose pieces, among them “The Descendant,” a powerful essay between these poems (poets in prose inspire a different form of awe!): “The relationship between the ancestors and the living is, like a curse, an expression of karmic fluidity. It does not flow in only one direction, but is shared.” Hydra Medusa accomplishes that rare poetic balance: sinewing language that is also melodic, and Shimoda’s song focuses us on the book’s deeply arresting ideas.
