American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin Poets)

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January Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock [NF] I first learned about the life and work of seventeenth-century writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish in Regan Penaluna's stellar study of women thinkers, and I've been dying to read a biography of Cavendish ever since. And I'm in luck (all of us are) thanks to biographer Peacock. A proto-feminist, science-fiction pioneer, and divisive public figure, Cavendish is endlessly fascinating, and Peacock's debut gives her the rigorous, in-depth treatment that she deserves. —Sophia M. Stewart Nonfiction by Julie Myerson [F] A blurb from Rachel Cusk is just about all it takes to get me excited about a book, so when I saw that Cusk called Myerson's latest novel "glitteringly painful," "steady and clear," and "the book [Myerson] was intended to write," I was sold. A tale of art, addiction, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters, Nonfiction promises to devastate. —SMS Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh [NF] Did the pandemic kill postmodernism? And what comes after the end of history? University of Illinois–Chicago professor Kornbluh dubs our contemporary style “immediacy,” characterized by same-day delivery, bingeable multimedia, and real-time news updates that spin the economic flywheel ever faster. Kornbluh names this state of emergence and emergency, and suggests potential off-ramps in the direction of calm reflection, measured art-making, and, just maybe, collective wisdom. —Nathalie op de Beeck Slow Down by Kōhei Saitō, tr. Brian Bergstrom [NF] In this internationally-bestselling treatise, Japanese philosopher Saitō argues against "sustainable growth" in favor of degrowth—the slowing of economic activity—which he sees at the only way to address the twinned crises of inequality and climate change. Saitō's proposal is simple, salient, and adapts Marx for the modern day. —SMS Relic by Ed Simon [NF] From Millions alum Simon comes a slim study of the objects we imbue with religious (or quasi-religious) meaning, from the bone of a Catholic martyr to Jimi Hendrix's guitar pick. Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series never misses, and Relic is one of the series' most unconventional—and compelling—entries yet. —SMS Filterworld by Kyle Chayka [NF] The outline of reality has become increasingly blurry as the real world melds with the digital one, becoming what Chayka, staff writer at the New Yorker, calls “Filterworld,” a society built on a foundation of ever-evolving algorithms. In his book of the same name, Chayka calls out the all-powerful algorithm, which he argues is the driving force behind current and accelerating trends in art, consumption, and ethics. —Daniella Fishman Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte, tr. Helge Dascher and Karen Houle [NF] A gripping narrative of coming to terms with her queer identity, Canadian cartoonist Delporte's latest graphic memoir—praised by Eileen Myles and Fariha Róisín—sees Delporte learning to embrace herself in both physical and metaphysical ways. Dreamy colored pencil illustrations and gently flowing storytelling capture the beauty, trauma, and ultimate tranquility that comes with learning to exist on your own terms. —DF Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino [F] In Bertino’s latest novel, following 2020's Parakeet, the launch of Voyager 1 into space coincides with the birth of Adina Giorno, who, much like the solitary satellite, is in search of something she can't yet see. As a child, she senses that she is not of this world and struggles to make a life for herself amid the drudgery of human existence. Playing on Adina's alienness as both a metaphor and a reality, Bertino asks, “Are we really alone?” —DF The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin [NF] Martin returns ablaze in her latest memoir, pitched as "H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene." Following an anguishing chronic pain diagnosis, Martin attempts to reconnect with her beloved Northern California wilderness in order to escape not only her deteriorating health but a deteriorating world, which has ignited around her in the worst fire season California has ever seen. Devastating and ambivalent, The Last Fire Season tries to sift through the ashes of climate change. —DF The Furies by Elizabeth Flock [NF] Violence by women—its role, its potential righteousness—is the focus of Flock's latest. Following the real-life cases of a young rape survivor in Alabama, a predator-punishing gang leader in India, and an anti-ISIS militia fighter in Syria, Flock considers how women have used lethal force as a means to power, safety, and freedom amid misogynistic threats and oppression. Is violence ever the answer? Flock looks to three parallel lives for guidance. —SMS Imagining the Method by Justin Owen Rawlins [NF] University of Tulsa professor Rawlins demystifies that most celebrated (and controversial) acting school, challenging our contemporary conceptions of screen performance. I was sold the moment I saw Rawlins received the ultimate stamp of approval from Isaac Butler, author of the definitive account of method acting: "If you care about the evolution of twentieth-century screen performance, you should read this book." —SMS We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge [NF] Famed twentieth-century philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote passionately about power, freedom, and inequality against the backdrop of fascism—a project as relevant today as it ever was. Stonebridge, a professor of humanities and human rights, revisits the lessons of Arendt's writings and applies them to the twenty-first century, creating a dialogue between past, present, and future. —DF Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose [F] In these 19 short stories, Rose meditates on philosophy, photography, and literature. Blending erudition and entertainment, Rose's fables follow writers, teachers, and artists through various situations—and in a standout story, imagines how St. Augustine would fare on Twitter. —DF Black Women Taught Us by Jenn M. Jackson [NF] Jackson's debut book foregrounds the work of Black feminist writers and leaders—from Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs to Shirley Chisholm and bell hooks—throughout American history, revealing the centuries-long role that Black women have played in imagining and fighting for a more just society. Imani Perry calls Jackson "a beautiful writer and excellent scholar." —SMS The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James [F] Pitched as Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez (yeesh!), The Bullet Swallower is the second novel (after Mona at Sea) from Elizabeth Gonzalez James, who also wrote the weird and wonderful essay/play Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. Infusing the spaghetti western with magical realism, the novel follows a Mexican bandito on a cosmic journey generations in the making. —SMS Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino [F] In Sammartino's debut novel, the owner of a gun store hatches a plan to resurrect his struggling business following his son's near-death experience. George Saunders, Mary Karr, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah have all heaped on praise, and Jenny Offill finds it "hard to believe Last Acts is a first novel." —SMS I Sing to Use the Waiting by Zachary Pace [NF] Pace fuses memoir and criticism (my favorite combination) to explore the emotional and cultural impacts of women singers across time, from Cat Power and Rihanna to Kim Gordon and Whitney Houston. A queer coming-of-age story that centers the power of music and the legacies of women artists. —SMS Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn [F] Blackburn, the author of the stellar story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl, delivers a debut novel about storytelling and unreality, centering on a successful novelist who gets hold of her dead brother's phone—and starts answering texts as him. Kristen Arnett calls this one "a bonafide knockout" that "rewired my brain." —SMS Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer [N] New Yorker staff writer Blitzer traces the harrowing history of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, foregrounding the stories of Central American migrants whose lives have been threatened and upended by political tumult. A nuanced, layered, and rigorously reported portrait that Patrick Radden Keefe hails as "extraordinary." —SMS The Survivors of the Clotilda by Hannah Durkin [NF] Durkin, a British historian, explores the lives of 103 Africans who were kidnapped and transported on the last slave ship to dock in the U.S., shortly before the Civil War began in 1861. Many of these captives were children, and thus lived their lives against a dramatic backdrop, from the Civil War all the way up to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. What these people experienced and how they prevailed should intrigue anybody interested in learning more about our nation’s darkest chapter. —Claire Kirch Your Utopia by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur [F] Following her acclaimed sophomore novel The Cursed Bunny, Chung returns with more tales from the realm of the uncanny. Covering everything from unruly AI to the quest for immortality to the environmental destruction caused by capitalism, Chung’s story collection promises more of the mystifying, horror-filled goodness that has become her calling card. —DF The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz [NF] Frantz Fanon—political philosopher, psychiatrist, and author of the trailblazing Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth—is one of the most important writers and thinkers of the postcolonial era, and his work continues to inform contemporary thinking on race, capitalism, and power. In this sprawling biography, Shatz affirms Fanon's place as a towering intellect and groundbreaking activist. —SMS You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, tr. Natasha Wimmer [F] Enrigue's latest novel, following Sudden Death, reimagines the fateful 1519 invasion of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. With exuberant style, and in a lively translation by Wimmer, Enrigue brings the Aztec capital and the emperor Moctezuma to vibrant life—and rewrites their destinies. —SMS February Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, tr. by Mima Simić [F] Croatian literature may lag behind its Russian, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian counterparts—roughly in that order—as far as stateside recognition goes, but we all make mistakes. Just like couples do in love and under capitalism. “A war between kitchen and bedroom,” as the liner notes read, would have been enough to sell me, but that war’s combatants, “an unemployed Dante scholar” and “a passable actress,” really sealed the deal. —John H. Maher The Unforgivable by Cristina Campo, tr. Alex Andriesse [NF] This new NYRB edition, introduced by Kathryn Davis, brings together all of the essays Campo published in her lifetime, plus a selection of additional essays and autofiction. The result is a robust introduction to a stylish—but largely forgotten—Italian writer whose "creativity was a vocation in the truest sense," per Jhumpa Lahiri. —SMS Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti [NF] Last year, I was enraptured by Heti's limited-run New York Times newsletter in which she alphabetized sentences from 10 years' worth of her diary entries—and this year, we can finally enjoy the sublime results of that experiment in book form. This is my favorite work of Heti's, full stop. —SMS Dinner on Monster Island by Tania De Rozario [NF] Blending film criticism, social commentary, and personal narrative, De Rozario (most recently the author of the Lambda Literary Award–nominated And the Walls Came Crumbling Down) explores her experience growing up queer, brown, and fat in Singapore, from suffering through a "gay-exorcism" to finding solace in horror films like Carrie. —SMS Wrong Norma by Anne Carson [NF] Everyone shut up—Anne Carson is speaking! This glistening new collection of drawings and musings from Carson is her first original work since the 2016 poetry collection Float. In Carson's own words, the collection touches on such disparate topics (she stresses they are "not linked") as Joseph Conrad, Roget's Thesaurus, snow, Guantánamo, and "my Dad." —DF Self-Portraits: Stories by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy [F] Japanese writer Dazai had quite the moment in 2023, and that moment looks likely to continue into the new year. Self-Portraits is a collection of short autofiction in the signature melancholic cadence which so many Anglophone readers have come to love. Meditating on themes of hypocrisy, irony, nihilism—all with a touch of self-deprecating humor—Dazai’s work will either pull you out of a deep depression or crack your rose-colored glasses; there is no in-between. —DF Imagination by Ruha Benjamin [NF] Visionary imagination is essential for justice and a sustainable future, argues Benjamin, a Princeton professor of African American studies and founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. In her treatise, she reminds readers of the human capacity for creativity, and she believes failures of imagination that lead to inequity can be remedied. In place of quasi-utopian gambles that widen wealth gaps and prop up the surveillance state, Benjamin recommends dreaming collective and anti-racist social arrangements into being—a message to galvanize readers of adrienne marie brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. —SMS Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen [NF] Artificial intelligence and machine-generated writing are nothing new, and perhaps nothing to fear, argues Tenen, a Columbia English professor and former software engineer. Traveling through time and across the world, Tenen reveals the labor and collaboration behind AI, complicating the knee-jerk (and, frankly, well-founded!) reactions many of us have to programs like ChatGPT. —SMS A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh [F] Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the inventor of the telephone, but what he considered his life's work was the education of deaf children—specifically, the harmful practice of oralism, or the suppression of sign language. Marsh's wonderful debut novel unearths this little-known history and follows a deaf pupil of Bell's as she questions his teachings and reclaims her voice. —SMS Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker [NF] Journalist Bosker, who took readers behind the scenes with oenophiles in her 2017 Cork Dork, turns to avid artists, collectors, and curators for this sensory deep dive. Bosker relies on experiential reporting, and her quest to understand the human passion for visual art finds her apprenticing with creators, schmoozing with galleristas, and minding canonical pieces as a museum guard. —NodB Columbo by Amelie Hastie [NF] Columbo experienced something of a renaissance during the pandemic, with a new generation falling for the rugged, irresistible charms of Peter Falk. Hastie revisits the series, a staple of 70s-era TV, with refreshing rigor and appreciation, tackling questions of stardom, authorship, and the role of television in the process. —SMS Acts of Forgiveness by Maura Cheeks [F] Cheeks's debut novel sounds amazing and so au courant. A woman is elected U.S. president and promises Black Americans that they will receive reparations if they can prove they are descended from slaves. You’d think people would jump on achieving some social justice in the form of cold cash, right? Not Willie Revel’s family, who’d rather she not delve into the family history. This promises to be a provocative read on how the past really isn’t past, no matter how much you run from it. —CK The Sentence by Matthew Baker [F] I minored in Spanish linguistics in college and, as a result, came to love that most useless and rewarding of syntactic exercises, diagramming sentences. So I'm very excited to read Baker's The Sentence, a graphic novel set in an alternate America and comprising single, 6,732-word sentence, diagrammed in full. Syntax wonks, assemble! —SMS Neighbors by Diane Oliver [F] Before her untimely death in 1966 at the age of 22, Oliver wrote stories of race and racism in Jim Crow America characterized by what Dawnie Walton calls "audacity, wit, and wisdom beyond her years." Only four of the 14 stories in Neighbors were published in Oliver's lifetime, and Jamel Brinkley calls the publication of her posthumous debut collection "an important event in African American and American letters." —SMS The Weird Sister Collection by Marisa Crawford [NF] Essayist, poet, and All Our Pretty Songs podcaster Crawford founded the Weird Sister blog in 2014, covering books and pop culture from contemporary young feminists’ and queer perspectives. The now-defunct blog offered literary reviews, Q&As with indie authors, and think pieces on film and music. For this collection, whose foreword comes from Michelle Tea, Crawford gathers favorite pieces from contributors, plus original work with a Weird Sister edge. —NodB Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh [NF] As research for his Ibis trilogy, Ghosh mapped the opium trade around the world and across centuries. This global and personal history revisits the British Empire’s dependence on Indian opium as a trade good, and how the cultivation of and profits from opium shaped today’s global economy. In his nonfiction The Great Derangement, Ghosh employs personal anecdotes to make sense of larger-scale developments, and Smoke and Ashes promises to connect his own family and identity to today’s corporate, institutional, and environmental realities. —NodB Private Equity by Carrie Sun [NF] In her debut memoir, Sun recounts her time on Wall Street, where she worked as an assistant to a billionaire hedge-fund founder and was forced to rethink everything she thought she knew about work, money, sacrifice, and living a meaningful life. This one sounds like a great read for fans of Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley (e.g. me). —SMS I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall [F] When Khaki Oliver receives a letter from her estranged former best friend, she isn’t ready for the onslaught of memories that soon cause her to unravel. A Black Bildungsroman about friendship, fandom, and sanity, I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is an unflinching look at "what it means to be young in a hard, and nonetheless beautiful, world," per Vauhini Vara. —Liv Albright Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan [NF] I know from personal experience that anything published by Graywolf Press is going to open my eyes and make me look at the world in a completely different way, so I have high expectations for Sloan’s essays. In this clever collection, a Black creative reflects upon race, art, and pedagogy, and how they relate to one’s life in this crazy country of ours during the time period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic. —CK Language City by Ross Perlin [NF] Perlin travels throughout the most linguistically diverse city on the planet—New York—to chronicle the sounds and speakers of six endangered languages before they die out. A linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, Perlin argues for the importance of little-known languages and celebrates the panoply of languages that exists in New York City. —SMS Monkey Grip by Helen Garner [F] A tale as old as time and/or patriarchal sociocultural constructs: a debut novel by a woman is published and the critics don't appreciate it—until later, at least. This proto-autofictional 1977 novel is now considered a classic of Australian "grunge lit," but at the time, it divided critics, probably because it had depictions of drug addiction and sex in it. But Lauren Groff liked it enough to write a foreword, so perhaps the second time really is the charm. —JHM Ours by Phillip B. Williams [F] A conjuror wreaks magical havoc across plantations in antebellum Arkansas and sets up a Brigadoon for the enslaved people she frees before finding that even a mystic haven isn't truly safe from the horrors of the world. What a concept! And a flexible one to boot: if this isn't adapted as a TV series, it would work just as well as an RPG. —JHM Violent Faculties by Charlotte Elsby [F] A philosophy professor influenced by the Marquis de Sade designs a series of experiments to prove its relevance as a discipline, specifically with regard to life and death, a.k.a. Philip Zimbardo (Chopped and Screwed Remix): The Novel. If you ever trusted a philosophy professor with your inner self before—and you probably shouldn't have?—you probably won't after reading this. —JHM American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas [F] Plagued by data harvesting, constant surveillance, mass deportation, and incarceration, the society at the heart of Cárdenas's new novel is less speculative dystopia than realist reflection. Channeling Philp K. Dick and Samuel Delaney, Cárdenas imagines a society where Latin Americans are systematically expunged. Following the lives of two Columbian-American sisters, one who was deported and one who stayed in the U.S., American Abduction tells a new kind of immigrant story, suffused with mysticism and philosophical rigor. —DF Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom by Grace Lavery [NF] I took Lavery's class on heterosexuality and sitcoms as an undergrad, and I'm thrilled to see the course's teachings collected in book form. Lavery argues that since its inception the sitcom has depicted heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of collapse, only to be reconstituted at the end of each half-hour episode. A fascinating argument about the cultural project of straightness. —SMS Whiskey Tender by Deborah Taffa [NF] Almost a decade in the making, this memoir from Taffa details generations of Southwest Native history and the legacies of assimilationist efforts. Taffa—a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe, and director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts—was born on the California Yuma reservation and grew up in Navajo territory in New Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. She reflects on tribal identity and attitudes toward off-reservation education she learned from her parents’ and grandparents’ fraught formative experiences. —NodB Normal Women by Philippa Gregory [NF] This is exciting news for Anglophiles and history nerds like me: Philippa Gregory is moving from historical fiction (my guilty pleasure) about royal women and aristocrats in medieval and early modern England to focus on the lives of common women during that same time period, as gleaned from the scraps of information on them she has unearthed in various archives. I love history “from the bottom up” that puts women at the center, and Gregory is a compelling storyteller, so my expectations are high. —CK Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin, tr. Max Lawton [F] Upon its publication in 1999, Sorokin's sci-fi satire Blue Lard sparked protests across Russia. One aspect of it particularly rankled: the torrid, sexual affair it depicts between Stalin and Khruschev. All to say, the novel is bizarre, biting, and utterly irreverent. Translated into English for the first time by Lawton, Sorokin's masterwork is a must-read for anyone with an iconoclastic streak. —SMS Piglet by Lottie Hazell [F] Hazell's debut novel follows the eponymous Piglet, a successful cookbook editor identified only by her unfortunate childhood nickname, as she rethinks questions of ambition and appetite following her fiancé's betrayal. Per Marlowe Granados, Hazell writes the kind of "prose Nora Ephron would be proud of." —SMS Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley [NF] Crosley enlivens the grief memoir genre with the signature sense of humor that helped put her on the literary map. In Grief Is for People, she eulogizes the quirks and complexities of her friendship with Russell Perreault, former publicity director at Vintage Books, who died by suicide in 2019. Dani Shapiro hails Crosley’s memoir—her first full-length book of nonfiction—as “both a provocation and a balm to the soul.” —LA The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano [NF] The freaks came out to write, and you better believe the freaks will come out in droves to read! In this history of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice, Romano (a former writer for the Voice) interviews some 200 members the paper’s most esteemed staff and subjects. A sweeping chronicle of the most exciting era in New York City journalism promises to galvanize burgeoning writers in the deflating age of digital media. —DF Burn Book by Kara Swisher [NF] Swisher has been reporting on the tech industry for 30 years, tracing its explosive growth from the dawn of the internet to the advent of AI. She's interviewed every tech titan alive and has chronicled their foibles and failures in excruciating detail. Her new book combines memoir and reportage to tell a comprehensive history of a troubled industry and its shortsighted leaders. —SMS Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange [F] Orange returns with a poignant multi-generational tale that follows the Bear Shield-Red Feather family as they struggle to combat racist violence. Picking up where Orange's hit debut novel, There There, left off, Wandering Stars explores memory, inheritance, and identity through the lens of Native American life and history. Per Louise Erdrich, “No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange." —LA March The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan [F] Callahan's debut novel follows a young artist as she faces sudden hearing loss, forcing to reevaluate her orientation to her senses, her art, and the world around her. Amina Cain, Moyra Davey, and Kate Zambreno are all fans (also a dream blunt rotation), with the latter recommending this one be "read alongside the novels of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Maria Gainza." —SMS The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft [F] When a group of translators arrive at the home of renowned novelist Irena Rey, they expect to get to work translating her latest book—instead, they get caught up in an all-consuming mystery. Irena vanishes shortly after the translators arrive, and as they search for clues to the author's disappearance, the group is swept up by isolation-fueled psychosis and obsession. A “mischievous and intellectually provocative” debut novel, per Megha Majumdar. —LA Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, tr. Heather Cleary [F] This isn’t your typical meet-cute. When two women—one grieving, the other a vampire, both of them alienated and yearning for more—cross paths in a Buenos Aires cemetery, romance blooms. Channelling Carmen Maria Machado and Anne Rice, Yuszczuk reimagines the vampire novel, with a distinctly Latin American feminist Gothic twist. —LA The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez [F] I'm a sucker for meticulously researched and well-written historical fiction, and this one—a sweeping story about the interconnected lives of the unsung people who lived and labored at the site of the Panama Canal—fits the bill. I heard Henríquez speak about this novel and her writing processes at a booksellers conference, and, like the 300 booksellers present, was impressed by her presentation and fascinated at the idea of such a sweeping tale set against a backdrop so larger-than-life and dramatic as the construction of the Panama Canal. —CK Bite Your Friends by Fernanda Eberstadt [NF] Melding memoir and history, Eberstadt's Bite Your Friends looks at the lives of saints, philosophers, and artists—including the author and her mother—whose abberant bodies became sites of subversion and rebellion. From Diogenes to Pussy Riot, Eberstadt asks what it means to put our bodies on the line, and how our bodies can liberate us. —SMS Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez [F] When Raquel Toro, an art history student, stumbles on the story of Anita de Monte, a once prominent artist from the '80s whose mysterious death cut short her meteoric rise, her world is turned upside down. Gonzalez's sophomore novel (after her hit debut Olga Dies Dreaming) toggles between the perspectives of Raquel and Anita (who is based on the late Ana Mendieta) to explore questions of power, justice, race, beauty, and art. Robert Jones, Jr. calls this one "rollicking, melodic, tender, and true—and oh so very wise." —LA My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld, tr. Michele Hutchison [F] Rijneveld, author of the International Booker Prize-winning novel The Discomfort of Evening, returns with a new take on the Lolita story, transpiring between a veterinarian and a farmer's daughter on the verge of adolescence. "This book unsettled me even as it made me laugh and gasp," gushes Brandon Taylor. "I'm in awe." Radiant by Brad Gooch [NF] Lauded biographer Gooch propels us through Keith Haring’s early days as an anonymous sidewalk chalk artist to his ascent as a vigilante muralist, pop-art savant, AIDS activist, and pop-culture icon. Fans of Haring's will not want to miss this definitive account of the artist's life, which Pulitzer-winner biographer Stacy Schiff calls "a keen-eyed, beautifully written biography, atmospheric, exuberant, and as radiant as they come." —DF The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman [NF] Sometimes you encounter a book that seems to have been written specifically for you; this was the feeling I had when I first saw the deal announcement for Shechtman's debut book back in January 2022. A feminist history of the crossword puzzle? Are you kidding me? I'm as passionate a cruciverbalist as I am a feminist, so you can imagine how ravenously I read this book. The Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the best books of 2024, hands down, and I can't wait for everyone else—puzzlers and laymen alike—to fall in love with it too. —SMS The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Drayluk [F] Kurkov is one of Ukraine's most celebrated novelists, and his latest book is a murder mystery set against the backdrop of WWI-era Kyiv. I'll admit what particularly excites me about The Silver Bone, though, is that it is translated by Dralyuk, who's one of the best literary translators working today (not to mention a superb writer, editor, and poet). In Drayluk's hands, Kurkov's signature humor and sparkling style come alive. —SMS Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls [NF] This multigenerational graphic memoir follows Hull, alongside her mother and grandmother, both of whom hail from China, across time and space as the delicate line between nature and nurture is strained by the forces of trauma, duty, and mental illness. Manjula Martin calls Feeding Ghosts “one of the best stories I’ve read about the tension between family, history, and self.” —DF It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken [F] Haunting prose and a pithy crow guide readers through Marcken's novel of life after death. In a realm between reality and eternity, the undead traverse westward through their end-of-life highlight reel, dissecting memories, feelings, and devotions while slowly coming to terms with what it means to have lived once all that remains is love. Alexandra Kleeman admits that she "was absolute putty in this book's hands." —DF Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi [F] When I visited Prague, a year after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the Czech capital struck me as a magical place, where anything is possible, and Oyeyemi captures the essence of Prague in Parasol Against the Axe, the story of a woman who attends her estranged friend's bachelorette weekend in the city. A tale in which reality constantly shifts for the characters and there is a thin line between the factual and the imagined in their relationships, this is definitely my kind of a read. —CK Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet [F] Crucet's latest novel centers on a failed Pitbull impersonator who embarks on a quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana—a quest that leads him to cross paths with Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquariam. Winking at both Scarface and Moby-Dick, Say Hello to My Little Friend is "a masterclass in pace and precision," per Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. —SMS But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu [F] Girl, a Malaysian-Australian who leaves home for the U.K. to study Sylvia Plath and write a postcolonial novel, finds herself unable to shake home—or to figure out what a "postcolonial novel" even is. Blurbs are untrustworthy, but anything blurbed by Brandon Taylor is almost certainly worth checking out. —JHM Wrong Is Not My Name by Erica N. Cardwell [NF] Cardwell blends memoir, criticism, and theory to place her own Künstlerroman in conversation with the work of Black visual artists like Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O'Grady, and Kara Walker. In interconnected essays, Cardwell celebrates the brilliant Black women who use art and storytelling to claim their place in the world. —SMS Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham [F] A theater critic at the New Yorker, Cunningham is one of my favorite writers working today, so I was thrilled to learn of his debut novel, which cheekily steals its title from the Dickens classic. Following a young Black man as he works on a historic presidential campaign, Great Expectations tackles questions of politics, race, religion, and family with Cunningham's characteristic poise and insight. —SMS The Future of Songwriting by Kristin Hersh [NF] In this slim volume, Throwing Muses frontwoman and singer-songwriter Hersh considers the future of her craft. Talking to friends and colleagues, visiting museums and acupuncturists, Hersh threads together eclectic perspectives on how songs get made and how the music industry can (and should) change. —SMS You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker [NF] Parker, a brilliant poet and author of the stellar There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, debuts as an essayist with this candid, keen-eyed collection about life as a Black woman in America. Casting her gaze both inward and onto popular culture, Parker sees everything and holds back nothing. —SMS Mother Doll by Katya Apekina [F] Following up her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, Apekina's Mother Doll follows Zhenia, an expectant mother adrift in Los Angeles whose world is rocked by a strange call from a psychic medium with a message from Zhenia's Russian Revolutionary great-grandmother. Elif Batuman calls this one "a rare achivement." —SMS Solidarity by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix [NF] What does "solidarity" mean in a stratified society and fractured world? Organizers and activists Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor look at the history of the concept—from its origins in Ancient Rome to its invocation during the Black Live Matter movement—to envision a future in which calls for solidarity can produce tangible political change. —SMS The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu [NF] After her mother, a refugee of the Vietnam war and the owner of two nail salons, dies from a botched cosmetic surgery, Lieu goes looking for answers about her mother's mysterious life and untimely death. Springing from her hit one-woman show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, Lieu's debut memoir explores immigration, beauty, and the American Dream. —SMS Through the Night Like a Snake ed. Sarah Coolidge [F] There's no horror quite like Latin American horror, as any revering reader of Cristina Rivera Garza—is there any other kind?—could tell you. Two Lines Press consistently puts out some of the best literature in translation that one can come by in the U.S., and this story collection looks like another banger. —JHM Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel [F] Bullwinkel's debut collection, Belly Up, was a canful of the uncanny. Her debut novel, on the other hand, sounds gritty and grounded, following the stories of eight teenage girls boxing in a tournament in Reno. Boxing stories often manage to punch above their weight (sorry) in pretty much any medium, even if you're not versed enough in the sport to know how hackneyed and clichéd that previous clause's idiomatic usage was. —JHM Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian [F] Haroutunian's novel-in-stories, part of Noemi Press's Prose Series, follows a pair of inseparable friends over the years as they embark on careers, make art, fall in and out of love, and become mothers. Lydia Kiesling calls this one "a sparkling, intimate look at women's lives" that makes "for a lovely reading experience." —SMS Death by Laughter by Maggie Hennefeld [NF] Hennefeld's scholarly study explores the forgotten history and politics of women's "hysterical laughter," drawing on silent films, affect theory, feminist film theory, and more. Hennefeld, a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, offers a unique take on women's pleasure and repression—and how the advent of cinema allowed women to laugh as never before. —SMS James by Percival Everett [F] In James, the once-secondary character of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn narrates his version of life on the Mississippi. Jim, who escapes enslavement only to end up in adventures with white runaway Huck, gives his account of well-known events from Mark Twain’s 1880s novel (and departs from the record to say what happened next). Everett makes readers hyperaware of code-switching—his 2001 novel Erasure was about a Black novelist whose career skyrockets when he doubles down on cynical stereotypes of Blackness—and Jim, in James, will have readers talking about written vernacular, self-awareness, and autonomy. —NodB A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen [NF] Chronicling 36 fateful encounters among 30 writers and artists—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain to Zora Neal Hurston—Cohen paints a vast and sparkling portrait of a century's worth of American culture. First published in 2004, and reissued by NYRB, A Chance Meeting captures the spark of artistic serendipity, and the revived edition features a new afterword by the author. —SMS Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler [NF] Butler has had an outsized impact on how we think and talk about gender and sexuality ever since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, which theorized the way gender is performed and constructed. Butler's latest is a polemic that takes on the advent of "anti-gender ideology movements," arguing that "gender" has become a bogeyman for authoritarian regimes. —SMS Green Frog by Gina Chung [F] Chung, author of the acclaimed debut novel Sea Change, returns with a story collection about daughters and ghosts, divorcees and demons, praying mantises and the titular verdant amphibians. Morgan Talty calls these 15 stories "remarkable." —SMS No Judgment by Lauren Oyler [NF] Oyler is one of our sharpest and most fearless cultural critics, and No Judgement is her first essay collection, following up her debut novel Fake Accounts. Opining on gossip and anxiety, autofiction and vulnerability, and much, much more, Oyler's caustic wit and penetrating voice shine through every essay. —SMS Memory Piece by Lisa Ko [F] Following up her National Book Award–nominated debut novel The Leavers, Ko's latest follows three lifelong friends from the 1990s to the 2040s. A meditation on the meaning of a "meaningful life" and how to adapt to an increasingly inhospitable world, Memory Piece has earned praise from Jacqueline Woodson and C Pam Zhang, who calls the novel "bright with defiance, intelligence, and stubborn love." —SMS On Giving Up by Adam Phillips [NF] Psychoanalyst Phillips—whose previous subjects include getting better, wanting to change, and missing out—takes a swing at what feels like a particularly timely impulse: giving up. Questioning our notions of sacrifice and agency, Phillips asks when giving up might be beneficial to us, and which parts of our lives might actually be worth giving up. —SMS There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib [NF] Abdurraqib returns (how lucky are we!) with a reflection on his lifelong love of basketball and how it's shaped him. While reconsidering his childhood, his relationship with his father, and the meaning of "making it," Abdurraqib delivers what Shea Serrano calls "the sharpest, most insightful, most poignant writing of his career." —SMS The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones [F] The final installment of Jones's trilogy picks up four years after Don't Fear the Reaper. Jade Daniels is back from prison, and upon her release, she encounters serial killer-worshipping cults, the devastating effects of gentrification, and—worst of all—the curse of the Lake Witch. Horror maestro Brian Keene calls Jones's grand finale "an easy contender for Best of the Year." —LA Worry by Alexandra Tanner [F] This deadpan debut novel from Tanner follows two sisters on the cusp of adulthood as they struggle to figure out what the hell to do with their lives. Heads butt, tempers flare, and existential dread creeps in as their paths diverge amid the backdrop of Brooklyn in 2019. Limning the absurdity of our internet-addled, dread-filled moment, Tanner establishes herself as a formidable novelist, with Kiley Reid calling Worry "the best thing I've read in a very long time." —DF [millions_email]

You Can’t Help Being a Person: The Millions Interviews Maureen McLane

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Poet and critic Maureen McLane’s new book More Anon: Selected Poems includes work from her first five collections of poetry including Mz N: the serial and the National Book Award finalist This Blue. In her work, McLane writes a variety of registers and approaches and styles, with as wide a range of subject matter as forms. Her poems range from the political to the erotic to the intellectual. There’s a playfulness to her work that sometimes obscures how detailed and precise that work is. McLane also has two poems in The FSG Poetry Anthology, which includes work by nearly every poet that FSG has ever published, and places her work in conversation with some of the great poets of our time. Both books offer an opportunity to read McLane’s poetry anew, and we spoke recently about how she came to understand her work and about trying to contextualize it for readers old and new. Alex Dueben:  I’m curious about the process of curating a selected volume of your own work. Maureen McLane:  It was interesting being an anthologist of my own work. I knew I wanted More Anon to have a representative core from each book, but I also wanted to make sure that through-lines across the books could be signaled in various ways—for example, the various versionings of Sappho which appear in each book. And I wanted this selected poems to reflect the sense of emergent seriality in my work. I have a poem featuring the character or persona of “Mz N” in my first book, Same Life (2008); later on, that character became the basis for a much longer development, in what ultimately became the book Mz N: The Serial (2017). In More Anon I wanted there to be some sense of what persisted or developed over those years of my writing life. I also wanted to preserve the range each book offers: from some very short intense lyrics to some more essayistic poems to longer sustained work. In selecting the poems for this book, I fortunately didn’t feel like I was going back to a stranger. The book draws on 20 years of a writing life, and sure, you go back with some distance and maybe a slightly different, more dispassionate eye, but I was glad that I didn’t feel estranged or remote from my earlier work. It felt of a piece, even if in some cases I wouldn’t write the same poem now. (Would one ever write precisely the same poem twice? Again?) That was interesting to discover, because it’s not like I sit around rereading my books. [Laughs.] Usually when I give readings, I tend to read from recent work. So it was interesting to go back to the beginning, as it were, and to think about how to shape a book that was alive and not a doorstopper. I mean, this isn’t a collected work: I’m not dead! [Laughs.] And hopefully, too, as the title More Anon suggests, the book welcomes new readers, and points to a horizon of ongoing writing and engagement. I hoped the book might offer something fresh and inviting to people who don’t know my work, and something fresh too to those who might be familiar with my poetry. AD:  I have Jim Harrison: Complete Poems, which just came out and that’s a massive project where, when you’re dead, someone else can put it together. [Laughs.] MM:  Exactly! [laughs] I mean, there are some wonderful poets who later in life have done that—and thankfully they are still with us and writing beautiful work. Louise Glück had a collected some years ago that was excellent, and now she’s writing some amazing new work. Fred Seidel had a collected a few years ago. But that’s a very different kind of project and I am hopefully decades away from that! AD:  So why did you decide on this format and not a new and selected volume? MM:  Some of those books are really wonderful and I enjoy reading them. For example, Toi Derricote’s I: New and Selected: I really liked that. It offers a survey of her career, obviously, but also a launching pad for the new poems. A couple of years ago, I did a Selected with Penguin U.K., in the spirit of introducing my work to a British audience. This new book for FSG—More Anon—was a slightly different project, because my work already had a presence here in the U.S., and this gave me another and different opportunity to distill the work, and maybe reintroduce it. My last book of poems, Some Say, was published in 2017; I had submitted that manuscript in 2015 alongside Mz N: the serial, and since 2015 I had been doing other kinds of writing, while also writing poems in several different keys. I felt like I didn’t want to include, say, 10 or 12 poems as the “new poems.” I felt I had another kind of manuscript emerging, and that More Anon would be a chance to take stock, to winnow and then frame poems a bit differently—not to introduce wholly new work. Another reason why I called the book More Anon is that, touch wood, there will be more from me anon. [Laughs.] Hopefully not too long from now. So, I didn’t want to dilute what was slowly distilling. Maybe that was stupid, I don’t know. For good or ill, I don’t tend to think about things in terms of “marketing.” I try to follow what feels formally and compositionally true to that moment in my writing life. Jonathan Galassi, my editor, was very on board with that, too—making it a selected, straight up. AD:  You’re very consciously framing the book and the work with four quotations to open the book, and opening and closing the book with an envoi and envoi eclipse. I loved the envoi, which ends “make her regret everything about her life / that doesn’t include me”. Isn’t that what we all hope for? [Laughs.] MM:  [Laughs.] These micro decisions carry a lot of weight. All of my books have envois—a kind of gesture sending the book out to the world. I realized that I did not want envois ending the sections from each book; I wanted there to be a sense of a new and  broader unified arc. So I begin and end the book with an envoi. In terms of epigraphs, I undertook a similar kind of selecting—choosing to sound a few notes for the whole collection. One can think about this almost musically: here’s an overture with little provocations and motifs, little sparks that hopefully will fuel a slow burn—or a poetic conflagration! AD:  The quotations you include from H.D.—“Spare us from loveliness”—and Alice Notley—“Experience is a hoax”—are very intentional. MM:  [Laughs.] So much of this reflects a kind of both/and, neither/nor quality of my mind. H.D. is a poet who you could argue trafficked ostentatiously in loveliness, even if the content of her verse is often about erotic duress or unlovely conditions. One could say that this line is a bit rich coming from H.D., but it’s a wonderful line and a wonderful note to self—as well as a note to the reader. Ditto with the Notley. These lines grooved themselves on my mind. These meta-poetic moments became wonderful glosses on my experiences of reading and writing—Notley pressing hard on the idea that poetry is “about” “experience,” as if experience were some kind of unmediated obvious thing. I just love that Notley presents this as one gloss on her own work: it’s like, okay, let’s pay attention. [Laughs.] So yes, there’s an intentional spin these epigraphs want to introduce. They certainly have spun in my mind and they became a way of transferring that spin to the reader. AD:  You also have quotations from Malthus and Blake which push that framing in a more political direction. Which is related to notions of experience and loveliness, especially when we talk about queerness and about what it means to be a woman in the world. MM:  Definitely. And they point to other trajectories baked into this book—trajectories about modernity, America, prophecy, “identity,” “experience,” after-lives. And the Shelleyan question arises, “What is life?” And for whom? I think the Malthus quotation—“Life is, generally speaking, a blessing independent of a future state”—is highly arguable. All of these epigraphs are meant as goads, not simply as endorsements. They all have an edge, a torque to them, and I would think they would vibrate differently for different readers. AD:  I also kept thinking of the Malthus quotation in relation to the Notley quotation. From the Buddhist perspective, there is only the present, the past and future are illusions. MM:  That’s wonderful. Of course Malthus was an Anglican pastor, so he was deeply not a Buddhist, but it is a really interesting philosophical claim he’s making in his famous or infamous essay on the principle of population. Which is an amazing and crazy and still influential document. But also one thinks of Keats—as he wrote in an 1817 letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey, “O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”  On the one hand, Keats is longing for such a life, but he’s got this existential unavoidable predicament of living via sensation and thought—“where but to think is to be full of sorrow,” as he writes in the Nightingale Ode. I love that the Malthus and the Notley did a two-step for you. [Laughs.] AD:  As part of going through all the books and selecting representative work in different ways, I kept thinking about how in all your books, you’re not a poet who has a single tone or approach. There’s a way in which you’re playfully looking for an approach in a similar way you’re trying to playfully look at the world. This book tries to represent that. MM:  That seems to me really on target. For me, certain approaches or tones or phrases tend to determine the path of the poem. A poem like “Excursion Susan Sontag” goes immediately into a kind of strongly voiced mock-professorial key—“Now Susan Sontag was famous / among certain people”—and it’s almost like you’re riding on a different bike or driving a different car, compared to other poems. I have tended to pursue this multiplicity of tones and modes in every book. Some books might be more in a certain key, but certainly my first book Same Life had a real diversity of approaches. I personally don’t see that as a haphazard eclecticism, I see that as almost an effect of sensibility, as you’re suggesting. It’s not the case that I can’t imagine writing a book or ultimately publishing something that is all in one key. I met a poet some years ago and they were surprised because, having read some of my work, they thought I was going to be very grim and dour. [Laughs.] I remember another poet said to me after a reading, I didn’t realize your poems were so funny. I didn’t know what to make of that. [Laughs.] It’s a funny thing how tone reads to people and how a multiplicity of tones reads. I talk about this a lot with students because I can think of many wonderful books in a profoundly unitary key, or with a common approach throughout—some of Glück’s books, for example, or, to go in a very different direction, David Kirby’s, can be like that. Or think of Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, or Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets. Or Donna Stonecipher’s amazing books. Or consider a poet like H.D. Obviously I feel like there are a lot of instruments to play on, and some people like to play on many and some like to play on one.  I see that this analogy is breaking down pretty quickly, because you can play in a lot of keys or modes on some instruments, if not all. But anyway, it’s also the case that Mz N and Some Say were written during the same period, sort of dividing up the poetic universe in my mind. Some Say is in a focused lyric key, while Mz N tracks an actual character, in looser, more expansive poems, some of which move into essayistic or narrative territory. This was the way I found myself channeling different tendencies in those two books. We’ll see what happens in the future. I have found myself writing more prose poems, which is interesting and a little surprising to me. AD:  From your first books with poems like “Mz N” and "Saratoga August,” you were interested in longer narrative poems. MM:  That’s one of the reasons I included “Saratoga August” in More Anon—it’s a multi-part poem which does have story in it, narrative elements, alongside lyric and song: these modalities are not mutually exclusive. At least for me or in me, whether as a reader or a writer. So yes, I think that that’s 100 percent right. In the early 2010s I was writing My Poets, a poeticritical memoir, and that shifted some internal gears. I realized I wanted to do more within poetry “proper” in that essayistic, autobiographical/autofictional key. I found myself going back to the Mz N figure, which I hadn’t expected to do at all. That was a surprise to me. So from this vantage I can see how different kinds of writing opened doors for other kinds of work. At a certain point I’ll likely be able to look back and say, here I came to the end of the line with such and such a thing. I don’t yet know what or when that will be, but certainly one doesn’t want to be repetitive. I haven’t been a poet who’s operated much from a principle of will or decision or program in the sense of: “Now I shall do X,” or “Here is my project book.” Though I suppose we could call Mz N: the serial that. I admire some writers who do proceed that way—Donna Stonecipher, MC Hyland, Cathy Park Hong, Srikanth Reddy, Edgar Garcia—but that’s just not the way I’ve tended to go. I’m usually responding to certain things in the environment, whether it’s ambient stuff or political things or my internal environment. I keep notebooks that are full of jottings and I’ll look back and start to see threads, but I tend to see these threads only later. And out of that gets woven a manuscript. AD:  Someone asked me to describe your work and I half-joked that you’re a very philosophical poet and you also write about sex, not as a series of metaphors using SAT words. MM:  That’s a wonderful compliment. Thank you. [Laughs.] AD:  I mean that as a compliment, but you also know exactly what I mean. MM:  I do. I really do. And we don’t need to name any names. [Laughs.] AD:  Just as you enjoy playing with style and approach, and I think this was clear from the beginning of your published work, you want to write about life and experience and what that means in ways that don’t always get addressed in poetry. MM:  That’s true and that leads you into different places. Some poems zoom in intently on the erotic. Some poems focus intently on registering a soundscape or landscape. Or some poems want to be looser, baggier things that pivot among politics, weather, erotics, story. So much is inflected by things I’ve read and heard and admired—and not necessarily in poetry, it might be in essays or fiction or music: works that are capacious, that allow for intensity but also expansiveness of concern, attention, scope. I want to honor all those registers. AD:  I don’t know what the queer poetic tradition is, to the extent that there is one, but part of queer writing is about trying to encompass many things and address it and look at it and not hide essential things behind metaphor or being an aesthete. MM:  It’s important that there are many queer genealogies and paths available now, more than there might have been 30 or even 15 years ago. Certainly the emergence of an identifiable queer literary and theoretical tradition opened up a lot for me and many others. Anything from Virginia Woolf to H.D. to Gertrude Stein to Eileen Myles to Frank O’Hara to James Schuyler to Audre Lorde. I remember reading Olga Broumas and Adrienne Rich early on. Foucault’s writing. Eve Sedgwick’s. This is all very ‘90s, a crucial decade for me. Critical theory was a lifeline for me and also a kind of horizon. This was about sexuality, sure, but also more broadly about what constituted my sense of the given, and testing and sounding that out. Not having the luxury of certain assumptions. Or not wanting that luxury. Or not being able to sit with that. So in terms of a “queer poetic tradition,” there was and is for me a socio-psycho-sexual domain and also a stylistic dimension, questions of formalization and style and experiment carried by literature, art, thought: and this has been galvanizing and inspiring. All of this gets reimagined by new and emerging writers, in many languages. The horizon of what queer traditions were circa 1995 versus 2022 is very different, in part because of all the thinking and writing and protesting and grief and tragedy and solidarity and transformation that the past 60 years have wrought in the U.S., but also internationally. I was saying recently to a friend that before I had any conscious affiliation with “queerness,” I was responding to writers who I later realized or discovered were queer. It is endlessly interesting to see how your unconscious knows more than you do. There were many reasons I was particularly oriented, so to speak, to H.D. and Stein and Virginia Woolf. Also to writers whom I liked couldn’t quite “get,” like Frank O’Hara. As a teenager and in my early 20s I had a very idealized sense of a poem and of poetry, but part of me also had a strong critical debunking impulse, too. Or rather, a critical, analytic impulse. When I was struggling and searching and flailing in my 20s (and beyond!), I found some really good avenues for thinking—if not yet solutions for living—via queer and gender studies. Also via Enlightenment and Romantic-era thought. And I drew on the poets and writers who were vibrating in my mind. AD:  As you were talking I couldn’t help but think of My Poets, which is a work of criticism and I don’t want to say that it’s not consciously a memoir because you were very conscious of what you were doing, but you weren’t just saying, here are poets I like. MM:  Exactly! I understood My Poets to be a kind of memoir via a reading life, which in my cases was always feeding back into sexual, erotic, intellectual trajectories. These, for me, are very enmeshed. For other people, eros might be enmeshed with film or music or sports, but for me, these poetic encounters were generative. Marianne Moore has a line in her poem “Picking and Choosing,” “literature is a phase of life.” Which might suggest you outgrow it, but that is not, I think, her point. I think My Poets was testing that out: the relation between literature and life-phase. A chapter like “My Elizabeth Bishop/My Gertrude Stein” offered a way to talk about those writers and their work, but also to talk about gender and sexuality and sexed writing. The book aimed to explore the interpenetration of reading and living. AD:  Before we ever spoke I remember coming across My Poets and trying to write a different kind of criticism, which doesn’t always show its work. Which isn’t quite what I mean, but you found a different way into talking about the poetry that spoke to the relationship a lot of us have to literature. MM:  Thank you. I remember that at some point I read Edmund White’s My Lives, which had chapters like “My Hustlers,” “My Friends,” etc.  I was attracted to this way of grouping things, to this alternate way of writing memoir via relationality. In My Poets, the chapter rubrics invoking specific poets (“My Chaucer,” “My Shelley,” “My Fanny Howe”) opened onto other matters too—questions of marriage and erotics and religion and reading itself and being a student. I didn’t go, oh, now I shall hybridize criticism. [Laughs.] I have done a lot of normative critical writing, but by the mid-2000s I was moving towards another key. My Poets was really fun and also hugely challenging to write; there was certainly no one saying, okay, give us 5,000 words on H.D. AD:  To circle back to the beginning, and the title, which says that there’s more to come, more soon, I know you’ve done a lot of scholarly work on ballads and minstrels and these works which have come down to us anonymously. We don’t know who made them or when, we have vague notions of traditions, and I kept thinking of Mz N, which is a series of poems about someone not unlike you, shall we say? MM:  That’s a lovely way to phrase it. AD:  Your name is on the book, obviously, but here are a lot of poems and a lot of different kinds of poems and the title is telling the reader, just go with it. MM:  You really hit a bunch of nails on their exact heads. After hovering among titles, I went with More Anon, because it ramifies in all these different directions you point out—and also “more anon” suggests “more to come,” and also raises the question, or possibility, of “more anonymity.” That is a thing that I’ve been long interested in. We’re all really preoccupied by our individuality. Or most of us. Certainly I can be! [Laughs.] You can’t help being a person. And then there is your ego and investment in your work, but also you know—or get reminded—that in the longer flow of time, all this is contingent and provisional and erasable. I have for a long time been interested in anonymity and poetry, in ballad traditions in particular. English and Scottish ballads usually entered into print—via broadsides, or anthologies, or other books—without authors. Some so-called traditionary ballads were circulating for decades or centuries, and one reason they survived is that they were so beautifully distilled or memorable that enough people wanted to keep singing or reading them. It’s useful to think about a poetic economy and vitality that’s circulating that way as opposed to the commodity-form of the author and the book. It’s a useful reminder, too. I think it was the poet Devin Johnston who reminded me that Thom Gunn said he wanted to write with the same anonymity you get in the Elizabethans. I’m sure that’s a paradoxical kind of commitment, and a beautiful aspiration. For me, the Mz N figure  was an enabling device allowing me to do all kinds of things with the figure of autobiography but also to write in a more narrative or dramatic way. “Mz N” points as well to the question of pseudonymity and to “n” as an anonymous or unknown variable. I think of Rimbaud, “Je est un autre” (“I is another” or “I is someone else”). I respond to that non-alignment or self-estrangement, which is certainly a profound experience for me and I think for many people. [Laughs.] I’m enough of an old-school psychoanalytically oriented person that I feel like we’re not in charge of that self-estrangement or non-alignment. That’s our given condition as humans. I always think of a line from the geneticist Richard Dawkins, that a chicken is just an egg’s way of making another egg. From poetry’s point of view, a poet is simply poetry’s way of making more poetry. If you’re a poet, of course you will likely or even necessarily experience an intense personal engagement or sense of vocation, but from the perspective of poetry out in the world, you’re just a medium for generating more poetry out in the world. [Laughs.] Maybe the Buddhist ambition—if such a paradox can be held—would be to aim to write poems that travelled widely and not under anyone’s name. I mean, you called me up to interview me, which is lovely, but think of somebody like Robert Burns. He published a book under his own name but he also became a prominent song collector in late 18th century Scotland. When these songs were published by the editor/impresario James Johnson, it was in a multi-volume collection of Scottish songs called The Scots Musical Museum. There were 600 songs published over several years, and at first Burns’s name was nowhere, though he’d contributed or set the words for some 200 songs. Once Burns got famous, the editor wanted to be sure to attribute certain song texts to Burns; hello cultural capital! But Burns was by then dead. RIP Burns! He’s a fascinating example in poetic and musical history: somebody who was a prominent author but also an incredibly important song collector. And his legacy toggles between “Robert Burns,” this supersaturated cultural figure with a proper name, and anonymity—someone who set the words to songs many know, like “Auld Lang Syne,” though few know he was the poet there. This bears on many other traditions too, not least the history of Black song in the Americas, and all kinds of so-called oral traditions. AD:  You're also in The FSG Poetry Anthology, which is an incredible book, and maybe especially in the context of the last question, how do you think your two poems in the book read in the context of this broad illustrious company, and just being read as part of this book which is a selection of postwar poetry? MM:  Isn’t it a great book? If it’s not cheesy to agree. I found it really surprising—lots of discoveries, not least from poets I thought I knew (e.g. Bishop, Heaney, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Katie Peterson, Devin Johnston, August Kleinzahler). The book sets up new resonances and reverb; obviously it’s an honor to be in it, and its establishing of a longer and international reverb is inspiring, as is the longstanding commitment to poetries in translation. How my poems might read in this context: well, that’s probably for others to say—but it is striking to see poems organized by decades. One of my poems appears in the 2000s section, while another appears in the 2010s. I told the editors that I hoped to be one of the poets of the 2020s!  But seeing things this way, you get a slightly different feel for generationality, and also there’s a nice push I think against monumentality: some big monuments are clearly represented (Heaney, Walcott, Bishop, Lowell, Neruda), but not as monuments, rather as poets among a company of poets; and one also encounters poets less hyper-canonical, like Louise Bogan. And to see the array of poets gathered in the past 20 years shows new lines of poetic and cultural force, I think—in the work of the poets I mentioned above, or in, for example, Shane McCrae’s work, or Iman Mersal’s poetry, translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell. It’s interesting; I hadn’t thought of the book as a post-war book until you said so. I guess I also feel that “postwar” might be a kind of historical artifact; it feels very 20th century, very Cold War, and that might be an accurate and striking way to think about a good swath of the anthology. And the historical sweep of FSG’s poetry publishing. AD:  It’s interesting to read all these poets—the ones I know and those I don't—and see them in conversation because of how they're grouped together. Demarcations like when FSG started or even the decades are somewhat arbitrary and vague. When did "the sixties" end and begin, for example? But out of such randomness, relationships emerge. Your editor asked for a selected volume, so you assembled one. Decades from now, will it feel like a natural demarcation or a random one? Who knows? But it's a nice collection of poems. MM:  Your thoughts make me think of a hilarious essay by Kay Ryan from some years ago, “I Go to AWP,” in which she casts a gimlet eye on project books, books with “arcs,” all those requirements (and sometimes impositions) of conceptual structure and organization. I suspect “a nice collection of poems” would be a fine gloss on things, in her view. And yes, modes of grouping can be arbitrary or vague, but they can also be enabling, at least sometimes, right? As for my selected, well, as you say, who knows how it will feel decades from now. But I can tell that even now it feels, for me, like a useful, and certainly not random, demarcation. The chance to make More Anon was an occasion for reckoning and taking stock, while allowing me to feel out the intimations of further, as well as returning, commitments as a writer. I’m hoping some of those glimmerings will take worldly form in some collaborative projects and in a forthcoming book, What You Want: we’ll see—more anon! [millions_email]