From my interview with Danez Smith about their curation of the early works of Langston Hughes for the anthology Blues in Stereo:

David Woo: Your poetry books display a complex pride, urgency, and despair in your experience of race. In Bluff, you say, “i want to be over with race / but race ain’t over me.” And in your first book, “[insert] boy,” you wrote, “If race is over, did we lose?” What is striking about Blues in Stereo is how healing Hughes’ love of Black people feels to those of us who feel despair over 21st-century oppressions. Can you talk about Hughes’ vision of race and how it relates to your experience today?

Danex Smith: For me, Hughes’ vision of race, country, and community is not one without despair, but despair never swallows what is joyful and possible, and in turn that joy and beauty never erase what is ugly and true. I wanted to center Blues in Stereo on how much Hughes loved Black people. When I read his work, I feel him wanting me to feel beautiful, strong, redeemed, believed, and safe — safe enough to admit I’m weary and worried, too. I feel that same tie in my own work. What is raging, pissed, despairing, exhausted, grieving, or vengeful all leads back to love, how to love the race; the people. When Black adults want to teach Black kids how and why to love themselves, they will reach for art, and when they reach for poems, it is very possible you might get a Hughes poem when you are being taught to see and love Blackness. I think of what the great Evie Shockley (who I hope is being read by Black kids learning to love themselves 100 years from now) said in her “ode to my blackness:”

you are my shelter from the storm
and the storm
my anchor
and the troubled sea

And I think that balance is something all Black poets who write about Blackness contend with; how to tell of the anchor, how to tell also of the troubled sea, how to survive the storm and be the storm. Hughes knew how to do it all. I know Hughes believed in revolution and, as healing and beautiful as he wanted his poems to be for us, he also wanted to arm us with the wisdom, hope, and power to fightfor a liberation yet to arrive.

I look back on the year in poetry by selecting two favorite reviews for each of the monthly review columns that my colleague Rebecca Morgan Frank and I wrote during the course of the year. I also review Kwame Dawes’s Sturge Town, Farnoosh Fathi’s Granny Cloud, Melissa Kwasny’s The Cloud Path, Halyna Kruk’s Lost in Living, Paul Muldoon’s Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, Laura Newbern’s A Night in the Country, and Ryan Ruby’s Context Collapse.

Here’s my review of Kwame Dawes’s Sturge Town:

Sturge Town bestows the continuing gift of Kwame Dawes’s extraordinary eloquence to re-center Anglophone poetry in a place of moral equipoise, the sonorous counter-song radiating from the post-slavery, post-colonial lands of the Caribbean and Africa.

Divided into sections each titled with phrases about light, this collection named after the poet’s family village, one of the first Jamaican towns created for freed slaves, contemplates the paradox of a worldly radiance enhanced with the darker shades of human meaning, “the white light that consumes / shadows, that turns this body / of riverbed brown into something / transparent like an ochre- /colored piece of cotton flapping / in the air.”

The voice exemplifies an ideal of gravitas, forthright and equitable in the deployment of its emphases, intimate yet crafted in the weight and swing of its cadences. “I am the author of my shame, / the wounded and the worried,” he writes, of the need for prayer, “and I close / my eyes to push away the darting lights / speeding toward my center.”

With the voice widening from his center to assume the music of others, a “Mammy,” a father, an alter ego named Robert Johnson, Dawes crosshatches the world in the illuminated shadows of Sturge Town, extending the ochre transparency of the Jamaican and Ghanaian landscapes of his past across the midwestern prairies and English cities of his present. “By three o’clock the walls are strained with shadows, / these colonial walls that we have kept, despite the revolution / and the new dialect of independence, kept for their history.”

(From the cover of Paul Muldoon’s Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, Farrar Straus Giroux.)

I reviewed seven poetry collections at Literary Hub, including Jennifer Chang’s An Authentic Life, Janice N. Harrington’s Yard Show, Matthew Hollis’ Earth House, Idra Novey’s Soon and Wholly, Jimin Seo’s Ossia, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s Purchase, and Jordan Windholz’s The Sisters. Here is my review of Harrington’s Yard Show:

In Janice N. Harrington’s magnificent fourth collection, the Great Migration was “disruption, / or pattern recognition, jump down turn around,” and the patterns that the migrants recognized in their new homes relied on the risk-taking attention that “makes belonging, makes place.” At their midwestern destinations, this sense of belonging often manifested itself in the “yard show,” where the decorative bric-a-brac of everyday life, “plaster ducks and plastic hens,” “wrought-iron filigree and sconces,” turned the spaces around a house into a form of personal expression.

Through these decorations, those who escaped the Jim Crow South created extravagant paeans to their newfound sense of home and liberty, “Black Versailles, Black baroque: ado, outdo, / and overdone.” With vigilant detailing and historical discernment, Harrington uncovers the “genius loci, hierophany, sanctum” in these Illinois homes and landscapes, refusing the superficial urge to see the yard show as merely kitschy or déclassé.

She searches for a way of “retelling / the stories that streets tell,” where broken things are “redeemed, reused, repurposed, / nothing abandoned,” and turned into something of personal and symbolic importance: “This Black woman— / pleasing no one but herself.”

Harrington’s style possesses a spiritually centered equilibrium—neither too spare nor convoluted, too outraged nor recessive—that becomes a beautifully artful version of prayerful yet disillusioned attention. Gazing on the prairie, she sees a vision of her and her progenitors’ place within it (“all the darkened progenies of grass / that reach and strive and shape dissent from light”), while in a domestic scene from childhood, she motions to an even larger compass, of Eve and the original sins within human nature, where love is like “the slow art of apple peeling—requiring attention, a sharp edge, a wound, a revelation, and a falling away.”

Detail from the cover of Jordan Windholz’s The Sisters (Black Ocean Press).

My piece in On the Seawall about Kim Hyesoon’s National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Phantom Pain Wings, translated by Don Mee Choi, begins as follows:

“Picture a bird in your mind,” Kim Hyesoon writes. “What kind of bird is it?” One American poet might imagine a blackbird (“A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one”), while another might observe a sandpiper (“His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied”). Here is a section of Kim’s poem called “Owl”:

A woman who’s lost in the woods meets a male owl.

The woman asks,

Do you know where my mommy went?

The owl answers,

How would I know your mommy? Why do women always lose their way in

            the woods? Why do women think that animals can speak?

The owl rips open the skin of her face and gnaws her eyeballs.

The eyeless woman becomes an owl.

She becomes a female owl perched on a female tree.

To read Kim’s Phantom Pain Wings is to enter a parallel world in which the agonies of a rigidly gendered society are exteriorized and animated, stripped of polite-society decorum, transformed into a faintly ridiculous yet vicious parable of talking animals, such as a sadistic, mansplaining owl, and interiorized again as a stationary figure, violated and sightless, “a female owl perched on a female tree,” the aggrieved inversion of Minerva’s owl of wisdom and night vision.

Encountering Kim’s work in the powerful translations from the Korean by the poet Don Mee Choi (seven of Kim’s collections so far, plus chapbooks and anthologies of poems and essays) is to be unnerved by the force of their strangeness. With each book I find myself trying to assimilate Kim’s difference, mulling over her poetic strategies and riffling through various critical formulations of uncanniness and originality that I’ve encountered, like Shklovsky’s “defamiliarization” or “making strange,” Brecht’s “alienation effects,” Blanchot’s “l’étrangeté commune,” and Harold Bloom’s literary strangeness as a “mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange.” What does it mean to say that Kim’s poetry feels harrowingly strange and original?

For the rest of the essay, go to On the Seawall here.

(Photo of Kim Hyesoon via On the Seawall and Guernica.)

At Literary Hub, I reviewed Rae Armantrout’s Go Figure, Daniel Borzutzky’s The Murmuring Grief of the Americas, Andrea Cohen’s The Sorrow Apartments, Jason Koo’s No Rest, Nam Le’s 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, Carl Phillips’s Scattered Snows, to the North, and Danez Smith’s Blunt.

Here is my review of Phillips’s book:

Carl Phillips, Scattered Snows, to the North

In Carl Phillips’s ravishing new collection, the elegiacal vision, still haunted by an erotics of loss (“I’ve forgotten /entirely what it felt like to enter his body / or to be entered by his”), has become enraptured with belatedness, “those afternoons whose / diminished music we’ll soon enough / lie down in.” The lateness isn’t the sign of a life in its dotage but the work of an intelligence grinding through the repeated exigencies of its own conflagrations, “the mind done with signaling, letting its watch fires, one by one, / go out: the renegade glamour of late fall.”

The poetry here arrives at the other side of the fires, in sinuous complexes of metaphor that revive experiences through the glamour, renegade, melancholy, of their ruins. Phillips speaks gorgeously of how, with age, the “mind’s high watchtowers” still remain “under guard against siege by barbarians,” then switches the image to the “light reflected off / the blade of a knife” from a disembodied, gloved hand.

The glove, it becomes clear, enshrouds a master poet’s hand, and the knife edge harbors many entrancing reflections: how the brokenness of a lover’s face is like “a Paleolithic fragment of a reindeer antler decorated / with an image of a horse” or how the last portion of a life requires a wise, if elliptical serenity to avert the blinding glare of self-recognition: “I could see my face, / tilted there, like a solar eclipse viewed indirectly, which / is the proper way, in a basin of water.”

Detail from the cover of Scattered Snows, to the North. (Farrar Straus Giroux)

Reviews of poetry books at Literary Hub: Saba Keramati, Justin Rovillos Monson, Chris Nealon, Robert Pinsky, Donald Revell, Tayi Tibble, Heather Treseler.

Here is my review of Robert Pinsky’s Proverbs of Limbo:

If we’re lucky and enduringly brilliant and born in 1940, we may find ourselves approaching the making of poetry with what I imagine to be the enlightened qualities that generated such longevity in the first place. We may focus less on the mind-expanding provocations of Blakean “proverbs of hell” than on richly ambivalent apothegms, morally textured and attuned to the tenuous distinctions of the world, perched somewhere between “the flames of Righteousness / And the pits of Euphemism.”

We’d know that a Seinfeld reference might feel incongruous because maybe we “live more in the fifties than the nineties,” but we’d balance our summoning of the passing slurs that a person of any identity can’t forget (Henry James likening immigrant Jews to “snakes”) or of the lost friends from our youth, like the poet Henry Dumas, “shot dead by a transit cop” in 1968, with the dynamic scope that age and wisdom can afford, “the crowd of names all stranded alive, /Ashore, outwaiting my shadowy boat.”

Such scope is beautifully realized in the poem “Soul Making,” which zooms outward to the “galactic broth” that “brews the first suns” and then inward to the “microscopic animals, flexing / Bizarre mandibles, that patrol my eyelids / And guts.” Wielding a colloquial line that acts as a delicate, sonic zoom to the eloquent pentameters of poetic tradition, like those of Hardy and Donne, Pinsky arrives at an unforced and moving connection between himself and those eyelash mites: “Darkling I too perform the turns and bits / Of my assigned proportions.”

One of the achievements of Robert Pinsky’s work has always been the way in which he balances a realistic and therefore fateful sense of life with a vivacity of expression that reflects his unabashed pleasure in the vagaries of human nature, a sense of moral and aesthetic proportion that Proverbs of Limbo splendidly exemplifies.

(Book cover, Farrar Straus Giroux.)

My roundup of recommended poetry books for April: Victoria Chang, Daniel Khalastchi, Sylvia Legris, Joyelle McSweeney, Emilia Phillips, Corey Van Landingham, and C. K. Williams. Here is my review of McSweeney’s Death Styles:

If to style—from stilus, a stake or pale, pointed instrument for writing (OED)—is to impale a thought with one’s pen, Joyelle McSweeney’s new book styles the aftermath of an infant daughter’s death as anguished, living consciousness pinned and vivisected, still squirming, onto the pages of an outré thought diary: “a periphery perforated by / absurdity and calamity / like funeral games performed for a slain infant,” she says, alluding to Euripides.

Accepting whatever inspiration presents itself to her “as an artifact of the present tense”—River Phoenix, Medea, the new Perry Mason, a skunk—she evokes what it means to “live in that / microregime which / pulls the watchface / all around itself.” “[T]he watchface is blank,” she warns, “the style / points exactly to itself.”

This mode of mirrored consciousness, from Bernadette Mayer to Emily Dickinson to the fragments of the pre-Socratics, depends on the self being pointed to, its artful intensities, the pointedness of any longueurs. In Death Styles,style may be, like the progression of a life, something narrow and transitory, what Schopenhauer termed “the physiognomy of the mind,” the flickers of an expressive face suggesting a vaster interiority: the permanent tear in a surviving mother’s eye (“from minima to minima / the ain’t of you”), the morbid yet healing grin (a pun on croque monsieur, croaking, and the smashed egg of a new life), the frail gaze ahead: “lucid, illicit / dust rides a motebeam / down to nothing where nothing / lifts its white sheet / to catch the image like a baby soon.”

(From book cover art for Sylvia Legris’ The Principle of Rapid Peering, New Directions Publishing, via Literary Hub.)

For Literary Hub I reviewed seven new poetry books: Sarah Ghazal Ali’s Theophanies, Tracy Fuad’s Portal, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson’s Watchnight, Dorianne Laux’s Life on Earth, Gregory Pardlo’s Spectral Evidence, Abigail Parry’s I Think We’re Alone Now, and Katie Peterson’s Fog and Smoke.

Here is my review of Tracy Fuad’s Portal (University of Chicago Press):

“I generated faces of people that didn’t exist,” Tracy Fuad writes, “and found that I already loved them.” The one beloved person that the speaker generates, like the wormlike figure of a sonogram, is her soon-to-be-born baby, and the “portal” of the title is both birth itself and the liminal spaces where true meaning is born: in the roots of words (“Worm, from the hypothetical root wer-, to turn, to bend”), in the accidental things of this world (the roses of Cape Cod arriving from a shipwreck), in the linguistic otherness of an Anglophone visitor to Berlin, and in the existential doubt that one must undergo (“the seeds of a nihilism with which I was once well acquainted”) to attain sense and value.

The method is often propulsive but blithely concatenated and sometimes uproariously amusing, as in the poem “Business,” which moves from a grandfather’s garbage company, American Refuse Systems (ARS), to the fact that “arse” was “once considered a polite term for buttocks” to a view of Neanderthals in the Neander Valley. That the reader imagines Fuad telling these stories to her future child inclines the book from the familiar intellectual atrophy of our era (“I could barely think / if I couldn’t also Google”) to the vaster, sacral perceptions she finds, at last, in the birth portal itself: “And the unbowing was there. / And the ecstatic, a humming. / And a great sorrow was there.”

(Photo illustration from the cover of Dorianne Laux’s Life on Earth, W. W. Norton, via Literary Hub.)

At Literary Hub, Rebecca Morgan Frank and I wrote an overview of forthcoming books, including reviews and previews. I wrote about Anne Carson’s Wrong Norma, Cindy Juyoung Ok’s Ward Toward, Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s Silver, Diane Seuss’s Modern Poetry, Reginald Shepherd’s The Selected Shepherd, Danez Smith’s Bluff, and Arthur Sze’s translation of Chinese poetry, The Silk Dragon II. The piece can be found here.

Here is my interpretation of Phillips’s Silver:

“Poetry is séance and silence and science,” Rowan Ricardo Phillips writes in Silver, his fourth collection. The seance summons a presiding spirit of this collection, the Wallace Stevens of the late-Romantic meditative eloquence (the lights at Key West that “mastered the night and portioned out the sea”). The silence is that of a place in the woods away from the pandemic where the speaker goes to cull “from those cold mountaintops the next fire.” The silence is that of a grandmother dying on the cusp of the pandemic. The science is the prosody of air and metal that lifts a silver plane with its silver contrail above the woods and the silver of the rental car to which the speaker rushes to avoid an expired parking meter, also silver, as the grandmother expires. “And I will be nothing but poetry,” the speaker says in his mournful solitude, “A blank in the blankness of the long game.”

The poems are more forthright than Stevens, more directly autobiographical and socially equitable, but the dedication with which Phillips approaches the art of poetry is, like Stevens, tonic and inspiring. “To be bottomless, atemporal, absent of hierarchy, and just,” he enjoins in “Biographia Literaria. “To accept that poetry is older than reflex, that it predates intention, that it is the breath your breath takes before you breathe.” 

A round-up at Literary Hub of seven books by Jen Campbell, Nick Flynn, Ishion Hutchinson, Kelly Rowe, Timmy Straw, Tao Yuanming, and Tomas Tranströmer contains this encapsulation of Tranströmer’s oeuvre:

Tomas Tranströmer, The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer
(translated by Patty Crane)
(Copper Canyon Press)

“And now it’s happening,” Tomas Tranströmer wrote, “the fragments are ying together, the mosaic appears.” Across the fourteen volumes translated here, Tranströmer (1931-2015) assembled a poetic mosaic as various as a well-contemplated life could be and “atjust the right distance / from reality.” Known for compressed perceptions that capture numinous mysteries within the ranges of ordinary life (“The divine brushes up against a person and lights a flame / but then draws back. / Why?”), he found deceptively simple but brilliant ways to suggest the intersection of a grand natural order with the mundanely human, as when a walk in the “colorblind dark” conjures what the present feels like to a middle-aged person: “A time span / several minutes long /fifty-eight years wide.”

While some of his most beautiful poems explicate sad themes like the isolation of an ailing child (“After a Seizure”) and the bleak advent of a Swedish winter (“Winter’s Glance”), Tranströmer dismantled any Scandinavian stereotype of lugubrious alienation, finding the countervailing value within the despair (“You drank the darkness / and became visible”) or celebrating ordinary pleasures like espresso: “the black droplets of deep insight / sometimes intercepted by the soul.” Patty Crane’s beautifully judged translation fulfills the need for a version of Tranströmer in a current, American idiom. A must for the poetry lover’s library.

A round-up of seven new books by Adrienne Chung, Danielle Cadena Deulan, C. S. Giscombe, Shane McCrae, Diane Mehta, Romeo Oriogun, and Simon West begins in this way:

“Do not despise your inner world,” the philosopher Martha Nussbaum advises, recommending literature and the arts because they offer “a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world.” The many ways in which poets construct their inner worlds and emotional lives are on pleasurable display in this month’s poetry books.

Romeo Oriogun strips his eloquent verse of embellishment, as if the agony of exile has led him to a back-to-basics moral reckoning, since “only language can begin the restoration / of those pushed out of history.” Diane Mehta employs a heightened diction (“lovepromises,” “neighborhoodilogical malaise”) that arises from her desire to capture “so many angled ways of being.” Shane McCrae’s style is plainspoken yet fractured and allusive, reflecting a difficult inner voyage to meaning: “How far we travel now to be / In the now impossible    presence of things….”

Go to Literary Hub to see the reviews here.