Library Book Picks

Alice Oswald’s Memorial names itself a version, an excavation, of Homer’s Iliad. In her introduction, she advises the reader: “I write through the Greek, not from it—aiming for translucence rather than translation.” In this version of the Trojan War, Oswald beams light on and through the names of 200 men killed in the war. In the following lines some are granted lives: families, lovers, homes, qualities unrelated to the battlefield. Some are granted individual, particular deaths. Most remain only names preceded by the names of others and followed by the names of others.

Extended similes spread like water or clouds between the dead of Memorial. Each evokes scenes from the natural world, pastoral settings, and far-away homes—the familiar world startling and strange within the litany of violence and death. The nature of erasure, and the white space in the text, breaks apart the pair being compared. The reader learns what something is like, but not what that something is. Each “like” could be stitched to the description of the death preceding, but the word also points to what has been erased, to bright light of the chasm created by the white space, and what grows in the liminal spaces erasure creates.

In the introduction, Oswald, a classist and a poet, reminds us that “ancient critics praised [the Iliad’s] ‘enargeia,’ which means something like ‘bright unbearable beauty.’ It’s the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves.” Memorial wears Homer’s epic down to the unbearable, which the reader is asked to bear: the beauty of the world and the horror humans inflict on ourselves and each other. 

Like a man put a wand of olive in the earth
And watered it and that wand became a wave
It became a whip a spine a crown
It became a wind-dictionary
It could speak in tongues
It became a wobbling wagon-load of flowers
And then a storm came spinning by
And it became a broken tree uprooted
It became a wood pile in a lonely field

This book, made of letters, is a love letter itself. Not just from Sarah Ruhl to Max Ritvo, but to friendship itself. A true friend is a rare thing – not just someone whose company you enjoy, but someone who irrevocably changes your life for the better, who leaves their mark on your very soul. It is even more precious when two artists find each other in this way, as Sarah and Max did. They met when Sarah was Max’s student at Yale, but as any educator will know, our students frequently end up teaching us far more than we teach them (sometimes clichés are true for a reason), and Max was no exception. Over the next four years, the writing they inspired in one another is a true gift, one that we, the readers, are privileged enough to witness through their correspondence.

For example, from Max:

“Everything in my life, the fabric of my life itself, is dissolving. You are not. Maybe I am not? That’s what your letter meant to me.”

And from Sarah:

“Courage, I say, 
is you, 
Max.

In your wild suit
your small boat
and terrible forest 

a man overnight
no boy
could ever scale those walls.

You come home
and dinner is waiting,
still waiting I hope, still warm.”

Grief and loss touch so many aspects of their story, and Sarah does not shy away from that in her retelling. It is an unflinching portrayal of the deep injustice of death approaching when one’s life has barely begun, when there is still so much more to say. Max passed away after his battle with cancer when he was just twenty-five years old. There is no way to spin that as anything but what it was: a heartbreaking loss. But in all her work, Sarah has an immense ability to provide us with hope, even within the darkest of moments, and with truth. This is not a sentimental tear-jerker of an illness narrative. It is honest. It is real. We see Max’s humor, his passion, his talent, and the joy he brought to everyone he met shine through the pages of this book. He did not waste one second of his (to borrow another poet’s turn of phrase) one wild and precious life, creating a truly exceptional body of work to leave the world before he left it far too soon. And now Sarah has given us yet another gift: Max’s memory becomes a living, breathing thing in her new play adaptation of Letters From Max, which the Poetry Foundation has the great privilege of presenting to the public later this month, following its off-Broadway premiere in 2023.

I could go on and on about my love for this beautiful book and my excitement for its new incarnation, but instead, I’ll leave you with a beloved quote from Sarah’s poem, “Lunch with Max on the Upper East Side,” which first appeared in Letters From Max and was later published in her debut poetry collection, 44 Poems for You (Copper Canyon Press, 2020):

“Max is a poet.
Max is a poem.
We all become poems
in the end.”

A reading of Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of Letters from Max will be performed at the Poetry Foundation at 2:00 PM CDT on June 29th, 2024. More details and registration information for this event can be found here.

In March my father passed away, and I understood something that I had previously known, but more shallowly: among its other uses, poetry is a container for grief. In Economy of the Unlost, the poet and scholar Anne Carson examines the ways two poets from vastly different eras and cultures invented new poetic forms for grieving. Born in Greece in 556 B.C., Simonides of Keos was a lyric poet known for his elegies and epigrams. Paul Celan was a Romanian Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor who wrote poems in German, the language of his parents’ murderers. Carson has placed these writers “side by side in a conversation and yet no conversation takes place. With and against, aligned and adverse, each is placed like a surface in which the other may come into focus.” Carson lays a careful trail for the reader, guiding them through the particulars of the circumstances in which each poet was writing. Simonides, the first poet to craft verse for inscription on gravestones, employs a radical concision dictated by economy. Celan, writing in a language whose meaning had been perverted by atrocity, reshapes and excavates words in order to salvage their value. Holding both poets to each other’s light, Carson offers the reader a deeper understanding of one of poetry’s central impulses: to bear that which is unbearable, which all will bear.

In honor of National Poetry Month, month of cold new blooms in the Northern Hemisphere where I read and write, I present a bouquet of lines from Girls That Never Die by Safia Elhillo (page numbers noted below):

My mother is almost my mother now, 

That night, metal of the fire escape against my bare legs, I accepted 

the girl who became my grandmother          brows & body rounded & cursive like arabic 

Because I am their daughter my body is not mine. 

the ocean froths over my thighs 

 

                                              who hurt you            who hurt you

 

my languages             my ligatures  smoke in my loosened hair 

i place inside me figs & nectarines, gnarled tomatoes 

The blood comes & comes 

imagining a girl          imagine nothing is done to her 

& become a hazard, meaning danger but also meaning 

i formed a body to be left behind 

i wear the dead girl’s clothes 

i misplace my homeland    mispronounce my mother 

what small freedoms could I exchange for my name for my Name 

& the minutes pass & the girl is untouched 

Page numbers, in order of appearance: 4, 8, 13, 21, 23, 27, 41, 51, 64, 67, 75, 91, 93, 95, 105, 113

March 7th, 2024, will mark five months of a brutal war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and other occupied Palestinian territories. As I cope with countless images, narratives, and news of this war, I mostly think of the human cost of the seventy-five year Israeli occupation of Palestine. Who do I trust most with the documentation of these years? Who do I turn to in order to better understand the history? As with most of my personal learning, I turn to poets and artists to give me the most accurately human description of what it must be like to live under these conditions.

A Blade of Grass: New Palestinian Poetry is an anthology I turn to and visit with often. Published in 2017, the volume does not include work that touches on current events. However, it gives space to the work of Palestinian poets from a range of generations who all share in what it means to live under occupation. Included among these poets are Fady Joudah, Mahmoud Darwish, and Sara Saleh, who all help us learn how to find hope and see beauty in the rubble of our cities, how to persevere with love and anger, and how to explain the unexplainable pain of losing home and those you hold dearest.

Presented in both Arabic and English, and in various poetic forms, A Blade of Grass is a poetic, confronting history lesson I so desperately needed. While libraries, schools, and archives are razed throughout Gaza, I think it is more important than ever to witness this history through the work of those who live it.

February, that month of short, cold days with a backdrop of red and pink hearts is the perfect time to revisit the work of Lucille Clifton and her astonishing collection, The Book of Light. Originally published in 1993 and recently released in an anniversary edition by Copper Canyon Press, the new edition contains a foreword by the poet Ross Gay and an afterword by Clifton’s daughter Sidney Clifton, which give additional context to the poems.

Clifton was the recipient of the Juniper Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and a National Book Award, among many other honors. The poems in The Book of Light include some of her most well known work, including “won’t you celebrate with me”:

     born in babylon
     both nonwhite and woman
     what did i see to be except myself?

The poems in The Book of Light address both personal trauma and global tragedy. Light appears as a form of truth telling, as in a series of poems addressed to Superman, where the poet asks if he will follow her when she decides to “enter the darkest room / in my house and speak / with my own voice, at last”. Readers who follow Clifton through these startling, funny, and unforgettable poems will be rewarded with the grace of Clifton’s unique illumination.

In this world, it is so easy to feel small. So small that we cannot even begin to fight for what we know is right. So small that we believe what is will always be, that one voice cannot possibly make a difference. But Amanda Gorman and Christian Robinson have given us something truly precious with their new book, Something, Someday – hope. Their text and accompanying illustrations are stunning in their simplicity, as they paint the story of a child saddened by the garbage that has taken over his community. He is told there is nothing he can do, “to sit and wait, / but you know people / have already waited / too long.” So he begins to clean up his neighborhood, finding friends to help him along the way who start to see that “this problem is big, / but together, / we are bigger.” Together, seed by seed, sprout by sprout, they turn the mountains of trash into a beautiful garden. This book’s target audience is children, but readers of all ages can and should be reminded of its lesson. It takes patience and perseverance, but together, we can build something better. “Something that is not a dream, / but the day you live in.”

Claire Schwartz’s debut collection, Civil Service, is crafted as an examination, a collaboration between the text and the reader. The opening section, “[the original gesture],” follows the evolution of a single vertical line to the diagram of a milk carton, and ttext below each shape strikes as similarly physical, material. Reading Schwartz’s lines feels akin to turning each in my hands, trying to feel out what is “[t]he house, the host, the cell, the hormones, the history./ The geography, the poem, the meaning you make.”

The blur between holding, possessing, and responsibility, accountability to and for others, is introduced in the figure of the fugitive Amira: “She is in your hands now.” Schwartz then traces intricate webs between a cast of characters who are all implicated in the interrogation and torture of Amira: the Old Dictator, the New Dictator, the townspeople, the Archivist, the Curator, the Censor, the Stenographer, the Board Chair, the Intern. Each is defined by their role within various overlapping institutions, institutions they ultimately comprise, and revised by their relation to Amira, and the off-page violences inflicted upon her.

Schwartz’s Acknowledgements end by thanking the reader: “You revised this text.” This collection is a text that revises me in each re-reading. If you allow it, these poems will revise you too.

Each Kindness, a picture book length poem by Jacqueline Woodson with illustrations by E.B. Lewis, is a rare treat. A meditation on the importance of kindness, it accumulates power through the eventual realization of its narrator, Chloe, that she has not been kind. Woodson, a deeply empathetic writer, trusts her young audience and never provides easy answers or a saccharine resolution to her tale. A new girl, Maya, moves to town and attempts to make friends with Chloe. Chloe and the other children reject her; eventually Chloe’s family moves away again, and Chloe is left to wrestle with the uneasiness her choices have produced. E.B. Lewis’ illustrations are a graceful companion to Woodson’s text, beautifully evoking both the loneliness of childhood and the splendor of the natural world.

Each Kindness was originally published in 2012 and was awarded both a Coretta Scott King Honor and the Jane Addams Peace Award. Its reminder to young readers about the power of our daily actions is one that feels especially crucial at this moment when, as Woodson writes, “Every little thing we do goes out, like a ripple, into the world.”


 

Many people have given advice on how to write poetry - the books penned on this topic could fill several shelves (and in our library, they do). But few have formed an ethos as succinct and beautiful as the one Kwame Alexander and Deanna Nikaido have given us with How to Write a Poem.

Their story does not outline various poetic forms or supply you with detailed writing prompts. It merely suggests you ask a question, and listen (to the world and to yourself) for the answers. It is a poem, in and of itself. A blank page need not be daunting, they say - let the words rain down upon you, then “write them into your paper boat and row, row, row across the white expanse.” A poem is plunging “into the silent sea of your imagination” and discovering your voice. A poem is unearthing the word that’s “at the tip of your heart where the light shines through.” A poem is showing us what you’ve found.

How to Write a Poem is a celebration of imagination on every page, aided by illustrator Melissa Sweet’s vivid collages. Sweet has forged a whole world, brimming with color and light, out of mere scraps of paper, showing us that art and beauty can spring from anywhere, no matter how humble the origins. This is especially fitting, as Alexander created this book to remind readers young and old that poetry does not need to be feared. He writes in his author’s note, “For so long, we’ve been taught that poetry is staid, complicated, and unfamiliar, and now many of us believe it. How did this happen?... When did poetry become something intimidating and inaccessible? We have forgotten its power, forgotten that many of the essential joys of poetry are the first ones we experienced as kids discovering the rhythm of language.” Poetry is power, but it does not belong exclusively to the elite, the old, the rich, or the few. Poetry belongs to all of us.

Now go write a poem!

When does a poem begin? How much of the writing and revising process happens away from a desk, from a keyboard, from a paper and pen? If I decide that my dreams are not a part of my poetry-writing practice, what does that do to the poems I write? The dreams I dream? If I decide that time spent in nature is a part of my poetry-writing practice, how does that change my poems, the natural world, and the relationship between?

In Edges & Fray: On Language, Presence, and Invisible Architectures, Danielle Vogel reshapes traditional Western notions of poetry-reading and poetry-writing, and the architecture of the poetry collection. Instead of reading poems in a carefully-choreographed succession, Vogel builds her collection as “a series of filaments.” She tells us, “I cast a thought, leave it to begin another fray, and then return,” in the manner of a spider weaving her web, or a bird constructing a nest. In a frontal note to the reader, we are urged to explore the collection in any order that, for us, “holds.” We are invited to wander, to sound out our own, individual paths, as we would move through any wild landscape. The page, like a meadow, a forest, is a collaborative, relational, space. 

Vogel’s somatic, textual, and sculptural work asks me to rethink the boundaries between the individual and the collective, foreground and background, matter and negative space. The white space wound through the poems slows my reading, reframes the connection between text and the field it vibrates inside, and changes how I pay attention when reading, and to what. In the first section of the book, lyrical fragments are woven between didactic poems, ars poetica, shaped poetry, and photographic images of a collection of nests in extreme close-up. These images, depicting nests held by a variety of museums, never depict the structure as a whole. Instead, the extreme close-up works to highlight the found materials woven into these structures, including scraps of newspaper, human hair, twine, scraps of cloth, feathers, grasses, sticks, and mud. Avian home-making is revealed as a kind of writing, how Vogel defines the process: 

the retrieval
of material       - - -       to produce a desired   ,    shape
                                  as open   :    archiving

In her sixth collection of poetry, Ada Limón explores autobiographical and reverent observations about the interplay between humanity and the rest of the natural world through four chapters named for the seasons. She begins in “Spring” with “Give Me This,” in which the poet watches a groundhog savor tomatoes from her garden. She asks, “Why am I not allowed / delight?” Her musings on nature and people’s place in it are imbued with the self-aware, brave naïveté of a hand reaching through a gate to a skittish horse. 

Though (or because) the earth is heavy with grief and indifference and though her mother’s horses “would eat the apples / with as much pleasure from / any flattened palm” (“Intimacy”), Limón cannot help but identify with and take solace in the plants and animals around her. This book constantly reckons with her desire to name, claim, and anthropomorphize. Watching two crows clinging to a tree branch, she narrates, “They say, Stop, and I still want / to make them into something they are not” (“Privacy”). 

She writes of imagining faces in flowers in “In the Shadow”: “Why / can’t I just love the flower for being a flower? / How many flowers have I yanked to puppet / as if it was easy for the world to make flowers?” This poetic puppeteering of nature is felt to be “a lazy kind of love” inadequate at subduing human loneliness. By “Winter,” in the final lines of the final poem, she laments, “enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high / water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease, / I am asking you to touch me” (“The End of Poetry”). 

This is a book to read outdoors or under sunlight coming through the Poetry Foundation’s windows. Its title poem, “The Hurting Kind,” is a breathtaking tribute to Limón’s grandparents that illuminates the poignant beauty that can come from refusing to name or reimagine. “Before my grandfather died, I asked him what sort / of horse he had growing up. He said // Just a horse. My horse, with such a tenderness it / rubbed the bones in my ribs all wrong.”