Library Book Picks

I re-read Khadijah Queen’s collection, I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On, at least once a year. A series of kinetic prose poems that flow, without punctuation, from one encounter with a famous man to the next, and sound out the complex and muscular webs of power shaping each encounter along gender, race, class, age, and the double-edged gift of femme beauty. As the title promises, each poem presents one famous man that the speaker (or her ancestors) met (or nearly-met), and a description of what the speaker, in some poems aged 8 and in others aged 40, was wearing. Through these memories, which range from sweet to pathetic to disappointing to violent, Queen’s girlhood and young adulthood are rendered in such specific and hooking detail that she beats, alive, on each page as she learns how to move through a world where her beauty attracts attention, both wanted and unwanted. Where men tell her, again and again, what she already knows: the meaning of her own name. By the end, I move beyond my impulse to protect her. I want to listen to what she has to say.

I’ve been haunted by Atsuro Riley’s poem Moth since encountering it in the pages of Poetry in 2015. “Came the day I came here young / I mothed / my self. I cleaved apart.” The poem is marked by turnings where the speaker remakes a self in the wake of trauma, even as it is the hidden self that forms the basis for the poem’s devastating refrain: “My born name keeps but I don’t say.” Something of this cleaving informs all the poems in Heard-Hoard. Riley splits words apart and arranges them in counterpoint to create a singular music, an effect that reminded me of cracking open a geode to reveal its secret inner glittering. Readers of these poems will enter a fully formed world, with its own characters, myths, chorus, and repetitions. Sonically and emotionally complex, Heard-Hoard is a collection to treasure and return to.

I firmly believe that great picture books are for everyone, regardless of what age you might be. Truly exceptional picture books are works of art, and this translation of Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions is one of the best examples of this ideal I have ever encountered. Valdivia and Paulson have transformed Neruda’s text, considered to be his last great work of poetry before his death, into a breathtaking landscape of visual poems. The vibrant illustrations perfectly reflect the questions on every page, each one profound in its playful simplicity. On a mountainscape against a rich cerulean sky: “Who shouted for joy / when the color blue was born?” Beneath waves swirling into a shell, teeming with fish the size of ships: “And could it be that the earth / is briefly borrowing the sea? / Won’t we have to return it, / with its tides, to the moon?” The book invites you to dive in and explore its depths with fold-out pages, which reveal extended illustrations and hidden questions. For example, a seemingly peaceful hillside folds out to reveal an erupting volcano and a massive, scowling feline, stretched out beneath the words, “How many questions are in a cat?”

At its core, Book of Questions is a stunning meditation on the importance of curiosity. Neruda’s text and Valdivia’s illustrations urge us to look closely at the world around us, and to never assume we know the why, the what, or the how of Earth’s many wonders. In a time when the answers to nearly every query we can think of are quite literally at our fingertips, this book encourages us to push our boats out into the darkness of the unknown, to swim in the mystery of a question without one clear answer, or any answer at all. As the Editor’s Note states,

“These questions—playful, dancing, mysterious, paradoxical, and nourished by a radical lack of certainty—are all unanswerable. In a gracious and meaningful gesture, what Neruda shares with us as an old man isn’t an arrival at Truth, but the astonishing freedom of a curious mind that dares us to reimagine the world again and again.”

May we all be so lucky to live our lives like Neruda: insatiably curious, for the rest of our days.

“Why do I like it if it makes me shiver?” a bat is asked in Randall Jarrell’s 1963 children’s book The Bat Poet, after he, the first bat to write a poem, has read one about a fierce owl aloud. Accompanied by striking black and white ink illustrations by Maurice Sendak, the very same year Where the Wild Things Are was published, Jarrell spins the aching tale of a young bat who becomes a poet in a world that’s hostile to it. In the animal world, bats, having slumbered through the daylight, are mainly ignorant to the day’s gifts– such as colors, like green, gold and blue. As bat learns to become a poet, so, too, does the reader. “He felt the way you would feel,” Jarrell writes of the first time the bat observes the world around him as deserving of poetic inquiry, “if you woke up and went to the window and stayed there for hours, looking out into the moonlight.” How to write the feeling of night holding its breath? Perhaps with the breath of iambic pentameter, but stopping short two metrical feet. How to show how, all day long, chipmunks scurry up trees and then into the ground, burying acorns? Perhaps with short and then long lines, so “it all goes in and out.” How to make a poem one likes though they shiver to hear it? How to make a poem that tells how a baby bird getting fed by its mother “cheeps as if its heart were breaking”? How to write a poem so good that, like the mockingbird’s song, one forgets it’s a poem? “A mockingbird can sound like anything,” the bat writes of his hero. “He imitates the world he drove away/ So well that for a minute, in the moonlight/ Which one’s the mockingbird? which one’s the world?” Bat soon understands that life is a poem, just as poems come from life– the way birds sing, the way one shivers at the thought of a menacing predator, and holds their breath, the sound of squirrels chattering their teeth, though all these we humans might call, rhyme, meter, line, image.

Jarrell is most widely known for his poetry collections for adult readers, including the National Book Award-winning The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960), in addition to his literary criticism. A contemporary of Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Hardwick, W.H. Auden, and even close friends with Hannah Arendt, he is perhaps lesser known than his peers because of his tragic early death. In a 1964 review of The Bat Poet in the New York Times, Hardwick wrote, “The child who understands its lessons will be wise and they are easy to understand because they are found in life.” I urge you to read this forgotten treasure and ask yourself, and your young reader: Which lessons are about poems? Which about the world?

In The Work-Shy, The Blunt Research Group, a “nameless constellation of poets, artists, and scholars from diverse backgrounds,” translate and transform archival documents from the first youth prison in California, asylums, work camps, and sterilization colonies. The resulting series of poems, each bearing the name of an incarcerated individual as title, tangle the language of the ward, the “fieldworker” and casefile author, and the ward’s family and friends into haunting, fractured forms. Fragments of salvaged language shape and are shaped by the silences and white spaces created by preservation practices and poetic composition. One of the challenges to the reader is to remain within the unnerving the silences and white spaces that systemic isolation, incarceration, pathologization, and sterilization both create and depend upon.

Wrenched out of an institutional context, the clinical language of the casefile is revealed as racist, classist, ableist, and ultimately dehumanizing. A series of mirror portraits of the wards, many children; drawings, writings, and other ephemera created by various wards; Agnes Richter’s asylum jacket, hand embroidered with layers of words, phrases, and sentences; and the found language of casefiles, counters with the indisputable humanity of the incarcerated. Each artifact acts as an evolving refrain, reminding us again and again: “the names are real.”

How to write the erased histories, to speak into historical silences, without perpetuating erasure of historically marginalized people, without speaking over the systematically silenced? The Blunt Research Group addresses the ethics of their project in a series of lyrical essays framing the collection, which offer that speaking can be an act of deep listening, all poetry is to some degree collaborative, and that research is a creative act. This collection is a must read for those occupied with found materials, erasure, shaped poetry, and collaborative poetic practices. In the spirit of deep listening, let us close with lines from the jacket of Agnes R.: “my jacket is/ me// my jacket is// I am not// I am not going home.”

“To not be seen at home … / To not be seen at school, / not on the street, not anywhere …” So begins Alcides Villaça’s mysterious and delightful children’s book, The Invisible, illustrated by Andrés Sandoval and translated from the Portuguese by Flávia Rocha and Endi Bogue Hartigan. In this moving tale of a child whose special power is invisibility, Villaça’s elliptical text and Sandoval’s striking illustrations immerse the reader in a world that is constantly mutating, an effect intensified by the inclusion of red transparencies that render portions of the text and illustrations invisible to the reader at strategic moments. Using the form of the book itself as a poetic device, The Invisible submerges the reader in the wonder and sadness of moving through the world unseen, building to a moment of emotional catharsis when the narrator finally chooses to reveal himself, declaring, “Let them know me.” A book that will resonate with readers of all ages, The Invisible is a unique enchantment tinged with melancholy, a perfect companion for the last days of summer.

Making it through the frigid winter months is no small feat (especially for my fellow Chicagoans), and I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the return of these blissfully warm days than heading to the park with my copy of Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders. The essays and vivid illustrations that make up this book are a love letter to the beautiful and bizarre creatures that call this planet home – from axolotls to catalpa trees, octopi to corpse flowers, Aimee’s lifelong passion for the natural world simply radiates off the page. She uses her beloved flora and fauna to paint an unflinching portrait of the joys and trials of childhood, coming of age, falling in love, motherhood, and the other milestones that make up a life. In her chapter on the narwhal, she writes,

“A white boy who would take my brown hand in his, putting it to his heart when he makes a promise so I can feel his heartbeat and the warmth residing there. If only the narwhal could have taught me how to listen for those clicks of connection, the echo reverberating back to me.”

In an age where so many of us spend our lives indoors and in front of screens, Aimee’s stunning prose is a reminder of the wonder that is truly all around us, just waiting to be discovered.

“Odessa is everywhere,” writes Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminksky in his astonishing debut, Dancing in Odessa (2004, Tupelo Press). You may know him by the kerfuffle around his prescient and widely-misinterpreted poem, “We Lived Happily During the War,” which appears in his National Book Award and National Book Critics’ Circle Award- shortlisted second collection, Deaf Republic. Dancing in Odessa attempts to reassemble, on every page, and every place that this book is opened, from the rubble time and distance has made of it in his memory, a coastal Ukranian city from which Kaminsky and his family became refugees in 1993. This assembly and reassembly gains a kind of propulsive momentum, as if set to the music of Kaminsky’s lyric, or, indeed, like the title of the book’s third section, “Musica Humana”-- that of our human lives. It sounds like something your aunts and grandmothers danced to, it sounds like a generation erased, it is heartbreaking– and yet, reading, you are swept up into it, for, as Kaminsky writes, “we dance to keep from falling.”

Like the lineage of dissident poets he invokes across the collection– Joseph Brodsky, Paul Celan, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Isaac Babel, to name a few– and, indeed, like the current refugee Ukrainian poets whose safe passage and financial support Kaminsky has doggedly organized via Twitter, Kaminksy’s work as a poet is to devise “a human window” into a country where love, old music, daily embarrassments, and variously prepared fish existed among the horrors enacted by repressive regimes. The horrors of the past, Kaminsky says, compel him to write as if his hands have been set on fire. And while the horrors are ongoing? Our memories, too, are precious: “At night, I woke to whisper: Yes, we lived./ We lived, yes, don’t say it was a dream.” This prophetic book changed my life– it is the one to read now.

The experience of moving through Anne Carson’s Nox, a collection printed on one continuous sheet of paper folded over and over into the dimensions of a book page, accordioned inside a box, evokes the archeological dig of personal, familial, and cultural memory.

After the death of her estranged brother, Carson, whose author bio always notes “teaches ancient Greek for a living,” turns, returns, to translation. A photograph of a Latin poem, Catullus’ 101, an elegy for his brother, begins the book. The unfolding text provides a winding path for translating the famously untranslatable Latin poem into English via a series of dictionary entries and etymological histories, interwoven with familial ephemera and Carson’s memories. The resulting work moves how grief moves—in a spiral, a flock of fragments, each present moment broken by the invisible and bleeding history.

Nox asks me to consider how reading, and remembering, are always acts of translation. It asks me to consider how my history (personal, familial, and cultural) shapes the text in front of me, and the me standing before the text. There is a vulnerability, and generosity, in baring and preserving the process of composition: the insistence on the tactical, the material artifacts orbiting an elegy; and the hand behind the book, the one that scores a word (DIES) into paper, that tears preserved letters into ragged scraps, that cuts family photographs.

Carson reminds me that asking questions, about history, memory, and language, is the work of the poet and the work of the historian: “It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.” At the moment I am writing this, in the second year of a global pandemic, I have, so far, survived. Many have not. This poem, this book object, shows one way to carry, to fashion a thing that carries.