The Poetry Foundation's 2021 Staff Picks

In keeping with our annual tradition, Harriet asked Poetry Foundation staff to share a book (or two) that helped them get through another challenging year.

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Evalena Friedman, Library Assistant

I was completely entranced by Latitude, the debut collection from Natasha Rao, one of this year’s Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellows. Natasha has found that beautiful balance between urgency and playfulness, and her poems are so brimming with life that I felt I could taste the fruit and smell the flowers of which she writes. I found this to be especially true in these lines from “In my next life let me be a tomato” (a desire I now share with her):

I want to return
from reincarnation’s spin covered in dirt and
buds. I want to be unabashed, audacious, to gobble
space, to blush deeper each day in the sun, knowing
I’ll end up in an eager mouth.

 

Fred Sasaki, Creative Director 

O.B.B. a.k.a. The Original Brown Boy by Paolo Javier with art by Alex Tarampi and Ernest Concepcion

I love this far-out book, which is part comics poem, manifesto, and geek-fest. I particularly love how Javier, Tarampi, and Concepcion play with lines on the page, and I admire the outrage, experimentation, and exuberance of the hard-wrought work. This publication feels radical and much-needed. Get your freak on! 

Stefania Gomez, Education and Youth Services Assistant

Interdisciplinary artist Shayla Lawz’s debut, speculation, n., is the most remarkable book I read this year. Lawz explores the very notion of embodiment, presence and absence, what it means to be or have a body. The book is situated in a world wherein Lawz—and members of Lawz’s family and community—are invisibilized, reduced to a body, made disposable. Lawz investigates what such erasure does to one’s interiority: “Where had I gone? I did not know.” The body, then, is a glitch, borderless, static, an immaterial projection, the screen a mirror, the mirror a screen. “Against time / against grief,” speculation, n., teaches remembering as resistance, to “be specific about who wants us dead,” and how, ultimately, to be deathless. speculation, n. is nothing short of prophetic.

Noa/h Fields,  Events and Accessibility Coordinator

VILLAINY BY ANDREA ABI-KARAM MADE ME CRY, MADE ME CUM, MADE ME RAGE, MADE ME RAVE. "THE END OF FASCISM LOOKS LIKE CENTURIES OF QUEERS DANCING ON THE GRAVES OF 1. CAPITALISM 2. THE STATE 3. COLONIALISM 4. NAZIS 5. RACISM 6. OPPRESSION"

Jeremy Lybarger, Features Editor

The book I've returned to more than any other this year is frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss. These are poems about addiction and AIDS and motherhood and punk music and precarity and beauty. Some of them are set in hard corners of the Upper Midwest. Some of them made me laugh. Some of them broke my heart. They're poems that, for all of their charisma, don't try to dazzle you, although they do. They don't set out to bullshit you either. "The problem with everything is death," Seuss writes—and once you've established that, well, you still have to live.

Shoshana Olidort, Web Editor

I keep coming back to Achy Obejas’s Boomerang/Bumerán, a bilingual book of poems in Spanish and English that interrogates the uses and abuses of language—in everything from mundane speech to sacred texts. “Kol Nidrei,” Obejas’s radical reimagining of a core Jewish liturgical text, stopped me in my tracks: “With the consent of no one, we pray among the dykes, the miscreants, the homeless, the enraged …” In a poem about the 2018 synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh that claimed eleven lives, Obejas memorializes the dead, wondering “if they understood what happened when it happened / if their hearing caught the stranger’s cry / if they pondered for an instant / if they were dreaming or confused.” But there is also humor in this collection, and love: “A lover may be conjured from under a beach umbrella, / via meditation, or a personal profile.”