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| Kenze Allen |
including poetry. This year’s stellar works show the range and depth of United States poetry at this time in history. Please share with me these exciting works by reading about them and supporting the individuals and their presses by purchasing copies. I have some personal and quoted notes to share:
Cloud Missives by Kenzie Allen (Tin
House): An Indigenous Nations Poets fellow of the first year, Kenzie’s debut
book combines historical texts and lyric works to create response to her Haudenosaunee
descendancy. She creates new forms to hold together the histories, maps, and
emotions. Not to be missed. From her press: “Like an anthropologist, Kenzie
Allen reveals a life from what endures after tragedies and acts of survival.
Across four sections, poems explore pop culture—the stereotypes in Peter
Pan, Indiana Jones, and beyond—fairy tales, myths, protests,
and forgotten histories, before arriving at a dazzling series of love poems
that deepen our understanding of romantic, platonic, and communal love.”
Consider the Rooster by Oliver Baez
Bendorf (Nightboat): This native Iowan now lives in the Rockies. During Covid,
he resided in Michigan, and, according to his press, “a neighbor in Kalamazoo,
Michigan threatens to call the police after discovering the author’s pet
rooster. The rooster sounds the alarm and our author wakes to revolutionary
transformation.” His stand as a queer poet informs the works of change and
chance.
A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye by
V. Penelope Pelizzon (University of Pittsburgh): Global travel informs this
book of lyrics and the odd-side role of the commentator/poet on journeys
outside “normal.”
Instructions for the Lovers by Dawn Lundy
Martin (Nightboat): This poet and essayist has established credentials plus is
a professor at Bard. Her press describes the book: “Martin creates a poetic
field dense with thought, image, and sound as she reflects on her relationship
with her mother, experiences of queer polyamory, lesbian sex, and the racist
conditions within the dying American university system.”
The Palace of Forty Pillars by
Armen Davoudian (Tin House). Another Tin House entry to the list Armen’s work
is based on Iranian architecture. From his website: “In Isfahan, Iran, the
eponymous palace has only twenty pillars, but reflected in its courtyard pool,
they become forty. This is the gamble of the book’s twenty poems: to recreate,
in art’s reflection, the image of a lost home.” I had a chance to talk with him
about the book last spring, and I immediately thought of Italo Calvino’s Invisible
Cities—how we create structures in our personal and collective narratives.
He is working on a Ph.D. at Stanford, and he is a poet I am following for his
vision, for his connection of personal to collective destinies.
Scattered Snows, to the North by Carl
Phillips (Farrar, Straus and Giroux): This veteran poet has been a north star
for over a generation. He has won the Pulitzer and written 17 books. His works
demands respect for their solid and lyrical energy.
Sturge Town by Kwame Dawes (W. W. Norton):
Kwame contributes to his communities by editing the African series of poetry
for the University of Nebraska Press. This book returns to his native Jamaica,
to one of the free towns founded after emancipation in Jamaica. Postcolonial
life. Music traditions and visual art poems are threaded among the themes.
Wrong Norma by Anne Carson (New Directions): Anne’s works are always perfectly balanced, inventive, and wise play with the language. About these prose poems the poet writes: “Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night. The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them ‘wrong.’”
Yard Show by Janice N. Harrington (BOA): Originally
a librarian, Janice Harrington turned to poetry in the 1990s. She writes about
the Southern origins of her family and Black Americans in the Midwest. Critic Johnny
Payne writes of this book: “As witness of this exaltation of the gaudy, the
poet reclaims kitsch as a redemptive force, a vital stream of art, when it is
mindfully connected to a set of local traditions, the heritage of a group that
had to strive hard to find its native expression using the materials at hand.”
