Here we are at the midpoint of another terrible, terrible year, but though the political climate may be more toxic and dispiriting than ever, people are still producing thoughtful, intelligent, entertaining literature and for that, at least, we can be grateful.
Below you’ll find the best reviewed fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—from Dennis Johnson, Rachel Kushner, Zadie Smith, John Ashbery, Zora Neale Hurston, and many more—of the past six months: 30 rapturously-received titles for your summertime reading consideration. I suggest choosing a book from each section, swinging by your local independent bookstore to pick all three up on your way to the beach, and then kicking back in the shade of an oversized umbrella as you let 2018’s finest writing wash over you. Or, you know, you can just read them at home or on the train or wherever you normally do your reading.
Anyway, enjoy!
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1. The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson
(29 Rave, 4 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“Denis Johnson, in all his work, aimed to locate the hidden, actual face of things. But the new stories build without those miraculous balls of hail, and their truths are necessarily deeper, and more precise, true as you would true a wheel … It feels like the paced vision of a writer who has been made to understand that life is fairly rude and somewhat short, but that the world contains an uneven distribution of grace, and that wisdom lies in recognizing where it—such grace—has presented itself. The stories are about death and immortality, art and its reach, and they ask elemental questions about fiction, not as a literary genre but as a human tendency … These stories ask you to step into the room and listen closely. They are not showy anthems, and in many cases, they have dispensed with hindsight altogether.”
–Rachel Kushner (Bookforum)
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2. Kudos by Rachel Cusk
(20 Rave, 3 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“In unhappier compositions her metaphors pile up and sit at angles like jigsaw pieces, but in the Outline trilogy they are masterfully in hand. There is urgency, a wish to avoid unnecessary detours, for we have someplace to be … Her prose is not musical, exactly. It is what I would call ritualistic. The monologues in the Outline trilogy are controlled trances, like Stevie Nicks at the end of ‘Rhiannon’: you enter the speed and the artifice and the belief of it with her. They seem to have been written compulsively; they certainly read compulsively. There is a relentlessness to them, an onslaught that is like the onslaught of life. Occasionally you find yourself wishing for someone to get up and go to the bathroom, but most of the time you are transported … Writing about writers is supposed to be boring, but this, for my money, is the most fascinating thing Cusk has done. Also, a fake Knausgaard shows up halfway through, and it rules.”
–Patricia Lockwood (The London Review of Books)
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3. Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
(18 Rave, 6 Positive)
“Asymmetry poses questions about the limits of imagination and empathy—can we understand each other across lines of race, gender, nationality, and power? The fluttering way in which Halliday pursues her themes and preoccupations seems too idiosyncratic and beautiful to summarize … The book richly considers the diffusions of life into art, of my consciousness into yours. It is also a musical document, with characters that play the piano or devote a great deal of energy to considering which CDs they’d want to bring with them to a desert island. Like music, Asymmetry possesses the mysterious quality of a created thing moving through time, expressing its own patterns, its meaning subsumed in the shifting symmetries of its form … Asymmetry stops short of arguing that novelists can leave themselves entirely behind; no person has the power to turn a mirror into a rabbit hole. The book does, however, evoke how our lives can sometimes blur with the lives of others, how a stranger’s features can occasionally ripple up the glass like an arpeggio.”
–Katy Waldman (The New Yorker)
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4. The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
(17 Rave, 7 Positive, 3 Mixed)
“…[a] magnificently hard-boiled novel … a powerful undertow pulls the reader through the book. I didn’t consume it so much as it consumed me, bite by bite. Part of its traction comes from Kushner’s mastery of mood and place, which in this novel is less flashily intellectual, in the style of Don DeLillo, and more infused with yearning … In The Flamethrowers, Reno had a way of absorbing the voices speaking around her and passing them on to the reader, and so does Romy … Kushner doesn’t soft-pedal her character’s crimes, some of which are as cruel as the treatment handed out to them. She’s not a polemical novelist. But while the prison guards berate their charges that they have ended up in this hellhole as a result of their own choices, she summons the indelible image of lives from which all meaningful choices have been erased, one by one.”
–Laura Miller (Slate)
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5. Winter by Ali Smith
(13 Rave, 6 Positive, 2 Mixed)
“Ali Smith is flat-out brilliant, and she’s on fire these days … Winter follows on the heels of Autumn—naturally. But aside from an exquisitely subtle link, the two books share concerns rather than characters or storylines and can be read separately. Their point of connection, so understated it’s easy to miss, demonstrates yet again Smith’s skill at revealing surprising relationships between seemingly disparate narrative threads … You can trust Smith to snow us once again with her uncanny ability to combine brainy playfulness with depth, topicality with timelessness, and complexity with accessibility while delivering an impassioned defense of human decency and art.”
–Heller McAlpin (NPR)
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6. Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
(14 Rave, 4 Positive)
“The novel is based in many of the realities of the writer’s life, but the prose is infused with imaginative lyricism and tone. In the end, this coming-of-age novel also has one foot on the other side, held between the open gates—a young woman of many nations and many souls. The journey undertaken in the novel is swirling and vivid, vicious and painful, and rendered by Emezi in shards as sharp and glittering as those with which Ada cuts her forearms and thighs, in blood offering to Asughara … Emezi’s lyrical writing, her alliterative and symmetrical prose, explores the deep questions of otherness, of a single heart and soul hovering between, the gates open, fighting for peace.”
–Susan Straight (The Los Angeles Times)
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7. The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
(14 Rave, 3 Positive)
“No heartwarming tale of pet ownership, The Friend presents a meditation on the raw experience of losing someone who is neither lover nor family yet who occupies a distinctive place in the lives of those left behind … With enormous heart and eloquence, Nunez explores cerebral responses to loss—processed through the writer’s life—while also homing in on the physical burden felt by those left behind … Nunez offers no easy solutions; instead, she offers the solace that comes from accepting change. Friendship comes with the possibility of great joy and deep sorrow. Surviving suicide throws us into a realm outside words. The Friend exposes an extraordinary reserve of strength waiting to be found in storytelling and unexpected companionship.”
–Lauren LeBlanc (The Minneapolis Star Tribune)
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8. The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst
(13 Rave, 5 Positive, 8 Mixed)
“…the immense assurance of the writing, the deep knowledge of the settings and periods in which the story unfolds, the mingling of cruel humour and lyrical tenderness, the insatiable interest in human desire from its most refined to its most brutally carnal, grip you as tightly as any thriller … It’s a wonderful structural device, this layering of similar situations on top of each other like a series of transparencies that cumulatively portray a culture as it exists in time as well as in space … An amazing amount of the passion and folly of the human comedy is woven into his modest life, all of it beautifully observed and memorably articulated. It makes for a looser, freer book than the cunning puzzle of a novel one was led to expect, and almost certainly a better one, too.”
–James Lasdun (The Guardian)
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9. The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer
(13 Rave, 9 Positive, 7 Mixed, 3 Pan)
“…[an] exuberant, sprawling novel, which may be Wolitzer’s most ambitious yet … Some of the best scenes in this book are from Cory’s or Zee’s perspectives, as Wolitzer follows them through college and into their 20s, where their stories gain a thrilling—if also heartbreaking—momentum … Wolitzer is known as a seriously funny chronicler of both the minutiae and sweep of modern American life, capable of storytelling as moving as it is acerbic, and all this is on fine display in The Female Persuasion … if at times her characters can sound a little too on-point, if her ending is a little too tidy, these faults are easy to forgive, because what she has written is not a speech but a novel, one that’s big, necessary, and utterly persuasive.”
–Anna Solomon (The Boston Globe)
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10. The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
(12 Rave, 4 Positive, 4 Mixed, 1 Pan)
“Benjamin slips into each of the characters’ heads and lets us live there for a while, writing in a delicate third-person voice that knows everyone’s secrets. There are moments as taut as a thriller, where time disappears as you turn pages; and passages of quiet compassion, as the characters reflect on the bonds of siblinghood, on the idea of home, on how those we have lost can still manage—miraculously and mysteriously—to stay with us, in ways that we can’t always explain. Its ending is unexpectedly emotional, as a wise secondary character comes to realize that ‘magic is only one tool among many for keeping one another alive.'”
–Moira Macdonald (The Seattle Times)
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1. Feel Free by Zadie Smith
(22 Rave, 12 Positive, 2 Mixed)
“Smith is critiquing everything we don’t want to talk about: complicity and naïveté, what we take for granted and how we are positioned, our good feelings about ourselves. It’s a territory to which she returns throughout Feel Free … What makes Feel Free so resonant is this refusal to let anyone, herself included, off the hook. At the same time, she is compassionate and understanding of our failings—although understanding alone, Smith knows, is not enough. More to the point, her purpose is inquiry, the essayist’s natural state of asking as opposed to answering: precarious uncertainty again … Her concerns move inexorably from the cultural to the existential—or maybe the two are increasingly the same.”
–David L. Ulin (The Barnes & Noble Review)
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2. The Recovering by Leslie Jamison
(13 Rave, 9 Positive, 2 Mixed, 2 Pan)
“With The Recovering, Jamison still articulates a clear, compelling mission. But the book may not strike such a chord, layered as it is with highbrow references and unconventional structures … There’s something profound at work here, a truth about how we grow into ourselves that rings achingly wise and burrows painfully deep. In this astounding triumph, Jamison reveals how myths make us who we are, situating herself within a storied American movement before steering us all toward a new, clearer state of being.”
–David Canfield (Entertainment Weekly)
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3. Calypso by David Sedaris
(12 Rave, 5 Positive)
“I have come to the conclusion that David Sedaris is not just some geeky Samuel Pepys, as I had assumed all these years. True, he may shed a revelatory light on the more extreme facets of our societal spectrum through his bizarre and pithy prism. Yes, his worldview—a fascinating hybrid of the curious, cranky and kooky—does indeed hold a mirror up to nature and show us as others see us. But make no mistake: He is not the Fool, he is Lear … This book allows us to observe not just the nimble-mouthed elf of his previous work, but a man in his seventh decade expunging his darker secrets and contemplating mortality. Calypso chronicles his latest attempts to come to terms with the slings and arrows of truly outrageous fortune that life has flung at him … For Lear the storm is the central metaphor … For Sedaris a snapping turtle with a partly missing foot and a tumor on its head becomes an unlikely leitmotif … The brilliance of David Sedaris’s writing is that his very essence, his aura, seeps through the pages of his books like an intoxicating cloud, mesmerizing us so that his logic becomes ours … The geeks really do inherit the earth.”
–Alan Cumming (The New York Times Book Review)
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4. How to Write and Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee
(13 Rave, 2 Positive)
“How good is How to Write an Autobiographical Novel? It’s so good that I could fill my word count just with quotations … Edinburgh was a masterpiece; so too is How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. One of its beauties is how simultaneously shaped and flexible it is, both thematically coherent and varied in subject matter … Chee’s particular style of mind and habits of moral engagement hold the collection together; every essay, no matter the subject, exhibits warmth, rigor, tact … The mask conceals and it reveals; writing transfigures and it uncovers. That’s the gift that writing has given Chee, and it’s the gift that his wonderful new collection gives its readers.”
–Anthony Domestico (The Boston Globe)
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5. See What Can Be Done by Lorrie Moore
(12 Rave, 2 Positive)
“Those who have not yet discovered her might best begin with the fiction and save this collection for later, not because it doesn’t merit attention but because Moore’s incisive, often mordant yet exhilarating pieces illuminate the trajectory of a literary artist’s aesthetic evolution, and enhance an understanding of her fiction. They give us a cumulative sense of how the frank, savvy, tragicomic sensibility so evident in her stories and novels reverberates in the wider context … Extended personal forays are rare, however, and in these pieces Moore’s particular frankness emerges chiefly (and deliciously) in parenthetical asides or digressive observations when she is focused on the work of others … I had enjoyed many of the essays in this collection in the journals in which they first appeared but was struck, on rereading, not only by Moore’s intelligence and wit, and by the syntactical and verbal satisfactions of her prose, but by the fundamental generosity of her critical spirit.”
–Claire Messud (The Guardian)
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6. God Save Texas by Lawrence Wright
(11 Rave, 2 Positive)
“God Save Texas, as the title suggests, is the work of a man who loves Texas’ uniqueness but finds himself increasingly dismayed by its politics and social policies … The push-pull between homegrown admiration and deep disappointment fuels God Save Texas with literary tension … God Save Texas was hatched when Wright’s editor at The New Yorker, David Remnick, asked Wright to explain his home state. But the book succeeds by proving this task impossible … Wright’s words could speak for both Texas and America. American exceptionalism is a sturdy component of our national mythology, a reminder that we consider ourselves different from other nations. You can call it a reactionary myth, as many have, but you can’t deny its hold on the imagination.”
–Chris Vognar (The Dallas Morning News)
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7. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara
(9 Rave, 5 Positive)
“…[a] meticulously researched, uniquely evocative nonfiction opus … With unflinching self-awareness, McNamara captures the adrenaline rush that accompanies each potential lead and the crushing disappointment that follows when most inevitably hit a dead end … The true crime genre has been criticized for exploiting trauma, but McNamara’s attention to specific details humanizes but doesn’t overexpose her subjects. Their trauma had become a part of McNamara in some small way, and her narration serves as a constant reminder of the case’s emotional and psychological toll … I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is narrative true crime journalism at its very finest, a complex, multilayered, chilling portrait of a faceless monster, and a remarkable tribute to the woman who, up until her last day, believed she would one day have him in her crosshairs.”
–Amelia McDonnell-Parry (The Village Voice)
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8. The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers
(7 Rave, 9 Positive, 4 Mixed, 1 Pan)
“At its best moments, Mokha reads like one of those obsessive journalistic explorations of a quotidian object—think John McPhee’s grand Oranges or Mark Kurlansky’s brilliant Cod or Salt … The final third of Mokha is concerned with the procurement and delivery of Alkhanshali’s first crop—a shipment of tons of beans—through a Yemen choked with civil war and battered by Saudi missile strikes. It’s a cracking tale of intrigue and bravery and more than a little bit of luck … He is by no means impartial; Alkhanshali is his friend, and the book is a celebration of that friendship. Eggers excels when he brings his sweeping novelist’s scope to the issues that matter most to him—income inequality, the spoils of colonialization—and he stumbles when Alkhanshali’s tale demands a more impartial witness. But really, every biography is a kind of love story between the author and their subject. And if Eggers leans a bit too heavily on the over-earnest mythologization of an American citizen with deep Yemeni roots during the disastrous Trump presidency, who—really—could blame him?”
–Paul Constant (The Los Angeles Times)
9. Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston
(10 Rave, 1 Positive)
“Barracoon, in many ways, pursues the slavery narrative in the same manner as the book and film 12 Years a Slave: it tracks slavery’s violence and aftermath through the words, memories, and history of a single person who survived it … Holding the book and reading it now, Barracoon seems ahead of its time, largely due to how it makes the story of slavery both intimate and viscerally visual, as Roots did most notably several decades after this manuscript was created …Hurston writes Cudjo’s voice as it was spoken out loud to her. Her strength in articulating dialogue is something that shines in her later work, but it is seen brilliantly here…Hurston lets his language exist, trusting readers to find their way through it … Barracoon is a difficult read, harsh and brutal at times, with just enough levity to help push a reader through. Cudjo ends his story as a full human, beyond the terrors he endured. Hurston’s book is about a person surviving, despite every attempt made for him not to. It seems triumphant, I’m sure. Until you remember what you’re celebrating the triumph over.”
–Hanif Abdurraqib (4Columns)
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10. The Line Becomes a River by Francisco Cantu
(7 Rave, 6 Positive, 2 Mixed)
“Francisco Cantú’s new memoir, The Line Becomes a River, veers away from propaganda and stereotypes and into the wild deserts and mountains, and, especially, the hearts and minds of the people who traverse the increasingly militarized borderlands. No one crosses unscathed, including Mr. Cantú … It’s rare to be given insight into the lives of the men and women who patrol our international borders, especially by a writer as gifted as Mr. Cantú … He becomes afflicted with nightmares of death, of missing bodies in the desert, and of his teeth crumbling into pieces. These passages, which are interspersed with dispatches from his daily patrol, are both beautifully written and terrifying. It’s fascinating to read how Mr. Cantú navigates such difficult physical and mental terrain.”
–Melissa Del Bosque (The Wall Street Journal)
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Poetry
1. Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith
(8 Rave, 2 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“What I have always liked about Smith’s poetry is her interest in other people’s lives. The lone self has been the sacred cow of lyric poetry since the ancient Greeks, and there’s no way to sever that link permanently, but a vacation now and then from self-absorption to look around and see what the rest of the human race has been up to can do wonders to one’s poetry … The poems in Wade in the Water are full of memorable images nimbly put together by Smith’s exquisite sense of timing and her feel for the kind of language appropriate to the poem … Wade in the Water is not only a political book. It asks how an artist might navigate the political and the personal, and the collection’s real strength lies in its many marvelous poems that are more private.”
–Charles Simic (The New York Times Book Review)
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2. Not Here by Hieu Minh Nguyen
(6 Rave)
“That sense of oneself as a monster, as a problem nobody can solve, governs these pages, and gives them their bitter, terse power … The poems in Not Here feel inevitable as well as painful, full of sentences that Nguyen had no choice but to write. That said, he has made the right choices about how to write them. They feel at once raw and ruthlessly condensed … Nguyen’s stripped-down style also makes available pithy, saddened advice, almost along the lines of Philip Larkin, whose poems about hating parties, and attending parties anyway, stand behind Nguyen’s decision to show his face at one more wintry gathering … In an ideal world no one would grow up with the life that Hieu Minh Nguyen has had, and many thousands would have his talents, his compression, his way with figures, his talent for turning harsh memories into elegant verse. In this world, many people have similar troubles, and try to describe them, in prose poems and in verse. But very few could do what Nguyen has done.”
–Stephanie Burt (The New York Times Book Review)
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3. Brown by Kevin Young
(4 Rave, 3 Positive)
“Kevin Young’s necessary new book of witness creates a parade through time, and I love a parade. Especially one with such good music—the poems in Brown dance through bebop and into James Brown’s megafunk … Every line of Brown is aware that this storm must scare the hell out of people who have locked their doors and kneel before Fox News Channel asking God what went wrong. Young’s book releases a universal shout—political in the best, most visceral way, critical, angry, squinting hard at this culture—while remaining at the same time deeply and lovingly personal. Love soars over every section, especially the most painful ones … It’s a parade for all of us. Kevin Young loves you. That’s why he sometimes gives you a kick. It’s a rage that protects the most delicate observer’s heart.”
–Luis Alberto Urrea (The New York Times Book Review)
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=4. Eye Level by Jenny Xie
(5 Rave, 1 Positive)
“This is a book about the necessity of toggling between the enchantments of the page and the allure of the horizon: Xie’s ‘appetite for elsewhere’ competes with a longing for the ‘infinite places within language to hide.’ The poems dazzle in their local details, even as they pine for global reach and scale … Xie comes across as a magician of perspective and scale, troubled by her own virtuosic illusions. Through Xie’s eyes, we can see the binds and paradoxes of being stuck inside a single point of view. When you’re at eye level with another person, however, you can be briefly prodded out of solipsism: you see yourself being seen … Eye Level with worldly landmarks and private discoveries, mapped routes and circuitous thoughts, suggests a kind of Fodor’s or Lonely Planet guide to inner life … Xie’s swallowed commands, shorn of their predicates, suggest that the rules of her art cannot be codified.”
–Dan Chiasson (The New Yorker)
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=4. American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes
(5 Rave, 1 Positive)
“His new book, a short volume of sonnets, American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin, is a gift in a fraught moment. These sonnets, existential, political, personal, retain a moral ferocity and urgency that propels that entire cycle forward … These poems are acutely aware of the literary tradition Hayes works in, with as many references to James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, to Derek Walcott and Langston Hughes, wrestling with the implications of blackness and literary tradition. Hayes’ inhabits the deeply troubling historical moment. But these poems are timeless.”
–Faraz Rizvi (The Millions)
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=6. Cenzontle by Marcello Hernandez Castillo
(5 Rave)
“The collection…expands across the page in lines and strophes of various lengths that initially appear as if in fragments. As the book progresses, however, the less these lines resemble fragments of erasure or censure, and the more they come more closely to resemble a network of rivers. Themes and images spring up, run underground, disappear, and then overflow elsewhere in the book … Within Cenzontle, binary oppositions—of gender, socio-political difference, and even of human or non-human—are merely the banks between which the potential for the creative play flows, ultimately culminating in political resistance … Cenzontle reveals a river-like flow of trauma between generations, and the ways in which we revisit our past in order to make sense of ourselves.”
–Leah Silvieus (The Harvard Review)
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=6. Kindest Regards by Ted Kooser
(5 Rave)
“Kooser’s poems…mildly subversive, unveiling literary vignettes where, at first glance, it does seem that not much of anything is going on. Yet not far beneath the surface of the narrative, something profound inevitably glows … Kooser’s puckish self-effacement—his recognition that in a world of practical urgencies, poetry doesn’t always or even usually command center stage—is part of his abiding charm … His poems speak without ornament of everyday life, not the preoccupations of the academy … Their matter-of-fact Midwestern sensibility is also informed by a playful lyricism … The reader hopes, in finishing this collection, that Kooser’s own journey is far from over.”
–Danny Heitman (The Christian Science Monitor)
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8. They Knew What They Wanted: Collages and Poems by John Ashbery
(4 Rave, 1 Positive)
“John Ashbery: They Knew What They Wanted does readers the great favor of letting us peer into Ashbery’s second, less known artistic career. His collages are presented alongside a selection of his poems, allowing us to see how much they have in common, to understand how each medium came to occupy a natural space in this prolific and influential artist’s creative landscape. And the book invites readers, even those who are most familiar with his poetry, to see the poems in a fresh light. Indeed, although They Knew What They Wanted collects work that spans a period of more than half a century, it feels so new that turning these pages is an experience of constant pleasurable surprise … These unique and amusing collages are well served by this beautifully designed and produced book, which is permeated by the sense of a half-remembered, half-postulated childhood … The publication of They Knew What They Wanted will help bring us closer to an artist whose work was what we sometimes forget poetry can be: a whole lot of fun.”
–Troy Jollimore (The Washington Post)
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9. The Second O of Sorrow by Sean Thomas Dougherty
(3 Rave, 1 Positive)
“As I read these poems I thought of Peter Handke’s brilliant, tortured, autobiographical novella, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams … The Second O in Sorrow, cannot be defined by one subject or variations on themes of pain, but branches out into other directions readers of Dougherty’s considerable body of work will recognize. There is a long poem of regret and love in the relationship of a man with his son and the spaces between them that are larger than a generation. There is Sean at a karaoke night in a bar … He defines poetry in a unique way that is both intimate and informative, visceral and real … What more could you possibly want from a writer?”
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10. Junk by Tommy Pico
(3 Rave)
“…throughout the book, Pico’s tone is casual and intimate. Reading Junk often feels like receiving a long text message from Pico, the kind of message your friend texts you from a bathroom at a party to share news of something illicit, or strange, or wonderful … So much of Pico’s verse recalls the work of midcentury poet Frank O’Hara…It may seem uninspired to compare a queer male poet who lives in New York City to Frank O’Hara, but I can think of no other poet who manifests O’Hara’s nerve and verve without sounding like a weaker imitation … Pico’s italicized lines, his abbreviations and text speak, his low diction, his rapid shifts between moods and tones: all belie a carefully composed line. And Pico’s imagery startles with its precision; the lips ‘marbled’ by hickeys recall prime marbled red meat … Pico’s poem is marked by energy and grace, silliness and variousness, and it elevates junk of all kinds; through Pico’s lens, nothing is not worth our attention.”
–Jacquelyn Ardam (The Los Angeles Review of Books)
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