The Poetry Foundation's 2020 Staff Picks

2020 is finally (almost) behind us … In keeping with our yearly tradition, Harriet asked Poetry Foundation staff to share a book (or two) that helped them get through. 

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Noa/h Fields, Events and Logistics Assistant

Nightboat’s anthology We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics gave me everything I wanted and more, the perfect supplement as I started my hormone transition journey. The Zoom reading was one of the best virtual events I attended in quarantine—a riotous joy fest with a veritable who’s who of the genderqueer literati. 

Another cherished quarantine memory was reading Bhanu Kapil’s How To Wash a Heart out loud with friends over Zoom. Afterwards we plunged into discussion and then, heads and hearts still buzzing, we piled into a Google Doc and wrote our own poems in response to two book-inspired prompts: 1. WHAT IS YOUR ORIGIN STORY? 2. WHO ARE YOU HOST TO?

Other favorite poetry titles from this year: Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge's A Treatise On Stars (paired with Empathy's long awaited return to print), Victoria Chang’s Obit and Rick Barot’s The Galleons. Each in their own ways so capacious and generous. There were also some books that were technically not poetry but books by/about poets that I will not be forgetting anytime soon. Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning and Anais Duplan’s Blackspace: On the Poetics of Afrofuture were transformative reads about poetry, race, and imagination. 

Jeremy Lybarger, Features Editor

I don't know if these are necessarily my favorite books of 2020, but they're the ones I'd recommend to anyone looking for signs of life at the end of this junkyard year. Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems, by Wanda Coleman (Black Sparrow Press); Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me, by the South Korean poet Choi Seungja, translated by Won-Chung Kim and Cathy Park Hong (Action Books); Romance or The End, by Elaine Kahn (Soft Skull Press); and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel (Nightboat Books). I'd also recommend reading Lizzy LeRud on Coleman and Ruby Brunton on Kahn.

Stefania Gomez, Education and Youth Services Assistant

Danez Smith's "Homie," a treatise on chosen family written in the wake of the death of Smith's dear friend was the book I clutched to me in a year I, too, lost a member of my chosen family. Smith sings of the friends "whose names burst my heart/ to joyful smithereens with their bright seeds... we stand, waiting to be made evergreen! we see your promise in the noonstar! hear your word in the rain!" "Homie" is at once an elegy and book about immortality. "As long as I am a fact to you," they write, "death can do with me what she wants." Please read this book and squeeze everyone you love very tight.

Angelica Flores, Receptionist and Fiscal Assistant

The poetry collection that intrigued me the most this year was Milagro by Penelope Alegría, the 2019 Chicago Youth Poet Laureate. My roommate and I took turns reading some of her poems out loud. I cried reading some of her beautiful poems about her life and her family. My favorite poems were “My Mom’s Hands Come to Chicago, Winter of ‘99,” “For My Only Living Grandparent, Who I Only Remember Sometimes,” and “Papa’s Deli Order.” It’s wonderful to read the early works of new poets and I can’t wait to read more of Alegría’s poetry in the years to come. I highly recommend reading any poetry collections published by Haymarket Books. 

Michelle Martinez, Permissions Coordinator

Nate Marshall’s Finna (which I was inspired to pick up after reading J. Howard Rosier’s essay “Talk It Out”) is, by a long shot, my favorite collection of the year. I’m not sure what I can say about Marshall’s tribute to “Black possibility; Black futurity; Blackness as tomorrow” that hasn’t already been said; it’s downright resplendent with an abiding love for Blackness, tender masculinity, biological and found families, words and what they do. Marshall’s dexterity, skill, and resilience make this look easy, but is it? “hecky naw.” Read this book.

Liz O'Connell-Thompson, Senior Media Associate

Settling down to read a paper book has felt like a fanciful activity that I must have made up ever doing. You're telling me that I can and have spent hours in stillness and calm, quietly giving myself over to a piece of art? Seems fake, but okay. This year I've been reading almost exclusively through audiobooks, which allow me some actual wiggle room. It's a real gift to have a poet read their work to you, let alone in a way where you can pause and rewind to spend a little more time with it. The audiobooks of Nate Marshall's Finna (One World) and Yesika Salgado's Corazón (Not a Cult) in particular are works that I appreciated reading in this way.

Katherine Litwin, Library Director

Two Chicago poets whose work I have long been in awe of released stellar collections this year. Krista Franklin’s Too Much Midnight and Mike Puican’s Central Air are books I will continue to return to and learn from, which brought me true joy during this hard year.

Fred Sasaki, Art Director and Exhibitions Cocurator, Interim Coeditor

I love A Better Place Is Hard to Find by Aaron Fagan, and the exquisite editions by The Song Cave. These poems flow on and feel so nice to read. Aaron was my first friend at Poetry magazine in the early 2000s, when he was assistant editor, and he kindly introduced me to publishing. I'm so grateful to reconnect in this beautiful book of darkly twinkling constellations. 

Distant interstices of nascent stars cease
To wit, with the spirit of the staircase—
Drifting far from everything near,
Our pain is selfish, it isn't ours alone.
A firefly caught in a cobweb, we die
Full of what we did or didn't do, said
Or didn't say, but it comes and goes,
(Like all things clear) like nothing clear.

Krystal Languell, Finance and Administration Director

Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal. The swarthy bildungsroman I'd always hoped I was living out.

Maggie Queeney, Library Associate

As 2020 has felt three years long, I thought it would only be fair to select three extraordinary poetry titles of 2020:Obit by Victoria Chang, Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz, and White Blood by Kiki Petrosino. 

White Blood works to raise the speaker’s ancestors and their histories, and the speaker’s history, erased and obscured by slavery. The poems trace this ancestral absence through what the speaker can access: the results of a DNA Ancestry Test Kit, boxes of archival materials, a tour of Monticello. This collection is part love poem, part lament, part spell to raise and give voice to the dead and lost. Grief and loss form the core of Victoria Chang’s Obit. Chang takes the form of the newspaper obituary to trace the multifold, unfolding process of grief, how the death of a parent can precipitate the death of so much else: voicemail, language, the future... Obit provides a space to be with another’s grief, and to begin to grieve the inconceivable losses of this year. Postcolonial Love Poem reminds me there is a world that to come home to: the lush greens and golds of the desert lands, a galaxy of extraordinary landforms and stones. The wonder of a river, of the body, the divine in everyone and everywhere. Diaz tells us, “It is December and we must be brave.” I look to these three poets, Victoria Chang, Natalie Diaz, and Kiki Petrosino, to find the way.

Shoshana Olidort, Web Editor

Shane McCrae's Sometimes I Never Suffered blew me away. McCrae's poems move seamlessly between Heaven and Earth, between the "hastily assembled angel" and Jim Limber, the adopted mixed-race son of Jefferson Davis, reimagining the histories we've inherited. An all-knowing God appears shortsighted, able to "see only the one thing that would" be, leaving the angel to wonder "Is that the one gift . . . . That free beings / Give God uncertainty." In"Jim Limber's Theodicy," Heaven is brought down to Earth as the speaker fantasizes: "What if in Heaven we could have white things // And not be white," then wonders, "how would we know / How good it was if it was good for everyone."