\u2013Rebecca Morgan Frank<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cClose, closer,\u201d Diane Seuss writes in her new book\u00a0Modern Poetry<\/em>, \u201cto that sheeted edge.\u201d As I turn the pages of poetry books in 2024, I hope to see glimpses of that edge, the edge of something in extremis, perhaps, but also the edge of the piece of paper, which is also the edge of a poet\u2019s mind. Strange transfigurations of form, startling intensifications of moral and political perception, unexpected evocations of consciousness\u2014I anticipate a full range of astonishments in the new year.<\/p>\n Some of the books will be extensions of oeuvres I\u2019ve pleasurably followed for years by poets seeking to achieve the next culmination in the life of their artistry, like Victoria Chang\u2019s\u00a0With My Back to the World<\/em>\u00a0(Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Don Mee Choi\u2019s\u00a0Mirror Nation<\/em>\u00a0(Wave Books), Kwame Dawes\u2019s\u00a0Sturge Town<\/em>\u00a0(Norton), Tracy Fuad\u2019s\u00a0Portal\u00a0<\/em>(University of Chicago), Joyelle McSweeney\u2019s\u00a0Death Styles<\/em>\u00a0(Nightboat Books), Carl Phillips\u2019s\u00a0Scattered Snows, to the North<\/em>\u00a0(Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Donald Revell\u2019s\u00a0Canandaigua\u00a0<\/em>(Alice James Books), and Corey Van Landingham\u2019s\u00a0Reader, I<\/em>\u00a0(Sarabande). Other books will be by poets who are new to me and, I hope, new to themselves, finding their edge for the reader’s astonishment.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2013David Woo<\/em><\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Diana Khoi Nguyen, Root Fractures<\/a> Diana Khoi Nguyen\u2019<\/em>s Root Fractures <\/em>builds from her lauded debut, Ghost Of<\/em>, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award winner and a finalist for the National Book Award with further investigations of family histories of grief and displacement. In this new collection, absence and omission evolve into a formidable sense of presence and narrative.<\/p>\n A series of poems called \u201cRoot Fractures\u201d carries on the multimedia hybridity of photograph and textual cutouts, layers, and fades of her earlier collection, while her series \u0110\u1ed5i M\u1edbi (which in English translates to renew or renovate, and also refers to economic reforms in Vietnam in the 1980\u2019s) turns to the sentence as its tool, through prose poems, and, occasionally a more fragmented weaving essayistic form. The threads between the books makes me wonder if this will evolve into a trilogy of sorts; I am already anticipating what comes next from her. \u2013RMF<\/em><\/p>\n Anne Carson, Wrong Norma<\/a> \u201cThe dark side of self-creation,\u201d wrote Louise Gl\u00fcck, \u201cis its underlying and abiding sense of fraud.\u201d Even with a writer of justly vast reputation as the great Canadian poet Anne Carson, each time I open a new book of hers I find myself entertaining the notion that her strangeness and originality may, in fact, be that of a trickster who magics her audience into a state of hallucinatory submission. But surely this is the uncanny way in which true originality operates. Each time I resist Carson\u2019s work, I end up joyously succumbing to her undeniable strengths: the profligate array of innovative forms, the mesmerizing creation and decreation of selves, the classical erudition, the sublimely weird inner life.<\/p>\n Wrong Norma<\/em> continues the Carsonesque tradition, from its amusing title calling to mind not only Norma Desmond but Carson\u2019s recent performance piece Norma Jeane Baker of Troy <\/em>(a conflation of Marilyn Monroe and Euripides), its promiscuous arrangements of prose poems, apparently autobiographical vignettes, and short fictions (\u201clong afternoons at the kill house\u201d), off-kilter verse translations (a portion of Plato\u2019s Symposium <\/em>entitled \u201cOH WHAT A NIGHT\u201d), empathetic insights into the enigmas of others including John Ashbery (\u201ca personality disposed to careless joy in any situation\u201d), interludes of handwritten marginalia around stressed swatches of gnomic typewritten phrases, and even a poignant, illustrated depiction of Paul Celan\u2019s encounter with Martin Heidegger.<\/p>\n As with Carson\u2019s previous books, Wrong Norma <\/em>is magisterially contrarious in conception, an omnium-gatherum text ensconced in a sui generis sensibility, a \u201ccommonplace struggle to know beauty\u201d that doesn\u2019t preclude uncommonly beguiling pronouncements: \u201cIs it proper to use the informal 2nd-person singular pronoun tu <\/em>or toi <\/em>when addressing the sky.\u201d \u201cTo survive you need an edge.\u201d \u201cCan you treat everything as an emergency without losing the reality of time, which continues to drip, laughtear by laughtear?\u201d\u00a0 \u2013DW<\/em><\/p>\n Penelope Pelizzon, A Gaze Hound That Hunteth By the Eye<\/em><\/a><\/strong> Penelope Pelizzon\u2019s third collection promises a wit and formal ease. Her playful allusions range from D.H. Lawrence\u2013 \u201ctrio of nephews,\/ avid hagiographers\/ who praise the body\u2019s stinks and stews\u201d in \u201cOrts and Slarts,\u201d to Henry Howard \u2013 \u201cThe Soote Season\u201d in which \u201cyoga-goers hoist mats\/ rolled cigar-wise in eco-cotton wrappers,\u201d to Sappho\u2013\u201cSome Say,\u201d in which \u201cgray hairs are the smoke off ships \/ whose burning all night bloodied the eastern sky.\u201d<\/p>\n The world is gross and beautiful from a dog\u2019s eye view, in the destructive landscape of gypsy moths, and within the world of aging and changing desires; the speaker of \u201cWishes for Fifty\u201d invokes, \u201cLet there be \/ lascivity with sexy \/ librocubicularists.\u201d (Librocubicularists\u00ad are those who read in bed, if you didn\u2019t already know this essential word for readers of Lit Hub.) Pelizzon, who balances a life between college professor at UConn and traveler to temporary homes in Syria, Namibia, South Africa, and Italy with a foreign diplomat spouse, offers a keen eye and ear to whatever she turns her attention to in this romp and bite of a collection. \u2013RMF<\/em><\/p>\n Diane Seuss, Modern Poetry<\/a> If the capacious version of the sonnet that Seuss used in her previous collection, the award-winning frank<\/em>, proved a gorgeous way to rein in\u2014structure, organize, make into art\u2014the enthrallingly candid rovings of her mind, her new book takes the canon itself as inspiration, or perhaps a copy of an old poetry anthology left in a puddle, adapting its forms to her special subject matter, the poet who somehow sprang from the mud of a non-literary or even anti-literary background.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I know of literature, of history, is spotty,\u201d Seuss claims, dubiously, as if readers were expecting her to be Gibbon or Harold Bloom. The self-deprecation (\u201cFor my people \/ it is the flaw that counts\u201d) is of a piece with the deconstructive impulse at the heart of this book, the desire to privilege the \u201citches and psychological riches\u201d of the working class over the aristocratic milieu, \u201cdust-covered \/ and ornate,\u201d from which the poetic tradition arose, carving up and reshaping the venerable forms in the image of her life: her quatrains are intentionally baggy, her villanelle refuses to be a villanelle, although her loose blank verse is stately and self-revealing, like a 21st-century Wordsworth.<\/p>\n All of these riffs on aspects of poetry (\u201cthat snarling, flaming bitch\u201d) are frame and afflatus, as forms should be, for the true art of Seuss\u2019s poetry, which lies in the ingeniously offhand style with which she presents her riveting, full-frontal insights about people, like Jim the queer drama teacher who thought they should marry but was really in love with \u201cThe Boy in The Fantasticks<\/em>,\u201d the lovers who lied to her or to whom she lied (\u201cI\u2019ve said big dick when I meant small dick\u201d), or the raw and barely viable self itself, always trying and never attaining the nebulous goal of being a better self: \u201cInside, Diane, you suffer \/ and your suffering is you.\u201d \u2013DW<\/em><\/p>\n Cindy Juyoung Ok, Ward Toward<\/a> Perhaps the most distinguished prize for a first poetry book is the Yale Series of Younger Poets, which is legendary for the tenure of W. H. Auden, who selected John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, W. S. Merwin, and James Wright. While there is a plethora of prizes now\u2014like the Academy of American Poets prize, whose 2024 release will be Sara Daniele Rivera\u2019s The Blue Mimes <\/em>(Graywolf Press), or one that was new to me, the Trio Award for emerging poets, whose forthcoming title is Christian Gullette\u2019s Coachella Elegy<\/em> (Trio House Press)\u2014Rae Armantrout\u2019s choice of Cindy Juyoung Ok\u2019s Ward Toward<\/em> for the Yale prize will represent all the exciting debuts I\u2019m looking forward to this year.<\/p>\n With brio and sorrow, Ok\u2019s book investigates such subjects as hospitalization for a major depressive disorder, the anti-Asian Atlanta spa shootings, and the failures of romantic and familial love. She is equally at home in parables, dream states, and more abstract contemplation: \u201cHypercorrection reveals an anxiety around the appearance of knowing and belonging.\u201d<\/p>\n Using a variety of formal devices, including poems written in Korean-inflected English and one in the shape of Korea, she moves through a range of emotional tenors to touch the heart of her life as a \u201cyounger poet.\u201d Ok\u2019s m\u00e9tier in this lovely debut is an elegantly discursive, analytical style studded with ironies: \u201cWhen bitten, ignore the instinct to pull, instead \/ pushing the latched body part further into \/\/ the biting mouth. This will lead to release, \/ though perhaps then it all starts again.\u201d \u2013DW<\/em><\/p>\n Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Silver<\/a> \u201cPoetry is s\u00e9ance and silence and science,\u201d Phillips writes in Silver<\/em>, his fourth collection. The seance summons a presiding spirit of this collection, the Wallace Stevens of the late-Romantic meditative eloquence (the lights at Key West that \u201cmastered the night and portioned out the sea\u201d). The silence is that of a place in the woods away from the pandemic where the speaker goes to cull \u201cfrom those cold mountaintops the next fire.\u201d The silence is that of a grandmother dying on the cusp of the pandemic. The science is the prosody of air and metal that lifts a silver plane with its silver contrail above the woods and the silver of the rental car to which the speaker rushes to avoid an expired parking meter, also silver, as the grandmother expires. \u201cAnd I will be nothing but poetry,\u201d the speaker says in his mournful solitude, \u201cA blank in the blankness of the long game.\u201d<\/p>\n The poems are more forthright than Stevens, more directly autobiographical and socially equitable, but the dedication with which Phillips approaches the art of poetry is, like Stevens, tonic and inspiring. \u201cTo be bottomless, atemporal, absent of hierarchy, and just,\u201d he enjoins in \u201cBiographia Literaria. \u201cTo accept that poetry is older than reflex, that it predates intention, that it is the breath your breath takes before you breathe.\u201d\u00a0 \u2013DW<\/em><\/p>\n Jean Valentine, Light Me Down: The New and Collected Poems<\/a> Ever since Jean Valentine died in 2020, there\u2019s been a hole left in the American poetic landscape, or perhaps I should say dreamscape. Her previous New and Collected, which won the National Book Award in 2004, gave way to the spare and stirring grief, memory, and visions of her later work that includes three of my favorites: Little Boat, Break the Glass, <\/em>and Shirt in Heaven. <\/em>What an enormous gift to have one of our major poets collected anew, and to have these new poems to discover. Let the countdown to this April release begin.\u00a0\u00a0 \u2013RMF<\/em><\/p>\n Reginald Shepherd, The Selected Shepherd<\/a> In his last book, before his premature death from cancer, Shepherd (1963-2008) wrote, \u201cThe dead move fast, nowhere \/ to nowhere in no time at all.\u201d To read him and others with posthumous collections forthcoming this year, like The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz <\/em>and Invisible Mending: The Best of C. K. Williams <\/em>(both Farrar, Straus and Giroux), is to slow the departure of the dead and situate them in the somewhere of one\u2019s passionate attention to their pages.<\/p>\n By the time of his death, Shepherd was attaining the status of a poet\u2019s poet, with his command of literature, his aesthete\u2019s attention to style, his restless metamorphosis from book to book (six in all), and his lacerating honesty. He was outspoken about a Bronx tenement upbringing with a difficult single mother who was dissipated, alcoholic, and suicidal (\u201cYou were my mother; I love you more \/ dead\u201d) and about his identity as an HIV-positive, Black, gay man whose preference was handsome white men (he labeled himself a \u201csnow queen\u201d), but he complicated these themes through the ruthless clarity of his self-knowledge. For example, in \u201cHygiene,\u201d a poem about Jeffrey Dahmer, who murdered many men of color, Shepherd wrote, \u201cEvery white man on the bus looks \/ like him, what I\u2019d want to be destroyed \/ by, want to be.\u201d<\/p>\n Jericho Brown\u2019s selections return to the literary scene a poet who now looks like a gainfully conflicted forerunner of the confessional poetic practice of many queer and BIPOC poets today as well as a source of enduring aesthetic contemplation, like the tremblingly elliptical love poem \u201cA Little Knowledge,\u201d \u201cThe poems I wanted were nothing \/ like my heart: nothing joined \/ us together, nothing held us apart.\u201d\u00a0 \u2013DW<\/em><\/p>\n Arthur Sze, The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry<\/a> The artistic interpretations that we call \u201ctranslations\u201d are central to my love of poetry, helping me to imagine with greater immediacy other cultures and epochs, however circumscribed a work may be by the English language. Among the translations I\u2019m looking forward to this year include Stephen Mitchell\u2019s version of Catullus: Selected Poems <\/em>(Yale University Press), Brian Henry\u2019s of Toma\u017e \u0160alamun\u2019s Kiss the Eyes of Peace <\/em>(Milkweed Editions), Robin Myers\u2019 of Javier Pe\u00f1alosa M.\u2019s What Comes Back <\/em>(Copper Canyon), Jeff Clark\u2019s of St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9\u2019s A Roll of the Dice <\/em>(Wave Books), Edward Snow\u2019s of Rainer Maria Rilke\u2019s Book of Hours <\/em>(Norton), and Peter Filkins\u2019 of Ingeborg Bachman\u2019s Darkness Spoken<\/em> (Zephyr Press).<\/p>\n As is evident in his award-winning collected poems, The Glass Constellation <\/em>(Copper Canyon), Arthur Sze\u2019s poetic practice has always made the thematic ranges and sensory detailing of classical Chinese poetry central to his own imagination, like the woodblock carver in the poem \u201cWater Calligraphy\u201d who \u201cpeels off pear shavings, stroke by stroke, \/ and foregrounds characters against empty space.\u201d The Silk Dragon II <\/em>is an augmented edition of The Silk Dragon <\/em>(2001), adding 18 new translations, mostly of poets since the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), to a working poet\u2019s selection of more than a millennium of Chinese poems that have engaged and inspired him.<\/p>\n In these lucid translations, Sze offers pleasures for all types of readers, those who want another taste of ancient favorites like Du Fu (\u201cThe nation is broken, but hills and rivers remain\u201d) and Li He (\u201cI will cut off the dragon\u2019s feet \/ and chew the dragon\u2019s flesh\u201d), those new to Chinese poetry (his candid account of one poem\u2019s tortuous process remains the best introduction to the art of Chinese translation that I know of), and those who admire Sze\u2019s own work for its telling specificities, as in Wen Yiduo (\u201cI feed the fire cobwebs, rat droppings, and also the scaly skins of spotted snakes\u201d), and its prismatic finesse, as in Xi Chuan (\u201cThe figures acquire the mountains \/ and waters, just as the mountains acquire the emerald and lapis\u201d).\u00a0\u00a0 \u2013DW<\/em><\/p>\n Stephanie Choi, The Lengest Neoi<\/a> Selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the Iowa Poetry Prize, Stephanie Choi\u2019s debut, The Lengest Neoi, <\/em>revels in formal variation and conversation (with poets, films, language\/s, a mother), albeit with twists. A lipogram isn\u2019t a lipogram, but the story of a tattoo with a missing letter; a sonnet crown gets disrupted, or expanded, by missing words and a crossword and with missing words; a series of \u201csound translations\u201d draw on Jonathan Stalling\u2019s Y\u00edng\u0113l\u00ecshi <\/em>process\u2013 there\u2019s much to solve, puzzle over, discover. The collection\u2019s title reflects Choi\u2019s language play: Leng Neoi, which translates from the Cantonese to \u201cPretty Girl,\u201d becomes \u201cLengest,\u201d a linguistically hybrid superlative for prettiest. These poems upend \u201ccorrections\u201d of language and body\u2013the spine, the jaw. A poem with headgear ends with a mother\u2019s twist of the expander: \u201cshe didn\u2019t know \/. She was turning\/ the song\/ right out of me.\u201d \u2013RMF<\/em><\/p>\n Li-Young Lee, The Invention of the Darling<\/a> The good news for Li-young Lee fans who waited a decade for his last collection, The Undressing<\/em> (2018), is that 2024 brings another new collection, The Invention of the Darling.<\/em> The speaker in the title poem of Li-Young Lee\u2019s new collection asks a friend, \u201cDo all lovers begin in hell and end in knowledge?\u201d The catch is revealed in this repeated line: \u201cMy friend and I are in love with the same woman.\u201d But this poem feels more tied to the contemporary human world than the rest: expect more elemental and mythopoetical longer poems, characteristically spare in their embrace of the vast (love, death, God), and circular in their choruses of repetition and return through phrases and figures\u2013serpent, hummingbird, and, in the familiar Lee cosmos, mother and father.\u00a0 \u2013RMF<\/em><\/p>\n Jos\u00e9 Antonio Rodr\u00edguez, The Day\u2019s Hard Edge<\/a> \u00a0\u201cTender,\u201d \u201cShelter,\u201d \u201cEntire,\u201d \u201cIn the Presence of Sunlight,\u201d\u2013 these Jos\u00e9 Antonio Rodr\u00edguez poems from The Day\u2019s Hard Edge <\/em>perfect the dance between lyric and storytelling, between autobiography and ars poetica, and you may have caught all of them in The New Yorker <\/em>already. Rodriquez, a queer Chicano poet with a few poetry collections and a memoir under his belt, returns to Northwestern University press with this collection that promises to reflect him at new heights in his work. In \u201cPilgrim,\u201d he wonders \u201cAbout plants standing in for our bodies \/ In poems\u201d \u2013then he turns to roses and\u00a0 Virgen of Guadalupe: \u201c Yes, she was a deity then,\/ But she had inhabited a body once.\u201d These are the rare poems about making that make me want to read more. \u201cI\u2019m not saying I\u2019m better than you,\u201d the speaker of \u201cMercy\u201d says. \u201cI\u2019ve been a prophet. I\u2019ve been a fool.\u201d I can\u2019t wait to have the full collection in hand: I\u2019m anticipating this as a 2024 favorite. \u2013RMF<\/em><\/p>\n![\"root](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/9781668031308-200x300.jpg\")
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\n<\/em>(Scribner, January 30)<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/anne-carson-wrong-norma-233x300.png\")
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\n<\/em>(New Directions, February 6)<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/9780822967217-206x300.jpg\")
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\n(University of Pittsburgh Press, February 13)<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"modern](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/modern-poetry-200x300.png\")
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\n<\/em>(Graywolf Press, March 5)<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"ward](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/ward-toward-199x300.png\")
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\n<\/em>(Yale University Press, March 5)<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/silver-196x300.png\")
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\n<\/em>(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 5)<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"light](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/9781949944600-200x300.jpg\")
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\n<\/em>(Alice James, April 9)<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/9780822948216-194x300.jpg\")
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\n<\/em>(University of Pittsburgh Press, April 9)<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"the](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/9781556597077-200x300.jpg\")
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\n<\/em>(Copper Canyon Press, April 16)<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/9781609389512-233x300.jpg\")
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\n<\/em>(University of Iowa Press, May 6)<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/invention-of-the-darling-200x300.png\")
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\n<\/em>(Norton, May 14)<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/IMG_1481-200x300.jpg\")
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\n<\/em>(Northwestern University Press, June 15)<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"Instructions](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/9781643622316-199x300.jpg\")
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/bluff-233x300.png\")
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