Audre Lorde

Kathryn Cowles‘s grounding and beautiful poetry collection Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World (Milkweed) was recently published! She’s sharing her pile with us, and dang is it epic. (I’m only going to hyperlink the first part of the list, but do be sure to check out any of these titles with the help Dr. Internet.) Kathryn writes:

I bought a stack of poetry books from online AWP this year, but the reading’s been slow, given the state of the world. Some of these books are from that stack, some have come out since then, and a handful of them are from members of the wonderful literary community around the Finger Lakes/Rochester/Ithaca area, where I live. Some I’ve read recently, some I’m about to. Also, I’m getting ready to teach my multi-media writing workshop in the fall (with fine-arts students from all over campus), so a lot of these books, especially the arts and multi-media ones, are things I’m getting ready to read and reread and teach.

Slew of poetry books:
Kiki Petrosino – White Blood
Natalie Diaz – Postcolonial Love Poem
Marianne Chan – All Heathens
Danielle Pafunda – Spite
Albert Abonado – Jaw
Burgi Zenhaeusern – Behind Normalcy
Elana Bell – Eyes, Stones
Bruce Snider – Fruit
Kathryn Nuernberger – Rue
Ilya Kaminsky – Deaf Republic
Danez Smith – Homie
Esther Lee – Sacrificial Metal
Cori Winrock – Little Envelope of Earth Conditions
Not pictured: Shira Dentz’s gorgeous Sisyphusina, which I left in my office

Poetry-ish-plus/ Poetry crit/ Lyric essaying:
Susan Howe – Concordance (I can’t believe I haven’t read this yet)
Ely Shipley – Some Animal
Christopher Patton – Unlikeness Is Us (translations of Old English poems in a really gorgeous copy)
Claudia Keelan – Ecstatic Émigré: An Ethics of Practice (from U Michigan’s Poets on Poetry series)
Kazim Ali – Silver Road
Till One Day the Sun Shall Shine More Brightly : The Poetry and Prose of Donald Revell (Ed. Derek Pollard) (I wrote an essay for this critical anthology, but I haven’t had a chance to read very many of the other essays yet)

Straight-up Prose:
Sejal Shah – This Is One Way to Dance
Melanie Conroy-Goldman – The Likely World (I’m working on a review of this terrific novel—intensely literary and somehow also a real page-turner)

Multi-media writing/art/collaboration/erasure/etc.:
Anne Rorimer – New Art in the 60s and 70s (research for a new project)
Emily Dickinson – The Gorgeous Nothings (eds. Marta Werner and Jen Bervin, with preface by Susan Howe)
Jen Bervin – Silk Poems
M. NourbeSe Philip “As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng” – Zong!
Craig Santos Perez – [lukao]
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha – Dictee
David Hinton – Fossil Sky (more a cloud map than a book)
Ben Marcus and Matthew Ritchie – The Father Costume (Marcus wrote the fiction piece, Ritchie did the art)
Eleni Sikelianos – Body Clock
Matthew Harvey and Amy Jean Porter – Of Lamb (Harvey did the erasure of a Charles Lamb biography, and Porter did the art)
Aruna D’Souza – Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts
Blaise Cendrars/ Sonia Delaunay – La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (an astonishing and beautiful reprint of the original accordion-style scroll by Yale UP)
Yoko Ono – grapefruit
Michael DeForge – Big Kids (terrific and tiny graphic novel lent to me pre-lockdown by a student and still not returned!)
Mary Ruefle – A Little White Shadow (I dearly love Ruefle’s erasures; she was a writer in residence one year for the residency I co-direct, and she does erasures every morning the way other people read the news)
Liat Berdugo – The Everyday Maths (commandeered diagrams)

As for me, I’m getting a little overzealous between the bookstore and the library, but hey. I blew through all my slim poetry books last month, maybe too quickly.

– NEWIES –
Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates; World’d Too Much, Russell Atkins (ed. Kevin Prufer); Dream of Europe, Audre Lorde;  New and Selected Poems, Toi Derricotte; How We Fight for Our Lives, Saeed Jones, The Cut-Outs of Matisse, John Elderfield (ed.); Matisse the Master, Hilary Spurling (in-progress)

– OLDIES  –
Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks; Boy Oh Boy, Zachary Doss; The Book of Delights, Ross Gay (in-progress); Hiroshima, John Hersey; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean-Dominique Bauby (trans. Jeremy Leggatt); Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit; A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley