Carmen Giménez Smith

La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living by Jennifer Hasegawa

The Flayed City by Hari Alluri

Sho by Douglas Kearney

The Monumental Misrememberings by Mimi Tempestt

Imagine Us, The Swarm by Muriel Leung

How To Wash A Heart by Bhanu Kapil

“Topdog/Underdog” (a play) by Suzan Lori Parks

Snowflake / Different Streets by Eileen Miles

Lake Michigan by Daniel Borzutzky

Dear Angel of Death by Simone White

Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong

The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers by Bhanu Kapil
WHEREAS by Layli Long Soldier
the déjà vu by Gabrielle Civil

– NEWIES –
Joe Sacco, Paying the Land (read, not pictured)
Ashley C. Ford, Somebody’s Daughter
Denis Johnson, Train Dreams

– OLDIES –
César Aria, The Divorce (trans. Chris Andrews); Niloufar Talebi, Self-Portrait in Bloom; Angela Jackson, Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life and Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks; bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress ; Maggie Nelson, The Red Parts (re-read); Sarah Manguso, The Two Kinds of Decay (re-read); Mir Taqi Mir, Remembrances (trans. C.M. Naim); Mary Sarton, After the Stroke; Lisa Fishman, Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition; Srikanth Reddy, Underworld Lit; Karen Tei Yamashita, Letters to Memory; Kate Durbin, Hoarders; Hoa Nguyen, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure; Henry Hoke, The Groundhog Forever; Thalia Field, Personhood; Ross Gay, Be Holding; Tessa Miller, What Doesn’t Kill You; Natalie Ginzburg, Voices in the Evening (trans. D.M. Low); Toni Morrison, Sula; Joy Harjo, An American Sunrise; Dag Solstad, Novel 11, Book 18 (trans. Sverre Lyngstad); Gabrielle Civil, ( ghost gestures ); Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat (in-progress); Ari Banias, A Symmetry; Sandra Lim, The Curious Thing; Harald Voetmann, Awake (trans. Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen); Jane Lapotaire, Time Out of Mind; Joseph N. Straus, Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music; Evie Shockley, Semiautomatic

Welcoming the new decade with the wonderful poet and scholar Cameron Awkward-Rich‘s book piles (yup, plural). Cam’s recently published poetry collection Dispatch won the 2018 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award at Persea. It’s not on my shelf yet, but I cannot wait to get my hands on a copy. His piles are amazing!

He explains: “I don’t maintain a ‘to-read pile’ per se, but here are the books that are not properly on the shelf, which means that they are just-read, to-return-to, to-finish, to-read, and/or to-hang-out-with.”

Pile #1, by the kitchen table, for the mornings:

Odes to Lithium, Shira Erlichman
Space Struck, Paige Lewis
The Malevolent Volume, Justin Phillip Reed
Felon, Reginald Dwayne Betts
The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching, David Gooblar
The Truth About Animals, Lucy Cooke
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Cathy Park Hong
Homie, Danez Smith
Leaves of Grass + Other Writings, Walt Whitman
The Odyssey, Homer (translated by Robert Fitzgerald)
Slingshot, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson
The Earthquake Room, Davey Davis
The World Doesn’t Require You, Rion Amilcar Scott
I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World, Kai Cheng Thom

Pile #2, by my home office desk, (academic) books that I am currently writing with, or am likely to:

Black Madness :: Mad Blackness, Therí A. Pickens
Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People, Viviane K. Namaste
Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Esteban Muñoz
Black Queer Studies, E. Patrick Johnson + Mae G. Henderson (editors)
The Right to Maim, Jasbir Puar
Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Heather Love
Ezili’s Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley
Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures, L. H. Stallings
We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, Ellis Martin + Zach Ozma (editors)
Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai
Histories of the Transgender Child, Jules Gill-Peterson
The Queer Limits of Black Memory, Matt Richardson
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, C. Riley Snorton
Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality, Siobhan B. Somerville
Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom, Sarah Jane Cervenak
Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss, Jay Prosser
Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience, Hilary Malatino
How to Make Art at the End of the World, Natalie Loveless
Camp TV: Trans Gender Queer Sitcom History, Quinlan Miller
Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of Emotions, Kathleen Woodward
When Time Warps: The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence, Megan Burke
Transgressed: Intimate Partner Violence in Transgender Lives, Xavier L. Guadalupe-Diaz
On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf

Pile #3, under the TV, to be picked back up and/or put into rotation:

What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use, Sara Ahmed
Madness, Rack, and Honey, Mary Ruefle
Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement, Jian Neo Cheng
Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault
Ugly Differences: Queer Female Sexuality in the Underground, Yetta Howard
Useless Landscape or A Guidebook for Boys, D.A. Powell
Be Recorder, Carmen Giménez Smith
Presence Detection System, Nora Collen Fulton
The Dimension of the Present Moment, Miroslav Holub
Letters from Max, Max Ritvo and Sarah Ruhl
Like Trees, Walking, Ravi Howard
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Sigmund Freud
Here Comes the Sun, Nicole Dennis-Benn

Here’s my own lone line. My hope for 2020 is to read more poetry—I’ve been leaning perhaps too far into prose this last year. But here’s where I’m starting out my next decade:

– NEWIES –
Elementary Poetry, Andrei Monastyrski (translated by Brian Droitcour, Yelena Kalinsky)
Amalgam, Sotère Torregian
Wave Archive, Emmalea Russo
The Grave on the Wall, Brandon Shimoda
Civil Bound, Myung Mi Kim
The Octopus Museum, Brenda Shaughnessy (not pictured, but read)
The Tradition, Jericho Brown (not pictured, but read)
Utopia Pipe Dream Memory, Anna Gurton-Wachter (not pictured, but read)
Story, Jennifer Firestone (not pictured, but read)

– OLDIES –

Conference of the Birds, Farid Ud-din Attar; Lacuna Park: Essays and Other Adventures in Photography, Nicholas Muellner; Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault; Kansastan, Farooq Ahmed; Heavy, Kiese Laymon; Obit, Victoria Chang; Animal, Dorothea Lasky; Workshops of Empire, Eric Bennett

The amazing prose writer Xuan Juliana Wang, author most recently of the gorgeous short story collection Home Remedies (Hogarth), shares her to-read pile with us this month. Swann’s Way is always there, she says. She always keeps trying to start it.

Rabbits for Food, Binnie Kirshenbaum
Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust (trans. Lydia Davis)
The Boys of My Youth, Jo Ann Beard
America Is Not the Heart, Elaine Castillo
Transoceanic Lights, S.Li
Mean, Myriam Gurba
A Prayer for Travelers, Ruchika Tomar

Some reading (not enough) and some gaining (not enough):

– NEWIES –

Animal, Dorothea Lasky
Magdalene, Marie Howe
Homesick, Jennifer Croft
Discipline, Dawn Lundy Martin
Be Recorder, Carmen Giménez Smith
Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener
Human Tetris, Vi Khi Nao and Ali Raz
Warnings from the Future, Ethan Chatagnier
A Prayer for Travelers, Ruchika Tomar

– OLDIES –

Conference of the Birds, Farid Ud-din Attar; Experiments in Joy, Gabrielle Civil; The Lice, W.S. Merwin; Potted Meat, Steven Dunn; The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde; Joy Enough, Sarah McColl; Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love, Anna Moschovakis; Home Remedies, Xuan Juliana Wang (in progress!); The Line Becomes a River, Francisco Cantú; Orient, Nicholas Gulig; Extratransmission, Andrea Abi-Karam; Book of Scab, Danielle Pafunda; Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado; The Interface for a Fractal Landscape, Ed Steck; Motion Studies, Jena Osman; The Winter Garden Photograph, Reina María Rodríguez (trans. Kristin Dykstra); Little Birds, Anaïs Nin; Lo Terciario / The Tertiary, Raquel Salas Rivera; Still Nowhere an Empty Vastness, Roberto Tejada; Sir, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle; Sun at Midnight, Muso Soseki (trans. W.S. Merwin and Soiku Shigematsu, out of print); The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, Katya Apekina