Robin Wall Kimmerer

Author of the newly published short story collection Sarahland (which I have, and cannot wait to crack open), Sam Cohen is sharing her to-read pile with us this month:

Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, Sarah Schulman
We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival, eds. Natalie West and Tina Horn
Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami (trans. Sam Bett, David Boyd)
Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
Sula, Toni Morrison
Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald
Girlhood, Melissa Febos
When We Were Outlaws: A Memoir of Love & Revolution, Jeanna Córdova
Gathering Moss, Robin Wall Kimmerer
Make Your Art No Matter What, Beth Pickens
100 Boyfriends, Brontez Purnell (sought for for hours, not pictured, but here in spirit)

March ended up harder than February reading-wise. The cruelest month is ahead of me, but these books aren’t going to read themselves. But the stack is definitely in “uh-oh” territory. Hopefully I’ll be able to dive in soon.

– NEWIES –

Sarahland, Sam Cohen (hooray!!)
Antonio, Beatriz Bracher (trans. Adam Morris)
The Living Method, Sarah Nicholson
Scardanelli, Friederike Mayröcker (trans. Jonathan Larson)
Letters to Memory, Karen Tei Yamashita
Sometimes I Never Suffered, Shane McCrae
Fieldglass, Catherine Pond
Hoarders, Kate Durbin
Giant Moth Perishes, Geoffrey Nutter
A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, Hoa Nguyen
Sho, Douglas Kearney
The Gentle Barbarian, Bohumil Hrabal (trans. Paul Wilson)

– OLDIES  –
Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks; Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates (in-progress); Dream of Europe, Audre Lorde; The Red Parts, Maggie Nelson (re-read); The Two Kinds of Decay, Sarah Manguso (re-read); Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer; Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, Jeannie Vanasco; Pigeons on the Grass, Wolfgang Koeppen (trans. Michael Hoffman); Leave the World Behind, Rumaan Alam; Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi; Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones); Remembrances, Mir Taqi Mir (trans. C.M. Naim); Land of Love and Drowning, Tiphanie Yanique (in-progress); After the Stroke, May Sarton; Curb, Divya Victor; All the Rage, Rosamond S. King; Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition, Lisa Fishman; Underworld Lit, Srikanth Reddy; Forgotten Journey, Silvina Ocampo (trans. by Suzanne Jill Levine, Katie Lateef-Jan); Natural Birth, Toi Derricotte

Goodbye old Julian calendar year, hello 2021. May you treat us even a bit more kindly. We begin the brand new year with Aeon Ginsburg‘s to-read pile! Aeon’s first full-length poetry collection Greyhound came out this fall, and you should definitely take a look. (Full disclosure, I edited this brilliant book.) Here’s what Aeon’s looking to read:

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I Got A Monster by Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg
Now by The Invisible Committee
Virtual Reality – Edition Digital Culture 6
The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley (with notes by Rebecca Teich)
Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker
Arts of Living On A Damaged Planet edited by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt
Surrogate Humanity by Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora
Indictus by Natalie Eilbert
Without Protection by Gala Mukomolova
Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon translated by Don Mee Choi
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
When I Grow Up I Want To Be A List Of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen
We Want It All edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel

As for me, you’d think I had a year with endless time considering all the new books I’ve amassed…Still. There are worse things that entering a new year with an ambitious stack.

– NEWIES –
Days of Distraction, Alexandra Chang
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney
The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women, ed. Dick Davis
Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi
Winter in the Blood, James Welch
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones)
A Fortune for Your Disaster, Hanif Abduraqqib
Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, Nikki Finney
The Red Parts and Bluets, Maggie Nelson (re-read)
Leave the World Behind, Rumaan Alam
Fierce Attachments, Vivian Gornick
Something Like an Autobiography, Akira Kurosawa (trans. Audie E. Bock)

– OLDIES  –
Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks; A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley; Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates; Dream of Europe, Audre Lorde;  New and Selected Poems, Toi Derricotte; The Two Kinds of Decay, Sarah Manguso (re-read); Defacing the Monument, Susan Briante; Phong Nha, the Making of an American Smile, Tammy Nguyen; Reincarnating Marechera: Notes on a Speculative Archive, Tinashe Mushakavanhu; Guillotine, Eduardo C. Corral; Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From, Sawako Nakayasu; Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer; Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, Jeannie Vanasco; The Essential Ruth Stone, ed. Bianca Stone; Pigeons on the Grass, Wolfgang Koeppen (trans. Michael Hoffman); The Marathon Poet, Åke Hodell (trans. Fia Backström, ed. Kira Josefsson); Life in Space, Galina Rymbu (trans. Joan Brooks); Sonnets, Ulises Carrión; Soviet Texts, Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov (trans. Simon Schuchat, Ainsley Morse); Being Human Is an Occult Practice, Magdalena Zurawski; Notes on Mother Tongues: Colonialism, Class, and Giving What You Don’t Have, Mirene Arsanios; The End, Aditi Machado; Quartet, Claudia La Rocco; Zero Energy Experimental Pile, Alex Cruse

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we’re rolling in a little late this month as news kept us glued to screens rather than books. But! Joshua Rivkin‘s poetry collection Suitor is hot off the presses and he shares his to-read pile with us this month! What he hopes to (re)read soon:

Twice There Was a Country, Alen Hamza 
Guillotine, Eduardo Corral 
The Black Maria, Aracelis Girmay
Underworld Lit, Srikanth Reddy 
Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, John Murillo
The Unreality of Memory, Elisa Gabbert 
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, Jenn Shapland 
Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong  
Cleanness, Garth Greenwell 
Middle Distance, Stanley Plumley 

Making headway, but still so much to go. Proud of myself for not acquiring so many new books, considering this stack.

– NEWIES –
4 Brown Girls Who Write, Roshni Goyate, Sharan Hunjan, Sunnah Khan, and Sheena Patel
Box Hill: A Story of Low Self-Esteem, Adam Mars-Jones
The Inheritance of Haunting, Heidi Andrea Rostrepo Rhodes
The Fact of a Body, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
Two Trees Make a Forest, Jessica J. Lee
Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, Jeannie Vanasco
The Essential Ruth Stone, ed. Bianca Stone

– OLDIES  –
Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks; Boy Oh Boy, Zachary Doss; A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley; Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates; Dream of Europe, Audre Lorde;  New and Selected Poems, Toi Derricotte; The Two Kinds of Decay, Sarah Manguso; The Undocumented Americans, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio; Defacing the Monument, Susan Briante; Phong Nha, the Making of an American Smile, Tammy Nguyen; Reincarnating Marechera: Notes on a Speculative Archive, Tinashe Mushakavanhu; Felon, Reginald Dwayne Betts; Guillotine, Eduardo C. Corral; Borderland Apocrypha, Anthony Cody; Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From, Sawako Nakayasu; Anodyne, Khadijah Queen; Homie, Danez Smith