If You Like This Prose Book, Read This Poetry Collection

A quick glance at the titles of Brown Girls and suddenly we signals to readers a group, a “we.” Featuring concrete, ekphrastic, and prose poems, along with other forms, Shockley’s stunning collection teems with musicality, wordplay, and first person plural. Bookended by “alma’s arkestral vision (or, farther out)” and “les milles,” each of the four titled sections between centers a collective voice (from “we :: becoming & going” to “we :: adhere & there”). Just as I revisited the poetic vignettes in Daphne Palasi Andreades’s debut novel, I want to study this beautiful meditation on awe, Black womanhood, mythology, and U.S. history.

The presence of religion and strong sense of place in Kirstin Valdez Quade’s unputdownable debut novel and Salazar’s stellar debut collection fused these for me. While The Five Wounds is set in a little town in New Mexico, these captivating poems explore the South. After flipping through the four sections recently, this startling image in “Ode” has been frequenting my thoughts: “Now all / the barns are eating themselves like sad stars // God gave up on, living out the rest of their lives” Delving into bells, love, violence, and vulnerability, I’m in awe of so much within these pages: the sonnets, the repetition, the rivers.

If you find yourself drawn to gutting but hopeful dystopian literature like Sequoia Nagamatsu’s page-turner of a debut novel, seek out Choi’s third full-length collection, which unfolds in five parts. A glimpse of the opening of “Science Fiction Poetry,” a haunting piece I bookmarked in my hardcover and audiobook: “Dystopia of the lost file; // Dystopia of the cracked screen; // Dystopia of the ankle prone to getting sprained again; // Dystopia of house plants gone yellow and headless;” For this poem’s ending and more endings and beginnings, spend time with this unforgettable work about grief, kinship, Korean American identity, and survival. I can’t recommend it enough.

With all of the art, learning, desire, and ambition, this lyrical debut by Antonia Angress and Shaughnessy’s latest feel like friends. Reflecting on artists, creativity, inspiration, and making, this marvelous collection from the author of The Octopus Museum is philosophical and women-drenched. Organized into three parts, “Saeculum” introduces the book: “She was Woman of the Year that year. She got a plaque.” I scrawled down sentences brimming with wisdom to hold close. And I scrawled down this one from “Moving Far Away” because it paused my breath in my body: “I’ll never forget you told me never to forget // but I did.”

While browsing the finished prose clustered at the end of my alphabetized bookshelves for a companion for this must-read about inheritance, longing, loss, and personal histories, I pulled down Victoria Chang’s innovative book, recalling similar themes and multimedia collages combining images and text. In Smith’s extraordinary collection, 42 numbered poems accompany 19th century pictures of Black people photographed in New York, Michigan, Nebraska, California, and elsewhere. In the “Preface,” the author of Incendiary Art, who has collected over 200 images across two decades, writes, “…I became obsessed with conjuring voices that reflect who the subjects in the pictures may have been and how they are inextricably connected to us.”

Can we take a minute to appreciate these striking pink book covers? Poignant and propulsive, Camonghne Felix’s gorgeous debut memoir and this electric second collection examine so much with care: love, trauma, mental illness and treatment, and healing. Pink sticky flags mark Leigh’s lines, stanzas, and pages. In the third and final part, “Bipolar II Disorder: Second Evaluation (Zuihitsu for Bianca)” begins: “We all called her Bianca. My fever, my havoc, my tilt. Bianca trashed the kitchen.” How much I needed this book in my life, and — like I listened to Dyscalculia back to back — I trust I’ll reread it soon.