From Ghostly Forests to “Zombie Vomit Mad Libs.” Seven Poetry Books to Read in November
It seems fitting that as we enter the zone between Halloween and election day, we encounter Zombie Vomit Mad Libs, The Ghost Forest, and Field Guide to Accidents. Throw in Cowboy Park, the one debut in this month’s poetry round-up, and November starts to look like a contender for best titles of 2024.
Yes, these collections offer up cowboys and zombies, and also velvet ants, sleep guides, Roman recipes (sort of), mad lib poems, and found-line ghazals. But don’t let the presence of formal romps and catchy titles deceive you: this month carries forward hauntings of many kinds: lost parents, a deported brother, the victims of war.
This is my last round-up of 2024, so I’ll end with a shout-out to the brilliant David Woo, who has shared this column with me for the last year, and who will cycle off after his December round-up. Stay tuned for his finale, and for the new year, when Christopher Spaide will step in to join me here. See you all in 2025!
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Albert Abonado, Field Guide for Accidents
“My wife wants to know why I reduce my poems/ to something that fits in my mouth. I don’t tell her I buried / my relatives in my throat,” recounts the speaker of the opening poem of Albert Abonado’s second collection, Field Guide for Accidents, a 2024 National Poetry Series winner selected by Mahogany L. Browne.
Burial, absence in statistics, misidentification: throughout, Abonado marks the erasures of Filipino-American experience, while also provoking its presence, invoking Manananggal, Aswang, Kaprem from Filipino lore, as well as, in “Ode to Kamayan,” the Filipino tradition of Kamayan, eating with hands, not utensils.
Motifs of hands and mouths reign in the compelling lyrics of the opening section, enticements that give way to welcome surprises like the prose poem, “Rival,” which begins with a game of nose stealing among children, then turns: “When I found his nose, he was already dead.”
Imagination rivals and reinscribes memory in these poems, including the titular poem, a meditation weaving sources on sleep-deprivation and “drowsy driving” accidents with histories of the speaker’s parents, including an almost-fatal car wreck. “Each imagined reconstruction of this event ended the same. They remained untouchable.”
Traci Brimhall, Love Prodigal
Traci Brimhall’s fifth collection simmers with “the slow/ smolder of Kansas and its controlled burns,” as she rekindles her relationship to the aubades of her debut collection, Rookery, and, to some degree, its poetic sensibilities. These are poems populated by “noctures of sonorous/ moths,” leaf-cutters and velvet ants, but also “favorite panties–the pink ones,””and the tongue kept “in training, / heroic, ready for Olympic kisses,” an image found in a mediation on divorce featuring the barn owl, who, we learn, frequently moves on.
These poems of mid-life renewal reverberate with the past, rewritten from a transformative new landscape. “Why I stayed” pulses with “because[s]”: “[b]ecause joy returned with a kiss crisp as a dried bee that became a stab / of honey on my tongue.” “I didn’t know I loved Kansas,” begins “Refugia,” and by the time we hit this homage to Nazim Hikmet, we’ve swallowed a tract of loss and spark, all the while grounded in Kansas’ landscape.
Throughout, Brimhall builds “the truth of motherhood,” a motherhood set realistically within illness, divorce, transformations. As these poems enthusiastically remind us, all of life continues to happen when mothering, including the passions, bodily and poetic, that thread a body of work, a personal history that moves toward freedom and power.
As if a mirror, the son emerges from the landscape and “holds his arms out and says if he were an insect/ he’d be a flying scorpion.”
Duy Đoàn, Zombie Vomit Mad Libs
What happens if you add Vietnamese diacritics to English words in a poem? If you take the Wikipedia article on “Tooth” and start substituting in “frog” to make a “Frog Autobiography?” Or if you use a Mayo Clinic entry on eye floaters and plug in the material details of Anne Sexton’s suicide? The stakes and outcomes of these questions may vary drastically, but their formal proximity makes a statement.
Duy Đoàn carries twenty-first-century nostalgia for language play and loose procedural forms to the edge in Zombie Vomit Mad Libs, the follow-up to We Play a Game, winner of the 2017 Yale Series of Younger Poets. These poems are allusively cinematic and romp with darkness: one sonnet is constructed of the first names of poets who committed suicide, another of the dates.
Nosferatu takes center stage, but there are also appearances by Sonic the Hedgehog, and zombies, zombies, zombies, as present in their absence as in their titular domination. Still, these are serious matters; in the ars poetica “Everything Means Nothing Compares,” the speaker posits, “Maybe // it’s our denominator / that’s weak. / not my numerator.”
Kimiko Hahn, The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems
Whether you’re looking to be introduced to Kimiko Hahn’s larger body of work or to have a convenient anthology of her reckonings, her New and Selected, The Ghost Forest, is a rich primer of formal play and one of 2024’s gems. The new poems (forty-three of them!) are packed with glosas, contrapuntals, golden shovels, erasures, found-line ghazals.
In the selected work, you’ll catch her “Exhuming a Centos”; forging “Reckless Sonnets” from the visceral and violent lives of insects; following the brush of the Japanese hybrid form of the zuihitsu into twentieth-century modes of writing. As Hahn notes to the reader in one of the section dividers between collections—an intimate touch that reminds us she is curating this book for us—”I thought my Narrow Road would be my exploration, not models for others to follow.”
Whether she’s in conversation with previous translations of Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior; nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets and writers (see the new poems); or articles from The New York Times Science section—see poems from Brain Fever (2010) and Toxic Flora (2010)—Hahn’s formal “fooling around,” another phrase from the section notes, thrives from origins in curiosity turned fascination.
“The Toxicologist at Home” ends, “So I don’t turn myself inside out/ I lurch from thing to literal thing. I long to be a crown-of-thorns sea star/ to accost what cannot be seen.”
Aditi Machado, Material Witness
“You woke and were haunted. / Haunted by discursive strategy.” There is a particular wit mediating the half dozen poems that shape Aditi Machado’s third full-length collection, Material Witness, and what makes the book most interesting is the totality of the poems nodding to one from their various corners.
In “Concerning Matters Culinary,” an all-caps sequence inspired by what is thought to be the first Roman cookbook, entries include “There is death folded/ in my mousse today” and “And the scallions withered in my arms.” (Check out her recent essay on this poem, its sources, and, well, aspic, here in Lit Hub.) Sure, Machado also sneaks in a vegetal specificity to the language of “Material Witness,” as with “plum deaths” and “You became a bespoke leek.”
But you read these in concert with the imperious voice of “Bent Record,” pronouncing “It was I / who ‘discovered’ the pant and I who named it imperially/ after my own self” and “I/ showed my work in the cruddy journals of my time.” There’s a sensibility to these varied ploys and plays with language and its own materiality, even of the flexible “you” and the text itself; as in “Now,” with“now you’re in the middle of the thing / beset by its obvious and lush features.”
Oksana Maksymchuk, Still City
Ukrainian poet Oksana Maksymchuk’s first collection written in English tracks life within a long war, situating us both on ground looking out and on the screen scrolling past images of war. Poem endings echo the repetitions of daily threat without foreseeable end: “how normal it all now feels/ how boring” “Are they here yet?” “Just the beginning for us.”
This is a world of cellars and shelters, where the absurdities and necessities of preparation are laid bare: the speaker reminds a loved one to wear the red hat they bought them “to help identify you/ in the current of the crowd/ in case the enemy strikes.” An ad for a cat “backpack / with a clear protruding bubble/ window” elicits: “Do we leave her behind?”
This is war in real time, amidst online ads, photographs on Telegram “causing an avalanche of/ angry emojis,” an unbearable scrolling past the unspeakable replicated and indicted in “Algorithmic Meltdown.” Here we scroll with the speaker through “ruins” and bodies and body-parts in graphic close-up mode, as she asks, “what do I hope / to unsee.”
Throughout, an ars poetica of a particular kind surfaces: for we are listening to a poet holding on to her wit, her eye, her self-awareness, from within war, witless and brutal; in war, she reminds us, “children / are an unsorted matter.”
Eduardo Martínez-Leyva, Cowboy Park
Eduardo Martínez-Leyva’s debut, Cowboy Park, opens with a slant of the gorgeous lyricism that sparks the book’s trajectories of queer desire: “To translate confection, my boy-tongue / nicked the hive’s bloated colony.” Language itself, its lushness and barriers, becomes both portal and weapon, such as when a series of slurs and negative descriptors slam the poem “ESL Lesson” to a halt with “We learn fast. We learn how to run fast. We learn / how to outrun those things that will slaughter us.”
Alongside of familial portraits, from “Portrait of My Mother in Her Youth” and “Portrait of my Aging Father” to poems about a brother who is detained and deported, there is the God of “Sin Documentos”: “we spoke about him/ as if he were an older brother. Another of us: brown and buzzed cut” who listens to country music: “Not the good kind of songs. The ones with heft and heartache….Untranslatable.”
And then there are the men; as the speaker of “Estrellita” recounts, “He punched me until all I saw were tiny, flickering stars. / Miniature cowboys riding on silver horses. / He loved me. I thought. He loved me….” Cowboy Park is a standout debut.
