jon davis
Above the Bejeweled City
Grid Books, 2021
$16.00
Playlist:
“The Ghost of Denis Johnson” “Above the Bejeweled City”
For this reading, I decided to read two poems. I have no idea—beyond being in the grip of the pandemic—why I dreamed these particular dreams. Perhaps my obsessive reading of Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Romance Sonambulo” informed the dreams. In both cases, I woke and scribbled notes, then went straight to the computer in the morning. Because writing a poem is like dreaming, I’m not sure, now, how much was dream, how much imagination.
I should say something more about “The Ghost of Denis Johnson.” I first met Denis in 1983 in Montana, and we remained friends until the end.
susan nguyen
Dear Diaspora
University of Nebraska Press, 2021
$17.95
Playlist:
Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Dear Diaspora introduces us to Suzi: ripping her leg hairs out with duct tape, praying for ecstasy during Sunday mass, dreaming up a language for buried familial trauma and discovering that such a language may not exist. Suzi, caught between enjoying a rundown American adolescence and living with the inheritances of war, attempts to unravel her own inherited grief as she explores the multiplicities of identity and selfhood against the backdrop of the Vietnamese diaspora.
Poems read:
“Letter to the Diaspora"
“Wish List"
“Suzi Searches for Ecstasy"
“Letter to the Diaspora"
“Unending"
julia wendell
The Art of Falling
FutureCycle Press, 2022
$15.95 paper $2.99 Kindle
Playlist:
“ ‘Come off a horse enough times/and you learn how to fall.' With its crescendos and diminuendos, this book is concerned not just with falling but also art and its making, paying homage to persistence and survival through music and musicians, paintings and painters, books and their characters. . . The Art of Falling offers an enduring wisdom and reminds us that “Sometimes you just have to let things toughen.”
—Amanda Moore, National Poetry Series Winner, 2021
Poems read:
“First Tomato”
“My Never Ending Katzenjammer”
“The Anorexic Teaches Her Children”
“Dear Home”