best-of lists – LESLEY WHEELER

A Very Good Anti-Best List

on December 31, 2020December 31, 2020 By Lesley Wheeler 6 Comments

It’s exasperating when people refer to a work of art as “great” as if that were an objective pronouncement. Great for what? The idea that there could be stable, neutral criteria by which literature could be judged more or less worthy is at best nonsensical. In practice, it’s often a way for powerful people to consolidate power and invalidate contradictory views so they can keep controlling resources, while calmly holding that their views are apolitical, unlike the allegedly hysterical screeds of propagandistic forces celebrating “minority” voices. In English department canon wars, these power-conserving arguments often mutate into claims about “influence”: a work is great because it has been important to many other writers. There’s validity to that; whether or not they find literary monuments beautiful, it’s useful for students of literary history to encounter them, the better to understand books that set out to repurpose or smash the monuments. If you’re serious about literature, though, you also read horizontally across fields, trying to understand the networks and processes of inclusion and exclusion, knowing that you can’t read it all, taking joy in what you love but also listening to arguments based on values/ tastes other than yours. You recognize that what’s “good” for classroom discussion and paper-writing at your institution might not be “good” in another educational setting, much less for a grief group, an open mic, or reading alone when you’re down. And, of course, even a classroom at an apparently homogenous college (like mine) is a gathering of wildly various experiences and needs. What it boils down to: many syllabi and anthologies are carefully curated, inclusive among many axes, and generally wonderful, but they remain documents of networks, access, and other specific, temporary conditions.

Emerging from English department hothouse-politics into the different canons and procedures of Creative Writing, I have to say, oh, man, here we go again. Plenty of people who publish annual best-of lists know perfectly well that what they really mean is “what I liked most among the books that presses sent me or I heard publicity for or came across randomly.” Their newspaper or magazine editors just won’t allow such an egregious headline. Still, these lists bug me, even though, probably hypocritically, I would be quite happy to see one of my books appear on almost any of them. I’m more than delighted when something I wrote delights anyone, and a media boost is awesome. I just don’t like this annual critical abandonment of knowing better.

So here are some 2020 poetry books I like that didn’t appear, to my knowledge, on any best-of-year list or major postpublication prize longlist (I also liked a lot of books that are critical faves, but I’m putting them aside for the moment). The beauties in the picture happened to be in my home office this week (I had already toted others to my work office). Among those shelved across town, special praise to Kaveh Bassiri, 99 Names of Exile; Tess Taylor, Last West; Jessica Guzman’s Adelante; and all the books I had the pleasure of featuring in my spring-summer Virtual Salon (which I’d be happy to reboot if you contact me with a newish book–just message me). There are many, many other exciting collections I haven’t read yet, and everything I found rewarding enough to finish in 2020 is listed below the photo. An asterisk doesn’t mean it’s “better,” just that it was published during the year before I read it. I notice I read a ton of poetry this year but much less prose than usual–that has to do with fragmented concentration–although there are many new books in those categories I also loved.

Best wishes to all of us for a good new year full of good-for-something literature, good-enough health, and please-be-better government. On the reading side, nourish yourself with books, buy from indies when you can, give love to small presses without publicity machines, and like what you like no matter what the critics or professors say!

POETRY (82 books and chapbooks)

1/12 Jeanne Heuving, Mood Indigo* (bought at a conference)
1/12 Tyrone Williams, chapbook* (bought at a conference)
1/18 Harjo, She Had Some Horses (teaching)
1/19 Harjo, American Sunrise* (fandom)
1/22 Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead (reread for teaching)
1/26 Forche, The Country Between Us (reread for teaching)
2/12 Cooley, Breach (reread for teaching)
2/15 Spencer, If the House* (fandom)
2/19 Young, Ardency (reread for class)
3/4 Dove, Thomas and Beulah (reread for class)
3/7 Bassiri, 99 Names of Exile* (gift)
3/7 Witte, All Fires Don’t Burn the Same (gift)
3/8 Smith, Wade in the Water (reread for class)
3/20 Nethercott, The Lumberjack’s Dove (reread for class)
3/21 Liz Hazen, Girls Like Us* (for Virtual Salon)
3/22 William Woolfitt, Spring Up Everlasting* (for Virtual Salon)
3/25 Elizabeth Lindsay Rogers, The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons* (Virtual Salon)
3/29 Phillips Bell, Ornament (reread for class)
4/3 Cabrera, lack begins as a tiny rumble* (for Virtual Salon)
4/6 Savage, Detail (for Virtual Salon)
4/6 Michael, Barefoot Girls* (for Virtual Salon)
4/11 Taylor, Rift Zone* (for Virtual Salon)
4/18 Chan, All Heathens* (for Virtual Salon)
4/19 Green, The More Extravagant Feast* (local friend)
4/27 Dungy, Trophic Cascade (reread for teaching)
4/29 Robinson, Needville (reread for Virtual Salon)
5/9 Kildegaard & Hasse, Rocked by the Waters* (anthology I’m in)
5/10 Dickey, Mud Blooms (for Virtual Salon)
5/15 Silano, Gravity Assist (reread for Virtual Salon)
5/23 Balbo, The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots* (for Virtual Salon)
6/2 Greenfield, Letdown* (for virtual salon)
6/6 Solari, The Last Girl (fandom)
6/12 Walker, Maps of a Hollowed World* (blurb)
6/27 Egan, Hot Flash Sonnets (fandom)
7/6 Petrosino, White Blood* (ad)
7/14 Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem* (fandom)
8/1 Voigt, Kyrie (friend recommendations)
8/2 Atkins, Still Life with God* (local friend)
8/3 Guzman, Adelante* (Shenandoah author)
8/4 Hong, Fablesque* (fandom)
8/5 Davoudian, Swan Song* (Shenandoah author)
8/6 Matejka, The Big Smoke (reviews/ buzz)
8/7 Hedge Coke, Burn (fandom)
8/8 Sealey, Ordinary Beast (reputation)
8/9 Chang, Obit* (fandom)
8/10 Perez, Habitat Threshold* (fandom)
8/11 Corral, guillotine* (reputation)
8/12 Neale, To the Occupant (fandom)
8/13 Bailey, Visitation* (pressmate)
8/14 Chatti, Deluge* (buzz)
8/15 Muench, Wolf Centos (recommendation)
8/16 Flanagan, Glossary of Unsaid Terms* (gift)
8/17 Nuernberger, Rue* (fandom)
8/18 Kapur, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist (fandom)
8/19 Farley, The Mizzy* (gift from a friend)
8/20 Avia, Fale Aitu | Spirit House (fandom)
8/21 Andrews, A Brief History of Fruit* (was sent to me)
8/22 Taylor, Last West* (fandom)
8/23 Harvey, Hemming the Water (reputation)
8/24 Ben-Oni, 20 Atomic Poems (fandom)
8/25 Ewing, Electric Arches (reputation)
8/26 Mountain, Thin Fire (Shenandoah contributor!)
8/27 Randall, How to Tell if You Are Human (spouse the comics reviewer had it)
8/28 Davis, In the Circus of You (bought at a conference)
8/29 Clark, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (reputation)
8/31 Murillo, Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry* (buzz)
9/20 Kuppers, Gut Botany* (fandom)
9/21 Su, Middle Kingdom (research)
9/22 Tolmie, The Art of Dying* (research)
9/24 Phillips Bell, Smaller Songs* (fandom)
9/30 Coleman, Selected Poems* (research)
10/1 Van Duyn, Firefall (research)
10/26 Birdsong, Negotiations* (review assignment)
11/14 Malech, Flourishing* (reputation)
12/1 Erdrich, Little Big Bully* (fandom)
12/12 Gay, Be Holding* (fandom)
12/17 Miranda, Altar for Broken Things* (friend)
12/18 O’Hara, The Ghettobirds (ms for blurbing)
12/19 Igloria, Maps for Migrants and Ghosts* (fandom)
12/25 Beatty, The Body Wars* (fandom)
12/26 Daye, Cardinal* (review assignment)
12/31 Oliver, Devotions* (fandom)

FICTION (32)

1/8 Suma, The Walls Around Us (friend’s recommendation)
1/26 Cho, The True Queen* (fandom)
2/24 El-Mohtar and Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War* (reviews)
3/7 Mantel, Every Day is Mother’s Day (review)
3/29 Erdrich, The Night Watchman* (fandom)
5/9 Mantel, The Mirror and the Light* (fandom)
5/28 Mandel, The Glass Hotel* (fandom)
6/3 King, Let It Bleed* (fandom)
6/10 Ng, Little Fires Everywhere (many reviews and friend recommendations)
6/17 Collins, Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes* (fandom)
6/21 Foley, The Guest List* (review)
6/24 Brooks, Year of Wonders (audiobook, review)
6/28 Hill, On Beulah Height (friend’s recommendation)
7/5 King, Salem’s Lot (review)
7/8 Wehunt, Everything Is Beautiful and Nothing Bad Can Ever Happen Here* (social media)
7/13 Baggott, Seventh Book of Wonders (fandom)
7/18 Jones, The Only Good Indian* (fandom)
7/26 Atakora, Conjure Women* (reviews)
8/8 LaValle, Devil in Silver (fandom)
8/16 Bardugo, The Ninth House* (review)
8/27 Hall, Dread Isle (ARCs, in fandom, and for blurb)
9/18 VanderMeers, ed, Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (a lot of it, anyway)
9/20 LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom* (fandom)
9/24 Tolmie, The Little Animals* (research)
10/11 Galbraith, Troubled Blood* (fandom)
10/18 Dimaline, Empire of Wild* (review)
11/15 Jones, Night of the Mannequins* (fandom)
11/21 Clark, Ring Shout* (reviews)
12/10 Harrigan, Half* (friend’s recommendation)
12/19 White, As Summer’s Mask Slips* (met at a conference)
12/24 Shawl, New Suns (research for teaching)
12/26 Riley, Such a Fun Age* (many recommendations)

NONFICTION/ HYBRID (8)

1/4 Reynolds, Walt Whitman (teaching prep)
1/12 Macfarlane, Underland* (recommendation from friends)
4/10 Buntin, Sheffield, Dodd, Dear America* (anthology I’m in)
4/12 Finch, ed., Choice Words* (anthology I’m in)
5/17 Selznick, Live Oak With Moss (for class)
7/6 Sheldrake, Entangled Life* (review and fungal curiosity)
8/30 Nezhukumatathil, World of Wonders* (fandom)
9/? Lee and Winslow, eds., Deep Beauty* (anthology I’m in)

*published within the last year or so

Best for what?–reading 2018

on December 30, 2018December 30, 2018 By Lesley Wheeler 5 Comments

urs and books I love hearing about people’s favorite books, and regularly shop and read from lists published everywhere every December. I’ve even written a short discussion of my favorite genre books in 2018, to appear in Strange Horizons‘ annual roundup a few days from now.

But I’m skeptical of these lists, too: “best” for whom, when, and why? For what purpose? I’ve found no single critic out there who shares all of my own tastes and obsessions, even though I’m part of a demographic heavily represented in literary journalism. What makes a book powerful is partly latent in the text, but is also contingent on circumstances. Even for one reader, the stories or voices that feel most necessary can vary from day to day. There’s no value-neutral, objective “best” out there.

I can certainly name the poetry books that most wowed me this fall, that I kept wanting to share: If They Come For Us by Fatimah Asghar, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins by Terrance Hayes, and, a little belatedly, Barbie Chang by Victoria Chang. Does that make them the best? It means they’re really good, for sure.

But I also bought poetry books for friends, marking a few poems for each that I thought would especially appeal. Asghar and Chang were on that list, but so was Ada Limón’s The Carrying, which I also remembered loving–and as I reread it, the book gained even more force. Some books grow over time. Does that make Limón’s book the best, even if a December reviewer barely has enough perspective to see it? Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment by Alessandra Lynch worked like that for me, earlier this year. On first encounter, I felt frustrated by how the poems skirted the central subject–rape–but the successive readings you have to do for a reviewing assignment changed my reaction to profound admiration. And while I just read Patricia Smith’s Incendiary Art, I can say it’s almost unbearably powerful, and maybe you should read it wearing oven mitts–where does THAT criterion go in the rankings? Really, I liked or loved almost all of the poetry collections I read in 2019 (listed below, excluding things I didn’t like enough to finish)–but I have no idea which will mean most to me five years from now.

Honestly, much that I read last winter is pretty hazy. On the novel side, I remember being deeply affected by Jesmyn Ward’s Sing Unburied Sing and thinking the prose beautiful. I feel similarly about Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black, which I read just this week, although the book’s sad irresolution disturbs me. There were several other novels I couldn’t put down–that inspired hours of intense delight. But Richard Powers’ Overstory, a massive tome that struck me in June as being a little clunky in a few passages, seems so far to have changed my brain the most. I mean, I’ve always loved trees–isn’t that practically a requirement of poethood?–but they loom larger now, more deeply rooted in my imagination, more prone to overshadow those little humans flickering around their boles. If a not-quite-perfect book alters how a human sees the world, might it not be the best for, say, trees?

Well, what do I know, really? I read a lot, but I’ve consumed the tiniest fraction of this year’s output (and fewer novels than usual, perhaps because I spent much of the summer revising my own). Happy New Year, and go read something from this list, or somebody else’s, because they’re all partial. In any case, bruit what you love. We all need a variety of angles to make sense of a landscape.

POETRY

1/2 Allak, Keine Angst* (poet I met in England)

1/2 Driskell, Next Door to the Dead (met through AWP)

1/3 Winn, Alma Almanac* (Barrow Street press mate)

1/4 Adair-Hodges, Let’s All Die Happy* (reviews)

1/5 Fisher-Wirth, Mississippi* (friend and writer I admire)

1/6 Young, Ardency (teaching), and reread 5/6 for another class

1/9 Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead (teaching)

1/15 Forche, The Country Between Us (teaching)

1/20 Lynch, Daylily Called it a Dangerous Moment* (for review)

1/28 Cooley, Breach (teaching)

2/2 Dungy, Trophic Cascade* (reviews)

2/9 Chen, When I Grow Up I Want To Be A List of Further Possibilities* (reviews)

2/16 Gay, Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude (teaching)

2/25 Trethewey, Thrall (teaching)

2/27 Kaur, Milk and Honey (recommendations)

2/27 Mahato, In Between (recommendation)

3/3 Hutchinson, House of Lords and Commons (AWP prep)

3/3 Schwaner, Wind Intervals (local poet)

3/6 Smith, Good Bones* (AWP prep)

3/14 Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (teaching)

3/17 Bell, Ornament* (teaching)

3/23 Taylor, Work & Days (prepping for campus visit)

3/25 Taylor, Forage House (teaching)

3/31 Igloria, Haori (prepping for campus visit)

4/1 Igloria, The Buddha Wonders If She’s Having a Mid-Life Crisis (“)

4/14 Givhan, Protection Spell (author I admire)

4/23 Reagler, Teeth & Teeth* (friend)

4/23 Keen, Milk Glass Mermaid (friend, rereading)

4/28 De la Paz, Post Subject (friend, also scouting for teaching)

4/29 Smith, Wade in the Water* (poet long admired)

5/7 Van Clief-Stefanon, Black Swan (reread for teaching)

5/8 Howe, Magdalene* (NBA finalist 2017)

5/10 Santos, Square Inch Hours* (NBA finalist 2017)

5/10 Miller, Women Disturbing the Peace* (friend)

5/15 Erin Belieu, Slant Six (picked up at AWP)

5/22 Emerson, Claude Before Time and Space* (fandom)

6/6 Tavila-Borsheim, Love Poems* (picked up at conference)

6/6 Robinson, A Cruise in Rare Waters (by a friend)

6/6 Hancock, The Open Gate (local writer)

6/10 Kindred, Says the Forest to the Girl* (friend)

6/21 Eusuf, Not Elegy but Eros* (met at a conference)

6/21 Meng, Bridled* (review)

6/24 Chang, Barbie Chang (word of mouth)

7/5 Banka, You don’t scare me (“met” her virtually)

7/11 Joseph, Confessions of a Barefaced Woman* (fandom)

7/22 Kildegaard, Course* (fandom)

7/29 Daye, River Hymns* (recommended by a friend)

7/29 Williams and Humberstone, ed, Over the Line: Intro to Poetry Comics (research)

7/30 Hayden, Collected Poems (teaching prep)

7/31 Coleman, ed., Words of Protest, Words of Freedom (teaching prep)

9/11 Ginsberg, Howl (reread for class)

9/25 Plath, Ariel (reread for class)

10/12 Limon, The Carrying* (fandom)

10/13 Hayes, American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin* (fandom)

10/15 Bishop, Questions of Travel (reread for class)

10/17 Bishop, Geography III (reread for class)

10/18 Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings* (fandom)

10/19 Brooks, A Street in Bronzeville (reread for class)

11/11 de la Paz, Requiem for the Orchard (reread for class)

11/17 Gay and Nezhukumatathil, Lace & Pyrite* (fandom)

12/10 Ostriker, Waiting for the Light (former teacher)

12/18 Asghar, If They Come For Us* (reviews and word of mouth)

12/19 Reed, Indecency* (Pulitzer)

12/20 Stallings, Like* (reviews)

12/20 Taylor and Roberts, Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle* (I’m in it)

12/20 Senechal de la Roche, Winter Light* (colleague)

12/23 Vorreyer, Every Love Story Is an Apocalypse Story (review)

12/27 Meitner, Holy Moly Carry Me* (fandom)

12/29 Smith, Incendiary Art* (fandom)

FICTION

2/10 Hill, Heart-Shaped Box (word of mouth)

2/18 Strout, Burgess Boys (friend’s rec)

3/4 Ward, Sing Unburied Sing* (prizes/ reviews)

3? Albert, The Hazel Wood* (review in NYT)

5/3 Locke, Bluebird* (NYT mention)

5/20 Due, The Good House* (NYT mention)

5/23 Robinson, Shaman (fandom)

5/29 Baldwin, Go Tell It On the Mountain (had somehow never read it)

6/2 Powers, Overstory* (reviews)

6/8 King, Outsider* (fandom)

6/? LaValle, Changeling (reviews)

7/8 Weber, Still Life with Monkey* (fandom)

7/18 Shaffer, Hope Never Dies* (what the hell)

7/20 O’Callaghan, The Dead House* (NYT review)

7/25 Hummel, Still Lives* (like her poems)

8/19 Walsh, Ghosted* (audiobook, from review of book)

9/5 Makkai, The Great Believers* (general fandom)

10/5 Galbraith, Lethal White* (general fandom)

10/7 Carter, The Bloody Chamber (reread for class)

10/16 Jones, Mongrels (reread for class)

11/11 Adcock, The Completionist* (audiobook, from review of book)

11/17 Schoffstall, Half-Witch* (review)

11/18 King, Elevation* (fandom)

12/1 Novey, Those Who Knew (book club)

12/8 French, Witch Elm* (review)

12/25 Meijer, North Wood* (gift)

12/26 Edugyan, Washington Black* (gift)

12/27 Moore, Ghostographs* (review)

NONFICTION

1/2 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons (references in other books)

2/2 Adichie, We Should All be Feminists (word of mouth)

4/22 Fennelly, Heating & Cooling (word of mouth, teaching possibility)

5/? Brownell (for teaching/ research)

7/5 Cleland, Mastering suspense, structure, and plot (for research)

7/6 Moore, Flash Nonfiction (for teaching)

7/9 Percy, Thrill Me (research)

7/12 Nelson, Bluets (reputation)

7/13 Connors, Salmon Matters (by a friend)

12/16 Tsvetaeva, Letter to the Amazon (recommended by daughter)

*=published within the last year or so

Close-reading the 2015 National Book Awards

on December 30, 2015December 30, 2015 By Lesley Wheeler 1 Comment

Forecast: capricious poetry weather ahead.

Last year I tackled the National Book Award’s poetry long list in time for a new year’s post and learned a lot from the exercise. This year I was completing the same task, reading with admirable industry and dedication, when I picked up Sunday’s New York Times Book Review and found it dedicated to the year in verse. Out of seventeen volumes receiving substantial mention there, it turned out I had only read two–and those had been granted relatively brief notice. Further, one of those, by Rankine, was a 2014 collection that continues to sell briskly. Granted, a few of the reviewed collections were newish–I follow Kay Ryan and Major Jackson faithfully and I’ll get to their new work eventually. Still, what a crummy percentage!

Let me repeat, then, that I despair of ever being very well-read in US poetry, much less in the verse of the English-speaking world, and I am not well-versed at all in contemporary poetry’s full polyglot splendor. Seriously, anyone who claims her best-of list is authoritative is kidding you, or herself. Some books, like Citizen, really are big events, aesthetically complex achievements speaking to the historical moment. And a collection must be skilfully written, thoughtfully edited, and attractively published to get media attention; as I observed last year, a suspiciously large percentage of books on these lists were published by fancy NYC operations. I’m sending out Radioland to post-publication prizes and can testify that thorough engagement in the awards game takes serious resources. Most presses don’t have the staff or the dough, and most poets can’t personally pick up the slack.

According to my partial survey, not from a mountain-top but an overgrown hill surrounded by cellphone towers and other scenery-blockers, I can testify that many of the year’s most exciting collections do appear on the NBA list. Robin Coste Lewis’ winning collection is stunning poetry of witness–the central collage is impressive but the framing lyrics really blew me away. I liked Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things so much I spent an afternoon just before Christmas reading bits aloud to my relatives. (I can’t find the title poem online, but look for it–it wowed my teenage daughter.) I’d characterize a good poetry collection as either deliciously crafty, or presenting a powerful take on urgent material, or both, but here’s another criterion: you want to share what you’re reading with loved ones. Limón’s book wasn’t perfect–a few weaker poems diluted the grand ones–but it hit me that way, as a collection I wanted to tell people about.

I also thought, however, that some books didn’t belong on the long list at all. They were, as I said, skilful, but there were a couple I wouldn’t have bothered to finish if I hadn’t committed myself to the task. And on the finalist list, I’m happy to see strong books by Terrance Hayes and Ross Gay, but the collection by Patrick Phillips just wasn’t especially engaging, even for a poet who’s been mining similar material (dead fathers). I found Marilyn Hacker’s entry more impressive–that title sonnet crown is amazing!–and the books by Jane Hirshfield and Lawrence Raab trumped Phillips–well, both Phillipses–in emotional power, at least for me.

Also, while I’d have to reread my year’s favorites to be sure which collection I’d personally choose for the laurels, it’s a shame Claudia Emerson’s Impossible Bottle wasn’t in the running. No 2015 book moved me more than that one. Other achievements that won’t get enough attention: the interdisciplinary ecofeminist gorgeousness of Bindle, an art and poetry collection by Elisabeth Frost and Dianne Kornberg; or the gender adventure of Stephen Burt’s All-Season Stephanie. Both have lingered in my mind, the way risky books do. Neither looks like an NBA book for various reasons–Burt’s, for instance, is a chapbook–but they and many other collections shouldn’t get blown away like so many autumn leaves.

Radioland wasn’t eligible for the 2015 NBA list, by the way, and won’t be for 2016, either. 2016 books have to be published on or after Dec. 1 2015; my book came out Oct. 1, but galleys weren’t ready in time for the NBA’s summer deadline. I don’t think these grapes are sour, therefore, but as I said, I don’t believe in the fiction of impartiality, either. I know I missed or misread good 2015 collections, and I would like to hear other people’s favorites, too. Seems to me the party could use some new refreshments.

In the meantime, I was floored to receive mention on Bill Manhire’s reading list–scroll down to see. Thanks to Emma Neale for pointing it out. And any NZ readers who are having trouble getting Radioland, please let me know. That’s another problem with small presses, of course; I have trouble reading widely in the poetries of other countries unless I can browse their bookstores in person, and I know many other poetry-readers, wherever they are, feel the same frustration.

Today I’m also looking back at 2015’s literary weather in general, my own capricious reading as compared to what I’m supposed to admire. Here’s my count: 48 books of poetry read or reread; 54 novels; and 16 books of nonfiction, not including a jillion articles as well as books in various genres I didn’t feel like finishing. I don’t see how a person with a needy family and a full-time job could read much more, yet I still feel behind–it’s crazy out there. 77 of those books on my personal list were authored by women, and my 2015 reading was diverse in many other ways, too, but I didn’t read very internationally in 2015, except for a pile of British, Scottish, and Irish poems in the summer, and a host of classic British mysteries that kept me sane through the year’s roughest patches.

I’d like to do better as a global poetry citizen in 2016, but given a daughter in college and sabbatical austerities and a looming dental implant, I don’t expect to be springing for plane tickets. Nor am I in a mood for resolutions, except to keep reading and writing. Mostly I follow literary whims (my novel draft is at 45,000 words and counting!)–I read what genuinely calls to me as much as possible–but I will perform the NBA short-list-reading exercise at least one more time. It’s good to study the company I aspire to keep, one of these days. 2015 NBA