Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors

Rosellen Brown recommends Everywhere You Don’t Belong, a novel by Gabriel Bump (Algonquin, February 2020). “The immensely talented Bump’s first book is an odd and original portrait of, and by, a Black kid from the South Side of Chicago who’s a fierce reporter of the affection and the disaffection that roil his community. There’s violence described sometimes head-on, sometimes at a slant; there’s love and ambition and confusion about how, or even if, one must leave home to survive. Bump writes short, sharp sentences, gets a little lost in plot gone nearly surrealistic, but still manages both humor and a fierce commitment to the idea that the people who love you will always be at the center of your being.”

Lauren Groff recommends Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin (Pantheon, February 2020), “for its wickedness, intelligence, and the impossible lightness with which it handles human horror, accident, and fate.”

Jane Hirshfield recommends Rift Zone by Tess Taylor (Red Hen Press, April 2020). “This book, grounded in awarenesses geophysical, astronomical, societal, biological, historical, and personal, explores with precision and passion the fractures each person must navigate over the course of an hour, a day, a life. To go through Taylor’s pages and focus on even the nouns alone is to find in hand a genuine assistance: places of grip these piton-poems leave us, marking their route across our time’s difficult cliff face.”

Jane Hirshfield recommends What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, by Mark Doty (W. W. Norton & Company, April 2020). “With this book, Mark Doty, already one of the century’s foremost poets, memoirists, and teachers of craft, enters the ranks of those rare scholars for whom any division of objective and subjective knowledge dissolves into a higher-strength alloy. Every sentence of this magnificent meeting of two poets across two centuries confirms why words matter, and can save—Whitman’s central text of American letters, of course, but also Doty’s expansive and expanding call and response.”

Jane Hirshfield recommends At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life by Fenton Johnson (W. W. Norton & Company). “With the originality, clarity, and eloquence familiar from Fenton Johnson’s earlier books, this book in defense of solitude arrived in March 2020, right into the start of a world suddenly changed into ‘pause’ and social distance. Anyone already of solo contemplative leanings will find in its pages an affirming companion. I say this without irony: solitaries are not misanthropes, nor cut off from the larger fabric of human and beyond-human connection. For readers coupled, knitted into the life of family, Johnson opens a view into a different set of choices in this articulate recording and witnessing of what it is to be born into an earth of many beings and of many ways of being.”

Peter Ho Davies recommends Scorpionfish by Natalie Bakopoulos (Tin House, July 2020). “An insightful novel about expatriates and exiles, immigrants and refugees, which wisely understands each of these categories as a state of grief.”

Peter Ho Davies recommends The Likely World by Melanie Conroy-Goldman (Red Hen Press, August 2020). “Conroy-Goldman’s gritty, street postmodernism recalls David Foster Wallace or Philip K. Dick, but it’s her depth of feeling, about love and motherhood, that lingers.”

Lloyd Schwartz recommends The Light Outside by George Kovach (Arrowsmith Press). “For years, George Kovach has dedicated himself to editing the remarkable journal Consequence, which is devoted mainly to examining issues of war and its social consequences. But Kovach is also a fine poet, producing touching and restrained poems that we don’t get to see enough of. Now Arrowsmith has published his first book of poems and it’s a treasure.”

David St. John recommends Little Black Train by Jordan Smith (Three Mile Harbor Press, March 2020). “Whenever friends tell me they’ve lost faith in poetry or this county, I send them a book by Jordan Smith. Formally hewn in the American grain, as reliable as a Stickley chair and with the companionable embrace of a Craftsman bungalow, each of his books renews one’s hopes for poems and people, as well as one’s love for country fiddlers and garden fiddleheads.”

David St. John recommends Take Me Apart by Sara Sligar (MCD/FSG, April 2020). “For pure pleasure and gorgeous writing, don’t miss this superb debut novel. A literary thriller resonant with psychological frailty and shot through with startling lyric wisdoms, this book is also a heartbreaking meditation on being a woman artist in a marketplace world.”

Dan Wakefield recommends The Town of Whispering Dolls, by Susan Neville (FC2, March 2020). “This collection of haunting stories was prompted by an outbreak of HIV and opiod addiction in a small town in Indiana, and it led Neville to a deep and moving exploration of where we are and who we are in this country today.”

Eleanor Wilner recommends To Those Who Were Our First Gods by Nickole Brown (Rattle, 2018). “Like all the most original poets, Nickole Brown is a poet of origins—her own and ours, in poems startlingly alive and afire with passion and candor and eyes as ancient and fresh as morning. As the poems reinvigorate ‘the beauty we were turned away from, ’ they counter despair with the work of care: ‘Hope…is not a thing you feel/ but something you do.’”