As a college student, I had a real miracle happen in the form of incidentally ending up in an intro to poetry class with Martín Espada. Learning from Martín changed my life in many directions, but today I’m here to think with you all about a central ethos of his mentorship, that “the purpose of poetry is to communicate.”
Who doesn’t love the good company of a great book, when reading feels like having a conversation? I especially love collections that lean into the everyday, and writers who bring their attention to bear on the seemingly inconsequential, the mundane, rendering it sacred. It’s this admiration that led me to the project of my own book, and it’s why I called that book Small Talk.
Lately, I’ve been returning to the books that have kept me such good company with new questions: How are these books thinking about and/or with the reader? How are they using form to change what kinds of thinking are possible? Who else is in the room of the poems? What do these poems believe, and how does the poet attempt to communicate that?
For this list, I’ve gathered together a group of writers that talk to their readers in ways that are innovative and permissive; books that changed what I could imagine a book might be capable of doing. In these pages, writers find meaning in a bag of Funyuns, a daughter’s socks at a bowling alley, a monarch butterfly on a wrinkled shirt, a friend eating strawberries, and so much more.
One Moment by Luis Muñoz (translated by Idra Novey & Garth Greenwell)
A collaboration between Muñoz and two translators, Idra Novey & Garth Greenwell, the poems in One Moment exist in conversation with each other; the book is organized with each poem next to its translation. There is an astonishing sense of arrival to these poems, each a moment one is stepping (suddenly) right into. There are too many revelations I would love to talk about in this book: a conversation in graffiti, a night spent removing the dots over i’s, a pigeon’s trust. Each of these poems do the miraculous work of holding a moment still enough to marvel at.
To Be Named Something Else by Shaina Phenix
The sheer amount of forms that Shaina Phenix utilizes –– the choreopoem, duplex, ghazal, cento, aubade, burning haibun, nested arroyo, just to name a few –– in this collection speaks to the innovation and reverence with which she considers her world. These poems splash in the water running down a Harlem street; these poems constellate a literary and historical Black femme lineage. In Phenix’s poems, playing a tambourine becomes a way to cross a threshold into generations of blood and music and spirit, an eyebrow threading becomes a ministration, and “state––country––land borders become porch screen doors.” I am astonished all over again every time I revisit this collection.
This Elegance by Derrick Austin
In my dream world, a gallery has framed each of the poems in this collection and I could spend my day(s) wandering through the rooms of this book. Using the concept of the sacra conversazione, Austin converses across time, space and artistic discipline in poems that address the contemporary (“June 2020,” “Ode on Symone’s Do-Rag”) and seem to transcend into timelessness (“Miracle Play,” “The Garden of the Lion”). As we go along you’ll find I love a book that conjures others, that joins a conversation. In this way, This Elegance is also part art historical lecture and part gallery catalogue, offering new pathways to wander down, new artists and thinkers to appreciate and talk with.
Perennial Counterpart by Yongyu Chen
I carried this book around with me all summer: I could only read one poem at a time before I would need to stop and just live in what I’d read for a while. The poems are sculptural, philosophical. Most of the poems in the collection have an endnote of address (for Mo-Jai / 04.04.22, letter to Yun Qin / 01.11.24, for Patty) and many include references (Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Paul Celan, Roberto Bolaño, to name a few), so that the book forms constellations, their meanings growing in scope as they cross and connect in other poems. I’ll be re-reading this book for a long time.
Reader, I by Corey Van Landingham
Corey Van Landingham’s Reader, I moves deftly and conspicuously between spaces: the public and private, contemporary anecdote and lit-historical allusion, the self and the we of a marriage, the speaker and the person writing that I. These poems look closely at the sentiments, expectations, and traditions that run deep within the daily. She begins most of the poems by leaping from the conclusion to Jane Eyre (Reader, I married him), and despite the apparent formlessness of these prose blocks, the poems burst with lyric play and allusion. Reader, I keep finding myself being visited by lines years later.
Mother of Other Kingdoms by Kai Coggin
I think one of the most powerful spells a poem can do, that a book can enact, is to reorient our relationship to a word. In this collection, Kai Coggin explores what motherhood might look like across species and what mothering a landscape could mean. This is a queer motherhood and a motherhood of stewardship. Talk about good company: these poems are mentors that not only ask me to lean closer, to love more, to pay attention, but show me how. When I read Kai’s work, I am reminded that belief can be an act of resistance and that hope is a radical choice.
We Both Laughed in Pleasure by The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan
I’ll end by breaking my pattern and include one book that is not a collection of poetry, but a book I return to in a similar way, for a similar kind of company. To read Lou’s journals is to encounter the personal history of one of trans history’s most important historians. Spanning almost 30 years, this collection published by Nightboat (thank you Ellis Martin & Zach Ozma) follows Lou from age 11 to his death at 39 from complications related to AIDS. Alongside the interpersonal struggles of queer organizing and navigating the medical system as one of the first trans men to do so, Lou’s journals also catalogue his crushes and love affairs, his coming to language for what he was, what he was assured could not exist, could not be. Lou is always somebody I can talk to.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Acie Clark is a multi-genre writer from Florida and Georgia. He has taught at the University of Central Arkansas, at Interlochen Center for the Arts, and at the Provincetown Public Library. He received his MFA from the University of Alabama where he worked for Black Warrior Review as the online editor and as a farmhand at Snows Bend Farm. His work has been supported by the Fine Arts Work Center, selected for Best New Poets, and anthologized in Divinity in the Margins, I Witness: An Anthology of Documentary Poetry, and The Florida Anthology. He lives in Arkansas.