Seven Unexpectedly Intimate Poetry Books to Read in March

In three of this month’s collections, we find ourselves in the shower with the speaker. In Armen Davoudian’s opening poem, a mother and son: the speaker steps out in his mother’s “lavender robe de chambre,” careful not to spill though “you’d forgive the spillage, or forget.” The poem ends, “What else will you love me despite?”

In Jordan Pérez’s “The Glory Has Departed,” a daughter watches her mother: “I watch her after through the shower glass, / smell the thick oleanders wilt, / sense her wild mourning, see / that she has shaved off all of her hair.” Nick Lantz’s speaker finds a lump in the shower in his collection’s opening poem: the next poem reveals it is cancer. In Don Mee Choi’s Mirror Nation, a turn to a childhood birthmark or “pig’s freckle” that has “faded over time.”

These unexpected intimacies mirror another kind of nakedness, sensibilities that strip down the veil between personal–domestic, familial, erotic, artistic–and state violences, past and present. These collections are not solipsistic, nor even autobiographical. The stakes are high. In Michael Ondaatje’s “Stella,” the speaker asks, “Now we are less. How do we become more? // How to die courteous and beautiful / protecting her house, guarding our door.”

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Don Mee Choi, Mirror Nation
(Wave Books)

“My father waved to me across a vast distance, from his present dimension: We are still not OK!”  Don Mee Choi concludes her hybrid trilogy, which includes Hardly War (2016) and DMZ Colony (2020), with Mirror Nation, a finale that begins in Berlin in 2019 at an artist residency, when the poet, discovers—through “remote waves,” and more tangibly, a photo—her photojournalist father on the bridge between Berlin and Potsdam.

At the center of Mirror Nation, the Gwangju Uprising of 1980, the year also marked by a photocopy of Choi’s “Hong Kong Adult ID” and the Miami riots. At the book’s center, also, grief: “Grief has a tendency to migrate from clock to clock, war to war, massacre to massacre, colony to neocolony. I notice grief has a lone wing, an absolute mark, resembling nothing else. What else can grief see?”

The rewards across the three volumes in concert manifest not only through the cumulative effects of evidentiary fragmentation collaged in documents and reflections and photographs, but the collisions of tones, both typographical and textual. Choi draws in Franz Fanon, Judith Butler, W.G. Sebald, Walter Benjamin, and W.E.B. Du Bois; from the latter, she riffs and marks the global and personal cleavings at the hands of empire: “My twinness manifests within unreasonable destiny, vast homesickness. My twin self has my comb.”

Armen Davoudian, The Palace of Forty Pillars
(Tin House)

Armen Davoudian’s handsome debut, The Palace of Forty Pillars, resounds with assured formal attention. What lingers are the intimacies of Davoudian’s images, magnified through his choice of forms: “Rubaiyat,” sets its gaze on a lover: in one quatrain, after swimming in “blooming plankton,” “Your naked body glistens/ in the bitter brine we will pass back and forth/ between our lips tonight,” while in another, the lover “slapped a mosquito dead / on my neck.”

The erotic and the everyday intersect, as in the title poem, a twenty-section sonnet sequence that evokes a doubling “like home and school, like love and being-loved,” through intimate scenes that range from the “puckering slices” and “jellied seeds” of cucumbers the mother has prepared, to his emergent sexuality: a school friend who “unbuttons his uniform and then lies down” so that “I copy out the answers on his chest / with what I know even then is too much pleasure.”

In “Passage,” the adult speaker’s vantage broadens: “a boy shoulders his way/ through the thighs of men,”: while “Far west, / they are wrapping children in Mylar/ and putting them to sleep where they used to house ammo.” Morality police stop a car in the ghazal, “Vice Squad,” in which Davoudian deftly empowers the form’s self-address, invoking his heritage as a minority in Iran: “Who speaks of the Armenians? / Let our gravestones crumble / so they can uncover my hand was in yours.”

Mary Gilliland, Ember Days
(Codhill Press)

“On the eighth day we looked on and realized it wasn’t good anymore.” So begins “Nothing is Remembered” in Mary Gilliland’s third collection, Ember Days. Gilliland waltzes smoothly between the cheeky and conversational and the lyrical, with a vantage that encompasses Big Lots and Betty and Veronica comics alongside ospreys and orchids and Tesla and God.

“As if Finny Folk Would Flip,” a poem that begins recounting the “tête-a-têtes of simple fish” thought to be “Russian sonar/ or the CIA broadcast of operatives who spiked the Bay Area’s office Koolaid,” swerves to solving the mystery of the sound by a “neurobiologist who dined in gloves / in the lab building’s/ cafeteria” and then lands in a revelation about class and real estate.

Across tightly-built lyrics, the poet establishes a levelheaded conversational ease that somehow makes room for celebration of the natural world, the inner world, and a sense of humor. Which is to say that Gilliland is full of surprises; the voice of these poems—whether set perched on a bar stool or while mowing down a cemetery—endures: “Watch what happens when what’s happening wants to stop.”

Fady Joudah, […]
(Milkweed)

“I write for the future/ because my present is demolished.” Palestinian-American Fady Joudah’s newest collection rattles with palpable grief and urgency. Aptly named with the textual reference for absence, omission, removal, […] moves to repair elision, erasure, using the one steady tool at hand for the poet: language. He eviscerates its power even as he makes use of it—”The passive voice is your killers voice”—and its limits—”I sketch horror like children draw stick figures—”and pointedly concludes the collection with the poem “Sunbird,” which ends “I be, / from the river / to the sea.”

Throughout this collection, symbols of a compassionate humanity are unbearably minute and vital: a small frog the speaker frees from his living room in “Mimesis”; a pet fish two children rescue after an airstrike in Gaza. The speaker places humans in scale: “The bees would not miss us if the entire neighborhood went missing. / The reverse isn’t true.”

The speaker weeps in front of us numerous times within these poems. This is personal, and this is the poet, as Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislator [] of the world”; Joudah chronicles and questions on an achingly large scale, including the reverberating, “What is an army that cares?”

Nick Lantz, The End of Everything and Everything That Comes After That
(University of Wisconsin Press)

If you’re looking for momentum, for skillful swerve and riff that holds substance, Nick Lantz delivers in his dynamic fifth collection, which has at its middle section a series of poems all titled “Word of the Day,” each an unpunctuated stream of consciousness pulled tightly into line and thought, weaving through a mind wandering across cancer diagnosis, treatment, and the state of the world, including a crashed truck of a hundred monkeys and true crime podcasts.

This is a collection that begins with “Ruin,” “At Ground Zero, fifteen years later, a bachelor party / poses for pictures / with a blow-up sex doll”—from here, the family farmhouse, Titus, Cortés: the speaker is looking at the big picture. Describing his cancer: “Imagine it like that scene from I Love Lucy / with the chocolates piling up so fast /Lucy starts shoving them into her mouth.” Or a game of telephone: everything is out of our control. “Poem Not Ending in a Shrug” takes on conspiracies, melting icebergs, an existential crisis that starts with missing letters on a pawn shop sign, moves into a shrug emoji, and ends “Why me? Why me? Why me?”

Yet these poems are not flip, they stick their landings, as does the collection. The final poem, “An Urn for Ashes” connects humanity in its demise, its collective Julius Caesars and “unnamed dead”: “your very form / a kind of ceremony / for transporting the dead/ through the living world.”

Michael Ondaatje, A Year of Last Things
(Knopf)

“When you are surrounded with ornaments / of the old world, you need to hear one living vein.” So ends the first section “A Night Radio Station in Koprivshtitsa,” one of the gems at the heart of Michael Ondaatje’s new poetry collection. “The old world”—memories, writers and friends lost, larger histories, icons, paintings—inform Ondaatje’s capacious and resonant lyrics. In “Last Things” the dying create: Dante is “a falling animal, / he crawls out of a shattered plaster/ a blue rough tongue slithering” and later as a lizard, delivers a finished book, and Agha Shahid Ali shapes a final ghazal.

In the palpable connections to paintings and buildings the collection is most alive: “A Disappearance” returns a woman to the painting she is erased from, while “One Hundred Views of the Pettah Market” brings “the stern entrance of dyers who steal colour / out of the bark of trees to paint temples.” In a set of poems curated like still lifes—”His Chair, A Narrow Bed, A Motel Room, The Fox,” and “A Billiard Hall, Cress Sandwiches, Wallpaper, a Piano Solo,” the latter moves from self-portraits of artists to their deaths.

The third and final section of “A Night Radio Station in Koprivshtitsa ends memorably with a “famous poet’s glass eye” that is “found beside / his body in a mass grave near Sofia.” Ondaatje’s own poetic eye, fixed on the long view, transcends throughout.

Jordan Pérez, Santa Tarantula
(University of Notre Dame Press)

“This is how you kill a tarantula. / Cover her and hope to god she suffocates.” Early on in Jordan Pérez’s debut, Santa Tarantula, her controlled, taut lyrics, populated with tarantulas, reimagined Biblical women, and members of her Cuban family, foreshadow that she can deliver a memorable punch. “Deadgirl,” with its proliferation of “a soft mushroom….I believed it was the knee of a dead girl” ends in an echoing image of the possibility of pedophiles behind every door in the neighborhood.

Pérez skewers constructions of masculinity across poems such as “New Study Says Men Who Do Dishes Are Less Likely to Kill You” and “The Men,” with its repeated and dissolving juxtapositions: “the one who surgically removes lips and keeps them floating in jars, the one/ who steeps calendula blossoms in oil for the winter….” Her precision has scope as she delves into family history: in “Masculinity Camps” “Gay men and maybe-gay men and dissidents were sent,” along with ballet dancers, writers, priests, and Pérez’s Cuban grandfather, to camps and put to work.

This latest Andres Montoya Poetry Prize winner reflects the vitality of this series from Letras Latinas across twenty years.