Sounds, Signs, and Elegies: Seven New Poetry Collections to Read This September

Let the rush of Fall books begin!

September is packed with new poetry collections, alongside anthologies such as Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora, edited by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Janine Joseph, and Esther Lin, and the unclassifiable gorgeous and edifying textual exhibit (joined by an exhibit of the same name in Los Angeles) of On the National Language: The Poetry of America’s Endangered Tongues, by B.A. Van Sise, with DeLanna Studi, Linda Hogan, Philip Metres, Lehua Taitano, Matthew Lippman, KT Herr and dg nanouk okpik, which incorporates photographs in its documentation of endangered languages.

The seven individual collections below reflect a few hashtag-worthy leanings in recent poetry. Amidst a diverse range of books investigating fatherhood from Gen-X and Millennial perspectives—think Rob Schlegel’s Childcare and Amorak Huey’s Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy–Raymond Antrobus’s latest documents the months leading up to, and following, the birth of a first child.

Poetic expansions off the page in the service of multilingual and accessible poetics take effective shape in Antrobus’ continued bilingual integration of British Sign Language and The Cyborg Jillian Weise’s video sonnets, accessed fully through QR codes on the pages of Pills and Jacksonvilles. And for those of you seeking out original and alive books in the expanse of current  ecopoetry, a wide net can perhaps encompass new standouts from Louise Mathias, Oliver Baez Bendorf, and debut poets Nathan Xavier Osorio and Kinsale Drake.

Happy reading, poetry-lovers.

*

Raymond Antrobus, Signs, Music

Raymond Antrobus’ intimate third collection offers a sincere examination of new fatherhood. “Towards Naming,” the first of the two long poems comprising Signs, Music, was written before the birth of his son, when “It is hypothetical. It is real.”

The anticipation of fatherhood is gripped by fear both real—avoiding a motel with a violent scene out front when driving in winter ice with his pregnant spouse, considering the consequences of a name (“My mother rings to apologize/ about my middle name and how many lines/ it has had me pulled out of….”)—and psychological, in the wake of intergenerational trauma: “What! will you be any better?” the speaker imagines a passing baby saying to him.

In the second poem “The New Father,” the poetic address to the now-born baby continues: “Your eyes swallow the sound that my ears can’t.” The trajectory of the book leads us not only to the revelation of the name in English and British Sign Language (BSL)—no spoiler of that one here!—but to the more intimate revelation, to the speaker, of the baby’s sign name, and, earlier, his first word: “The first word my son signed / was music; both hands, fingers conducting / music for everything—even hunger….”

This book moves with deceptive directness and ease, giving way to a significant record of lyric inquiry.

Oliver Baez Bendorf, Consider the Rooster

Oliver Baez Bendorf’s surety of voice and formal control guides this rich third collection. In a narrative of a noise dispute among neighbors, “Consider the Rooster” begins in anaphora, comically echoing the sound “Who” with lines unfolding from “Who did not ask to join this world any more than I did” to the later punchline return: “Who sleeps in a cardboard box in the garage because the philosopher called the police, /Then asked for eggs.”

The love poem “T4T” (trans for trans, for those unfamiliar) begins in truncated medias res “And I think he must be drunk, from the sweet way he.” The fragmentation expands: “I think there’s something happy and right about us mating. / That night how you. Chest flying. Tonight my house creaks.”

There is beauty and flight within these poems even as they stay in the earthly and bodily world. “Will and Testament” concludes: “Already/ abandoned/ my body once–look what happened after.”

Kinsale Drake, The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket

National Poetry Series winner Kinsale Drake’s debut collection opens, “enough about you: airwaves / in bloom, mouthpiece // on fire. I must sing the hum of the yucca….” But the speaker must also sing “Our grandparents’ blues” and “O, like Jimi’s guitar I must sing— / dirty sing blister let the sound rip the sky.”

Through poems shaped by evocations, songs, and callings, the diversities and “contradictions” that shape these poems are caught in the myriad of sounds on the local home radio station in “Put on that KTNN,” where “All contradictions / find a home in the body,” for “How else to know/you enter a land of monuments, not / a wasteland, loved by radio waves….”

Drake is a Diné poet young enough to have been the Library of Congress’s 2017-2018 National Student poet and to have garnered attention and awards as a young poet and performer, and here she demonstrates the music she can bring alive in the formal boundaries of the page; this is a poet who we will hear much more from in years to come. Now, the  poet shapes her own songs; “Prickly Pear Blues” opens, “& the church is quiet/  in the plum dusk/ all my youth/ sunsets tinged with want.”

Nathan Xavier Osorio, Querida

Nathan Xavier Osorio’s vibrant debut, Querida, delivers imagery that burns innately earthly, grounded in the habitats and histories of California, where water takes the form of “the chance arroyo/ that after a sudden rain becomes a mudslide” with “contents of the channel, its splintered/ baseball bats, scorched tires, the knotted crowns of zip ties and desert.”

Chain stores, drought, and displacement surge within this collection; in “Welcome to the Show,” we witness disruption of Mexican-American homes through the construction of Dodger Stadium, while throughout, the work and lives of the speaker’s parents set the stage amidst the steadfast landscape, mountains included, of his boyhood.

Osorio’s sonnets sing from the control of his abundance, as he threads the sonnet crown “The Last Town Before the Mohave,” through the book, a stamp of skill and presence that leads readers toward the closing series of “Ritual” poems, themselves interrupted by the weaving of another even tighter sequence, “Abandonarium.” Throughout, Osorio delves into the borders between human and nature, between form and its curated and organic disruptions.

Louise Mathias, What if the Invader Is Beautiful

 “Some say the tree seduced the axe. / My anger he said // looking right in my face / is global.” So ends “Doomsday” from Louise Mathias’ third collection, a cluster of poems both volatile and sparse, imbued with an echo of Plath, whose Little bloodied skirts” become, in Mathias’ hands, the orchid’s “Discarded little skirts” in 108 degrees.

There’s a fearlessness, and a darkness of something murkier than wit, in these earthy flights that bridge intimate violence and the engulfing natural landscape, marked by latitudes and longitudes in the poet’s end notes and California flora: “His hands around my throat // until I blurted cliffrose. No word/ is ever safe, said every wind born westerly.” “Everything hurts in the half-light./ In the fields, I was told I was childish / in a field of fragrant bells.”

These are gorgeous poems of knife and bloom, of seduction and reclamation: “I’m not saying his eyes were not oceans. I am saying these oceans were knives.”

Jillian Weise, Pills and Jacksonvilles

 “We cyborgs are composed of meat and machine. / We have machines inside our body-minds.” So begins, “A Very Kind Note to Some Poets,” the opening poem of Pills and Jacksonvilles, the latest from poet, novelist, video artist and activist The Cyborg Jillian Weise (Cy) as the poet identities for audiences such as ours.

There is a Gen-X DIY aesthetic, made both accessible and digital, in the four “video sonnets,” which offer images, image-description poems, and a QR code for videos created with disabled and Deaf artists, while the closing section offers materials around the “video play,” “A Kim Deal Party,” to which readers are invited with a URL in the acknowledgments. (Disclosure: I am listed in the “Cast” list in the book, having contributed a very brief voice clip to A Kim Deal Party in response to a Facebook call.)

There is also a narrative documenting presence here, from “As If I Met Their Wife at a Museum,” which builds from “one of the rules/ is that you and I must never / appear to each other/ even though we both love/ the same person” and the wider “Questions for Ray Kurzweil, Delivered to Him by a Reporter for Vice News,” which asks “What made you turn away from us?”

The Cyborg Jillian Weise’s sense of voice drives this collection of Sappho fragments and hashtag lists and check box poems, of activism, of “crip love,” of exploration of accessible multi-media poetics collaborations.

Matthew Zapruder, I Love Hearing Your Dreams

 The speaker in Matthew Zapruder’s “Poem for a Suicide,” asks “what would /a perfect elegy do? place the flowers //back in the ground?” In this sixth collection, which follows last year’s Story of a Poem, Zapruder’s celebrated memoir about writing and parenting a young son with autism, singular musings are imbued with the presence of absence, whether of those who have passed—a father or poets ranging from Dean Young to Emily Dickinson and Witold Gombrowicz–or a son who feels present in these poems through the smallest significant actions, such as drawing trains in both memory and future plans.

The poet’s mind is a solitary place, and there rests the dark generational humanity of these poems: “It seems these days / every poem is a failed elegy / for the world,” and “I cannot/ deny I often feel anger// at the similarities between me /and an oil company,” the speaker shares.

Relief is delivered with both levity and tenderness, in both frankness and the blurring borders of dream and imagination: the speaker promises to “piss” on a tree in honor of Gombrowicz’s birthday, while in the titular poem, “I Love Hearing Your Dreams,” the speaker awakens the “you” crying out in sleep: “gently //shook you/ your eyes/ in the ordinary light” and “before you spoke /your face became/ a son an animal….”