oh, you thought this was a date?! is a poetry collection exploring the apocalypse through trauma, desire, and the realities of America. The collection is split into sections, each with a quote, dictionary definition, ‘Soundtrack’ and ‘Ritual’, and the book feels like a ritual overall, a chance to speak about brutality and destruction through lyric and song. There’s a lot of music, titles and lyrics, infuses throughout the book and it almost feels like the hazy soundtrack to a wasteland, playing whilst poems explore kinds of apocalypse, trauma, vengeance, and personal histories. At times, in poems like ‘Ars Poetica: We Can Take Our Turn, Singing Them Dirty Rap Songs’ but also through its own structure and tone, it is also a manifesto for poetry that isn’t “fluff”, that does things rather than gently meditate, and that’s a good message to leave with: poetry should have power, and can feel dangerous to those who’d rather it was hidden.
100 Queer Poems is an anthology of, as the title suggests, 100 poems from across the twentieth and twenty-first century that evoke queerness in some way, with the introductions by each editor exploring some of the definitions and ideas behind this concept. Split into seven sections, the poems follow a range of topics and styles, with some in translation, so there’s likely to be something for most people to enjoy, regardless of what sort of poetry you prefer.
For me, I found myself often most drawn to poems by poets I’ve already read (Mary Jean Chan, Matthew Haigh, Peter Scalpello, Richard Scott, Danez Smith), which possibly suggests that I’m already good at finding the poetry I like, and it was nice to read various poets together. I found myself drawn into the collection and accidentally stayed up too late reading it all in one go, almost in suspense for what poem would come next. I would like to have a physical copy (I read the book in PDF form) to use as a proper anthology, to flick through and dog ear and find that specific poem you want to read again at that moment.
Probably my favourite poem in the collection is one I think I’ve read before, Harry Josephine Giles’ ‘May a transsexual hear a bird?’, which I don’t think will ever stop being such a powerful poem and one that strikes a real message about poetry and what can be in it, offering with that an interesting commentary on what should or could be included in any collection of queer poetry. Surprisingly, I also found myself really drawn to the ability to reread Auden’s ‘Funeral Blues’, a poem I’ve read a lot but not recently, in the context of poems from a range of decades, but especially alongside a lot of modern poetry. Some other poems that stood out to me were ‘Go Away and Then Come Back by Martha Sprackland, ‘I See That Lilith Hath Been with Thee Again’ by Shivanee Ramlochan, and ‘Ganymede’ by Jericho Brown.
As the introductions touch upon, it is refreshing to see a major publisher bringing out such an anthology, which feels like the sort of book that all queer poets and poetry fans need a copy of, both as something to return to and as a representation of a current moment (which the acknowledgements suggest, referring to the idea of there being another one of these in ten years). As with any anthology, people are going to prefer different poems or wonder why certain things weren’t included, but it is a great chance to survey some of the queer poetry out there from the past 100 years or so. It’s a jumping off point rather than a closed book, as any good anthology should be, and I think it just being readily available and visible is still important.
Time is a Mother is Ocean Vuong’s second collection of poetry, exploring grief and memory and the important details as well as larger questions of self and place. The writing is lyrical and beautiful, as I expected, but also the poems are highly readable, telling stories and putting together images masterfully.
My two favourites were probably ‘Beautiful Short Loser’, which feels like a collection of biting observations and tells multiple stories at once, and ‘Not Even’, which is a breathtaking look at self and the past. I also particularly liked ‘Dear T’ and ‘No One Knows the Way to Heaven’, and I enjoyed a lot of the different use of form, particularly space, and also the format of ‘Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker’ which was very powerful whilst only using an Amazon purchase history.
Fans of Ocean’s Vuong’s poetry probably won’t be disappointed—I wasn’t, but was drawn into the poems, and I’ll definitely want to return to them. I’m still in awe at the combination of powerful meaning, concisely expressed thoughts, and sheer readability of Vuong’s poetry.
At Least This I Know is a collection of poetry that explores belonging in a range of forms: nation, race, sexuality, family, future, and more. The book is split into sections – ‘Where I begin’, ‘How I have grown’, ‘What I have lost’, ‘What I have given’, ‘He that I love’ and ‘Where I will burn’ – and I really liked how this took you on a journey through the poems, enacting journeys of the poet and also giving a sense of going deeper into issues of belonging and self.
I knew I was going to like the collection from the first poem ‘November 16th, 2014’, which is a perfect opening for it: a moment at border control, encapsulating fear and desire for a place to belong, and a poem that almost makes you laugh and cry at once. From there, the collection moves on to images of family, like being passed photos around and told stories, and then onto growing up and queerness, loss, and place.
I really liked the use of repetition in many of the poems, used to various effects, for example in ‘By the seashore’, one of my favourites in the collection, in a way that really gets across how certain details can become entwined with grief and traumatic moments. Also, the repetition (and variation) in ‘These pyramids are houses for the dead’ stood out to me, especially with the font size changes, and the poem has such a powerful sense of place and what people can lay claim to.
I also like the understated love poetry in the collection, especially ‘We are young and still have time’ and ‘It had been so long’, which both have a beautiful sense not only of tiny moments of love, but also time, the seeming unreality of it and maybe how queerness impacts that, changing the effects of looking back or thinking of a future.
In short, I loved this collection, which captured me from the start, with its wit, phrasing and powerful simplicity combined with explorations of all sorts of things that make up a person and make them feel like they belong somewhere. Occasionally I had to pause reading at the end of a poem to think ‘damn, that’s good’.
(Note: Thanks for 404 Ink for the proof copy – the book is out now via their website)
I always do a ‘best books I read this year that weren’t out this year’ list, to fully appreciate any books I was catching up on/not born for/etc, but this year it is crucial, because this year is the year I read Lote and the year I read Tommy Pico. So we have to start with my two new faves:
Lote by Shola von Reinhold – Not so much the book I didn’t know I needed as much as the book I knew I needed but did not have. A friend gave me this thinking I would like it, maybe not that it would quickly become one of my favourite books of all time. We follow Matilda through Transfixions, aesthetics, and questions of who gets to define history and taste in a book that does Gender Feelings and made me google people and just generally feel like I got so much from it. I read it twice in 2021 and that may have not been enough.
IRL, Nature Poem, and Feed by Tommy Pico – I read three of Tommy Pico’s poetry books this year, and the only reason I’ve not read the fourth is that I’m saving it on my ‘to read’ pile that some kind of hoarder. I love long poems, I love books that are a single poem, and I love how Tommy Pico writes. I was sold and then I read the lines “Stop fucking / posting about “veggies,” truly / America’s most disgustingly / perky word”. Also, this year I watched Reservation Dogs because Pico writes on it, so got even more great content.
Okay, fine, I did read some other great books from not-2021 this year too, so here’s a few others that I’ll go less feral for:
Homie by Danez Smith – I read a whole bunch of recent-ish poetry on catch up this year and this was another stand out book, about friendship and loss.
Small Beauty by jia qing wilson-yang – A short novel about where you come from, as a trans woman deals with grief and explores her aunt’s secret relationship, that was just really good.
Infect Your Friends And Loved Ones by Torrey Peters – If we’re talking short… this novella was one of those ‘I know I need to read it’ and then I read Peters’ Detransition, Baby (which will come on the proper year list) and then I finally read this and it was fantastically witty and dark.
The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen – The only graphic novel I read this year, and it gets onto my top books list… the art style is beautiful (I basically picked this up because I saw a picture of the cover) and the tale of using stories to communicate where you don’t have other words is very emotional.
I read some other great poetry this year, but actually a lot of the non-out-this-year books I read this year were a bit of a let down, maybe because with all the reviewing and actual day job I didn’t get time to read as much of a mix as I’d like, especially not older stuff. Still, I got some new obsessed-with favourites out of the year, which I’ll take as a win.
Anyway, my list of actual 2021 books will be coming soon (and then, if you’re lucky, some kind of ‘spite list’/things I didn’t like in books this year)…
Where Decay Sleeps is a collection of poetry split into seven stages of decay: pallor mortis, algor mortis, rigor mortis, livor mortis, putrefaction, decomposion and skeletonisation. Using seven themes, the poems explore haunted elements and everyday gothic, merging horror creatures with modern technology and creating spooky atmospheres.
I particularly enjoyed some of the twists on modern life, like ‘Monster Tinder’ and ‘Dinner with Dracula’, which were tongue in cheek, and the combination of those with more serious poems like ‘Decay, The Stalker’. The variety of kinds of gothic poetry was nice, with some poems a walk in an eerie woods and others a sudden reveal of gruesome bodies. The poetry is accessible and it’s a good collection for gothic horror fans who perhaps don’t read many poems as well as poetry fans who like a bit of haunting.
Deep Wheel Orcadia is unlike anything I’ve read before, a sci-fi novel in verse about home, belonging, and place written in the Orkney dialect with an English translation. The plot follows the meeting of Astrid, who returns to the titular space station after art school on Mars, and Darling, who is fleeing her past and has ended up in the far off reaches of space, but also a cast of characters across Orcadia as they try to keep apace with the changes around them.
I found the form ideal for the setting and narrative, with the verse and the sci-fi combining well to make the world-building concise and leaving plenty of ambiguity in this glimpse into the world of the space station. The short poems, occasionally getting longer to play out a big scene, move quickly between characters and situations and I found the pacing a lot more suited to me than a lot of sci-fi, leaving me wanting more rather than feeling like I’d been told too much. There’s probably a lot of different ways to read the book with its dual text, and though I settled into reading each page first in the Orkney and then English, I could imagine trying out different ways in the future.
The exploration of gender and love in this world was a real highlight, and I also liked the fact that a lot of the story was about a character returning from the “big city” (aka Mars) to their childhood home and perhaps looking for inspiration that won’t come. There’s a lot of stuff in Deep Wheel Orcadia that feels timeless, and in general it is a book that transcends things. I want to think more about Astrid and Darling and I’ll undoubtedly be rereading this a few times and probably picking up more and more each time.
As ever, my poetry reviews can be boiled down to ‘nice words here’s my faves’, but anywhere, here are said faves in my review of Kat Sinclair’s poetry collection Very Authentic Person:
Very good poems: I loved the combination of personal and political and pop cultural and public transport and little references, and the thinking about poetry but not in a self indulgent way. My favourite words were “I am floppy disk years old” and “But I’m really getting there with the rainbow paintbrush / this meritocratic omelette, all the good names being taken / when all of our pets have pets” (because I am predictable about old computer stuff in poetry) and I enjoyed all the little references but also the sounds of the poems too.
I was excited to read this collection as I loved Sean Wai Keung’s poem in the Haunted Voices anthology, and it did not disappoint! The format of focusing on different Glasgow restaurants to explore identity, language, and authenticity worked really well (‘tinto tapas’ was one of my favourite poems in the collection and was very much on this theme) and gave a sense of travelling through the collection around Glasgow, thinking about who you are and where you belong. Some of the poems also explore lockdown, in terms of food and getting outside and also pandemic racism, and they had a wry yet relatable approach (especially ‘wing rush’ which is about whether anyone knows if you’ve already been out once that day) which I also really liked.
I love Sean Wai Keung’s poetic style and these poems were clever and enjoyable, a fresh take on identity and what is authentic (cuisine or otherwise).
Teeth in the Back of my Neck is a collection of poetry that focuses on anger and sadness, on identity and history, and on the societal structures that hold us. Split into two parts—’The Teeth’ and ‘The Neck’—the poems explore things the violence and trauma that women face, the way women’s bodies are seen, and how race and belonging are constructed and viewed in society.
The collection manages to feel varied whilst having clear themes, and the poems are written in an immediate and forthright way that gets across the anger and power behind them. Poems like ‘Hell Will Fall Apart for You’ and ‘A Few Brown Bodies’ look at how people react and how to get angry (or not) about things, and how to enact change, feeling immediate and memorable. The second half of the collection focuses even more on personal identity, history, and people’s relation to others in how these are built. I found the poems that explore the importance of names (‘Jane’) and the idea of DNA testing and the self (’23andme’) particularly interesting, questioning what makes a person and how other people react to that.
It’s hard, despite the pun, not to call Teeth in the Back of my Neck poems with bite, because that’s what they feel like: they’re sharp, witty, and emotional, and even just looking quickly back through the book to write this review makes me want to read them again and again.
Fiendfully Reading 
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