Last year I started a difficult book club reading group with Monsieur Big Bang and some friends from the graduate writing program from Sarah Lawrence. So you guessed it: this group is very white. Our first book was David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. We followed that with White Noise by Don DeLillo and now we’re reading Lucia Berlin’s Manual for Cleaning Women.

We're unabashed intellectuals and politics are always part of our discussions, especially as the U.S. elections fell like a hammer into our first year's meetings. Two women in the group recently recommended Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine as one of the best books they’ve read in a while. One of the daughters of the members even said they would join the group if we picked that book as a selection, (which we probably won’t because so many of us have already read it). But these poems do have an unexpected connection back to Infinite Jest as both comment somewhat ruefully about tennis tournaments.

As soon as it was recommended to me I was in a hurry to get it because I’m now ravenous to read political poetry.  This book, most famously, covers police violence deaths, each new edition adding names.

But this book is also an amazing psychological investigation on micro-aggression. And if you think of micro-aggressions as unintentional (and therefore innocent), the mistakes of ignorance or language, (like accidentally mispronouncing Cantonese and offending a native speaker), this book show you the fine points of what it really is.

I would say this is required reading in light of the political realities of today. More on Claudia Rankine: Who Is Claudia Rankine? The Poet Just Received The MacArthur "Genius Grant" (Bustle)

It feels like the black lives matter movement lost some steam when Trump was elected. We have so many problems now competing for our attention. Rankine’s book is a good reminder to revisit books of poetry dealing with accelerating police violence and dehumanizing black people. Forget micro-aggression for a second. This is macro-aggression.

One of the runners up of the Rattle chapbook competition was Ligatures (for black bodies) by Denise Miller which I was lucky enough to receive as a subscriber last year. It’s 35 pages that pack a big punch.  You can can get a copy for six dollars and it’s well worth the price.

We all follow particular subject threads in our reading. I keep following the trail of New Mexican poetry. Monsieur Big Bang and I recently visited the a place south of Santa Fe called El Rancho de Las Golondrinas. This is a beautiful and quite expansive living history museum depicting the history of the Spanish Colonial immigrants who settled along the Rio Grande.

I check out every museum or college book store to see if I can find new local poets writing about "place." My project is twofold: learn something about how the neighborhood poets view particular places and support those bookstores who stock local poets.

This is how I found an amazing chapbook by Rafael Lobato, "Working in the Sun (Un Campesino en el Sol)" which was published in 2000 and  translated by Deborah Melendy Norman. The 21-page chapbook contains only seven poems but I enjoyed all of them: poems about relatives, outdoor labors, the Rio Grande and New Mexico history, growing up in rural New Mexico, cultural changes and challenges, and strategies of flirtation (warnings of a misspent youth). 

From "This Was My Life"

When you live, you lack everything.
When you die, you leave everything.

From "Welcome to the Ranch of the Swallows"

The Spaniard who slept here
Died very tired—I can feel it.
His feet struck so deep
In the sands of time
Not even the wind
Can erase his place in history.

Amy King's The Missing Museum (2016)

A month ago I received a review copy of Amy King's new book of poems, Missing Museum. I know only a bit about Amy King from Goodreads, reading news stories about writers who are aggravated Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize, and seeing her on one of the ModPo MOOC panels. I also quoted one of her essays in my eBook, Writing in the Age of Narcissism. But I hadn't yet had an opportunity to read her work.

In this book I was initially fascinated by her creative but non-integral titles like “Pussy Pussy Sochi Pussy Putin Sochi Queer Queer Pussy” and “One Bird Behind One Bird” and "Imperfect Yet.” The titles felt like random good lines being put to good post-modern use. The first and ending poems also experiment with ALL CAPS, making them challenging little book ends. If every poem had been in ALL CAPS, I'd probably still be reading them.

Once deep into the poems, they reminded me of poems by Jim Carroll due to their kind of gritty, skin-ripping quality. Or Henry Rollins. These poems are unkempt, full of street-intellectualizing that is delightfully pushy.

She had me in the prologue with "purveyors of knowledge, but too, your emotions are an intelligence.” Not only is this a defense of the emotional, I feel the entire set is writing about various intelligences: equations, indices, data, “math life,” points, beliefs and theories that aren’t adding up. In “Pussy Riot Rush Hour” “we incomplete ourselves.” In “Violent Blossoming Cities Ask How to Hear the Song” you can “centrifuge yourself.” These feel like riffs that solve for disruption.

In the book's back-advertising, John Ashbery is quoted describing King’s poems as “abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living.” That’s a good way of saying it (I guess). She's writing in a very intense now-ness. But I would like to separate King from Ashbery here because I think she’s moving in another direction from the Ashbery school. These poems move in and out of accessibility. There are bits of straight-shooting I loved in poems like “A Room Without Walls” invoking whiskey and Lionel Richie. There's movement here where some Ashbery-students stall. She's not stuck in the same whirlpool of an old experiment. Literally, “the room opens into a field.”

King can give even her enigmatic-ness a precision in one section but then provide some slack and sense in another. We relax from earlier abstractions and the contrast is satisfying and interesting.  There's also emotional directness at a cerebral level. Here's where we push to escape agendas, both sexual and poetic. In "The Little Engine’s Death" she wonders, “am I hiding in the shotgun’s sexual agenda?” King is not afraid of feelings. And I can't help but think back to her essay on exclusion in today's poetry world when I read a line like this from "My Singularity is Self-Inflicted,"

Tonight I am in the museum of my life, and you have an inflated sense of signature.

And we're back to realism in a poem like "Your Heart, The Weight of Art, " which reminded me of Neruda:

Sometimes I see what isn’t there, and that includes Love,
as if some parlor trick is inherited from my great grandmother
of the mythical Cherokee variety. But she was no soothsayer, and I’m
            just alone
now, with the life that is in you calling mine out.

There's subversiveness around what makes us feel. From the poem "One Bird Behind One Bird:"

Too bad about the plate, the shadowbox, the twisted book.
The universe conspired, a felony against your face
in search of the tiny light that carves such things,
a grand piano to play, a poor painting by Paul Stanley
resembling the way I feel instead,

I also like "Drive By and Understanding the Poem" as a meditation on language and poetry, literally poetry as place and place as a congregation of those who wield power in Poetry.

 The poem’s also a handshake.

Her topics are also very up-to-date: guns, Baltimore, Muslims, gender identity, the Internet, (I always appreciate good capitalization on the word Internet), the Cloud, Americanness.

These poems are not solely games and juxtapositions. This is the difference between random and almost random. It takes more dexterity and I feel like there's just a smarter head behind it.

We are all cross-dressing
in tiny wings with the machines of bones to go on.