While the Possible is Possible: A 2021 Poetry Preview, Part 3
Welcome to the final installment of this year's poetry preview. I'd like to thank Ana, Ken, Evie, and Phillip for joining me this year and bringing their unique sensibilities to this glimpse into the future. Our collective picks for the must-read poetry books of the coming year (don't forget to check out parts one and two of the preview) show, among other things, the incredible capaciousness of contemporary poetry.
I've never felt the urgent need for that breadth and diversity as I do now, as I struggle — as all of us are struggling — to understand the chaos of the last four years and look, with as much hope as we can muster, toward an uncertain horizon. May these books be sustaining company for you as they have been for us. And stay safe! — Craig Morgan Teicher
the she said dialogues: flesh memory
Akilah Oliver, January
T.S. Eliot told poetsshe saidthrobs with sexual excess, the erotic as a pulsing of cosmic inundations, what she calls "the menstrual blood of angels." By "refashioning the Black female tongue," Oliver seeks to trouble the distinction between sacred and profane (this, she tantalizingly argues, is what W.E.B. Du Bois actually meant by double consciousness). She sings the wounds of a lover, the politics of Black lesbianism, and casts herself as the priestess of a Sapphic paganism.
