A Playlist for the April 2019 Issue

For our April 2019 playlist, we asked contributor Jane Yeh to curate a selection of music for us. You can read about her approach to creating the playlist below. Click here to open the playlist in your Spotify app.

Rather than trying to match songs to poems, which seems impossible, I chose songs whose lyrics touched on a few of the themes that some of the poems in this issue seemed to suggest. (Even to say I’m looking for “themes” in a poem feels reductive, but there you go.)

A number of songs on my playlist are about the strength of female friendship and sisterhood (literal or metaphorical), which I saw as relating to Angel Nafis’s poem of sisterly love, “Ode to Dalya’s Bald Spot,” and the women’s world of The Salon that Fatimah Asghar describes in her essay “Finding the Hammam.” The thrilling sense in which love or friendship creates a protective shell of solidarity—us against the world—is also found in some of these songs, and in José Olivarez’s “Shelter Island”:

                                  we walk into the teeth of the hour
armed with each other. [...]
when we hold hands, we invent a spaceship.

The power of defiance, of rejecting societal norms and rebelling against oppressive forces, is expressed in many of the tracks in this playlist, as well as in Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s “Birthday Suits,” Desirée Alvarez’s “‘Un Tintero,’ Inkwell,” and (more mournfully) Edil Hassan’s “Ghazal”—“I am still an accident of geography looking for a body that is not a stain.” And that frequent subject of pop songs, the unhappy relationship, is reflected, in a way, in Adonis’s “Psalm,” translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid and Ivan Eubanks. When they write, “A distance as great as a mirage divides us,” and “I cannot live with you, I cannot live without you,” the poem’s speaker may be addressing God, but could equally be singing about a bad breakup.

I’ve tried to pick songs that will be unfamiliar to most people, because what’s the point of listening to a stranger’s playlist when it contains songs you already know? If this list helps anyone to discover even one new artist they’re excited about, I would be psyched. Thanks for listening!