New York Times Reviewers Weigh the Best Reads of 2014
--which includes books of poetry, obviously. Let's check out Dwight Garner's "best of" list which features Erin Belieu's newest book of poetry, Slant Six, and poet/novelist, Ben Lerner's new book 10:04. In the introduction to NYT reviewers's best-of lists, Garner explains: “Mine are in no particular order ... yet I’d like to keep them in the order I sent them in."
ART IN AMERICA, 1945-1970 edited by Jed Perl (The Library of America). After World War II, New York City became, for the first time, the beating heart of the art world. This new art — by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and many others — flipped on a switch for many American writers. This anthology of art writing from that period is plump, unbuttoned and convivial, streaked like bacon with gossip and cogitation.
THE EMPATHY EXAMS: Essays by Leslie Jamison (Graywolf Press). This collection of cerebral, witty and multichambered essays — on topics as disparate as murder trials, extreme endurance races and medical mysteries — tends to swing around to one topic in particular: what we mean when we say that we feel another’s pain.
10:04 by Ben Lerner (Faber and Faber). This is an intimate yet oddly grand novel of New York City, one that takes place between two recent storms: Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Sandy. The novel’s narrator, a writer, says he hopes to compose a book that is, on some level, “a long list of things that quicken the heart.” Mr. Lerner has written this sort of book.
SLANT SIX by Erin Belieu (Copper Canyon Press). A smart and nettling book of poems — about love, sex, social class and our free-floating anxieties — from a writer who is a comedian of the human spirit. Her crisp free verse has as many subcurrents as a magnetic field.
PREPARATION FOR THE NEXT LIFE by Atticus Lish (Tyrant Books). Here is a raw first novel with a low center of gravity. Set in Queens, it dilates upon blinkered lives, scummy apartments, dismal food and bad options. At its heart is a love story between a Chinese immigrant and a veteran of the Iraq war. Mr. Lish’s narrative is intense, moving and somehow necessary.
EVERY DAY IS FOR THE THIEF by Teju Cole (Random House). Mr. Cole’s novel is a book of peregrinations. It’s about a young Nigerian man, a medical student in New York City, who returns home for a short visit. It’s a book of impressions, of fleeting glimpses, that add up to a memorable portrait of a man caught between two societies.
Read Dwight Garner's complete list at The New York Times.