NPR Sees the 2016 Poetry Light

At NPR, a preview of the poetry books to come in this year of 2016, one of dark times: "These are dark times; our feeds are filled with news of shootings as well as the hateful speech that always results. Every year, writing this preview, I think of how poetry is one of our surest consolations," writes Craig Morgan Teicher. While he notes the monumental and the collected, such as The Collected Poems of Adrienne Rich, "one of the major feminist pioneers of the second half of the 20th century; Claudia Rankine was tapped to write the introduction," and collected volumes of Stevie Smith, Marie Ponsot, Rita Dove, Frank Bidart," Teicher looks closely at 2016 ventures from Robyn Schiff, Aracelis Girmay, Francine J. Harris, Karen Volkman, and more. A couple to whet your eyeballs:

Look
by Solmaz Sharif
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Paperback, 96 pages

This debut from Solmaz Sharif, a poet of Iranian descent, offers another kind of take on the most pressing issues of our moment: war in the Middle East, the war on terror, the devastation ravaged upon families in the name of freedom. Sharif has a vast poet's toolkit. She employs definitions taken from a dictionary by the U.S. Department of Defense, bulleted lists, bombed narratives and exploded memories, and even a rhetorical form the mad genius Christopher Smart once used to describe his cat but which is here put to more serious use: "Whereas today we celebrate things like his transfer to a detention center closer to home;/.../"Whereas I made nothing happen." All the while, she entreats us not to avert our eyes, because "We say the war is over, but still/ the woman leans across/ the passenger seat/ my son, my son."

The Black Maria
by Aracelis Girmay
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Paperback, 104 pages

Crowned by an extraordinary long poem interweaving the childhood of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, whose neighbor "turns,/ with her white looking,/ his telescope into a gun" with the author's hopes for her own unborn child — "Maybe he will be the boy who studies stars" – Aracelis Girmay's third book of poetry looks at the crimes committed against African Americans throughout history and now. In sequences, untitled lyrics, long poems, and a series of "Estrangements," Girmay follows the deepest roots of her language to their sources: "It is my history raiding me," she writes. These poems repeat themselves, reuse lines, feel anxious and scattershot, but there is beauty and imperative witness everywhere here.

Read it all at NPR.