Here We Go: Entropy's Best Poetry of 2017

Those highly anticipated, highly afeared best-machinations-of-an-entire-year lists are a-coming. Here's the first, from our eyes. Entropy's "Best of 2017: Best Poetry Books & Collections" features lots of books published this year of 2017 that you may or may not have read, and curated by staff and readers alike! Reminder: "In no particular order…" (well, how about the first few):

1. Inherit by Ginger Ko (Sidebrow)

 

Inherit is a really striking collection, constructed out of an emotionally-packed lyric on family, culture, gender imbalance and history. —rob mclennan

2. When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Future Possibilities by Chen Chen (Boa Editions)

 

Chen Chen refuses to be boxed in or nailed down. He is a poet of Whitman’s multitudes and of Langston Hughes’s blues, of Dickinson’s ‘so cold no fire can warm me’ and of Michael Palmer’s comic interrogation. What unifies the brilliance of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities is a voice desperate to believe that within every one of life’s sadnesses there is also hope, meaning, and—if we are willing to laugh at ourselves—humor. This is a book I wish existed when I first began reading poetry. Chen is a poet I’ll be reading for the rest of my life. —Jericho Brown

3. Whereas by Layli Longsoldier (Graywolf)

It’s no exaggeration to say that I was blown away when I read Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS—such trenchant, beautiful thinking and writing about the relationship between official political speech and literature’s capacity to write back. And write back Long Soldier does, with a sensibility so tough and gentle, so sure of itself and so questioning, that I find myself simply standing back in admiration, savoring every perfect, necessary word of her intervention. I imagine the whole of WHEREAS one day being read in its entirety to and from the hilltops, in all its intimate wonder. I hope to be there.—Maggie Nelson

4. Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith (Graywolf)

 

These poems can’t make history vanish, but they can contend against it with the force of a restorative imagination. Smith’s work is about that imagination—its role in repairing and sustaining communities, and in making the world more bearable. . . . Their poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy. . . . But they also know the magic trick of making writing on the page operate like the most ecstatic speech. —The New Yorker

There are 60 (!) in total listed at Entropy.