Break to Sing: Seven New Poetry Collections to Read in July

“Elegy, sing the bones to break / the cycle. The cycle: Sing to Break. Break to Sing.”

, Philip B. Williams’ Lift Every Voice

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This month, we see poets collaborating and conversing beyond words on a page, from Victoria Chang’s hand-stitched historical photographs to a robot libretto from Brenda Shaughnessy, who joins the substantial ranks of poet-librettists, including contemporary poets Douglas Kearney, Janine Joseph, Avery R. Young, and Robert Pinsky, who’s own 2011 robot opera, Death in the Powers, centers a chorus of robots. The line between poem and song continues to be porous; the journey of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” set as song by his brother, later coined the “Black National Anthem” and then individually turned back to poem as a golden shovel by Philip B. Williams, reminds us of a poem’s endurance, as do the last words of Franz Wright, caught in the poems of his final collection: “Let alone, let / alone the lights / of home my / wanderings done.”

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José Felipe Alvergue, en el norte/ soy del sur, (Omnidawn Publishing)

“I receive signals/ throughout my life. / Radio fragments bouncing / around.” Alvergue chisels those signals, those fragments of his family history of migration from El Salvador, “Historical pain, like faintly buried stone steps” and “the spectacle of indefatigueable bodies”, in fourteen-liners that need not align with borders. Alvergue’s sonnet-essays, as he calls them, swerve, turn on the page, break free by line, occasionally fit around the color photographs that anchor this collection, stretching the sense of the turn in echo of intergenerational trauma. For even the photos can be upside down: “A family of turns / becomes form. Work embodied that is / future occupying, but not future anxious. / The turn disavows utilized value.” In one compressed pairing, the left half of the sonnet speaks back to a photo, “My mother, newly orphaned, newly arrived”, while across a slim column of space the sonnet depicts a man screaming at her in Costco: “She landed trusting / she would be American only to find herself / a woman of color in America.” In these poems the turn is also the dance, a form of survival, celebration, endurance: “We came in dancing,” “We danced in defense,” “Dancing is making repairs / in motion. Salvadoreño parents snap their /fingers at their kids and you better be moving.”

Victoria Chang, Tree of Knowledge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Victoria Chang’s latest collection centers a tree brought down by chainsaw: “It swayed like a woman / hanging from a gallows.” A line later, the speaker continues, “I wondered how it felt to finally swing in / ecstasy only in death.” The roots of these expansive poems draw on artists, from Picasso to contemporary artist-writers such as Renee Gladman and Ai Wei Wei, and Chang makes this engagement material by taking historical photographs into her own hands, stitching them with red thread and pairing them with “tiny persona poems” also printed in red. For at the heart of this collection is the expansive breathless long poem “Eureka,” marking not only Eureka’s story of expulsion of its Chinese citizens, but menopause and melancholy, ambition, loss, and, ultimately, expectations, as the speaker laments “but I only want to write about trees/ about the dead Chinese people near trees/ about my dead family near the trees.” And in “Motherhood”: “When I can no longer find the words to describe this, / the baby next door tries to speak, the trees drop their stars.”

Anna Journey, Wolf Cut: New & Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press)

If you come to Anna Journey’s new book for a poem about Larry Levis’ archived boots, you’ll stay for the stories, a speaker “so messed up from mixing my drugs that I accidentally / stole a child” at a music festival, and who recalls the “anarchy / symbol I smeared in blood on my bedroom door.” Throughout Journey’s baker’s dozen poems of new poems that move between California and the South, a sense of the father, now gone, emerges: “When I refused, at fifteen, to hand over the carton of Newports / tucked behind a line of calf-high boots in my closet, /slammed and locked my door, my father tore the whole / damn thing off its brass hinges, injured his shoulder.” He appears to be trying to prevent the speaker’s self-harm, revealed to the reader by cigarette burns on her forearms. We also see him as he is dying, and in his youth in Mississippi, copying Greek off a bathroom stall after which he “brought his transcription to the Episcopal priest / who taught Greek and Latin at Millsaps. The priest /laughed as he translated, It says, “My shit don’t stink.” Flushed out with more compressed, in both image and music, standouts from her first four collections, Journey’s New & Selected is both revealing and full of life.

Brenda Shaughnessy, Sensorium Ex: An Opera in Verse (Knopf)

Shaughnessy’s robot opera, written in collaboration with composer Paola Prestini, captures the complexity of distinctions between corporate control of technology and its possibilities, with a focus not only on inclusive disabled casting, but on the use of AI to “assemble recorded vocalizations of nonverbal human actors into their characters’ lines,” modeling an “AI that gives you back your own data, to use as your own voice, for your own purposes.”  The cast includes a robot named Sophia, who is “our new human you are hoping to perfect!”; a scientist single mother, Dr. Mem, and her nonverbal child, Kitsune; a chorus of souls; and CORP, the human embodiment of a large corporate entity who has “jillionaire tech-lord omnipotence” and is “sometimes followed around onstage by a trumpet.” (And is a baritone, of course.) Mycelia, who is “part tree and part human” reveals that she is “Fluent in Aspen, Birch, / and Cypress” and “I sing what I remember. / That’s how my knowing is got.”  This story of mother and son itself offers a compelling contribution to human-centered literature about robots, AI, and disability, marked by Shaughnessy’s sure hand as a poet turned librettist. (And if, like me, reading this also makes you long to experience the opera off the page, check out the trailer.)

Phillip B. Williams, Lift Every Voice (Penguin)

“Sing to break. Break to sing.” From this evocative call in the preface poem, “Aide-Memoir,” Williams’ third collection turns to poems that grapple through swerve and reference and the sharp sensibilities of the poet’s active mind and vantage, voiced: “A close friend tells me my mother told him my father / committed suicide. Not how overdosing works, love.” In a series of “While Reading” poems, Williams enters into narratives and symbols of others, transforming and borrowing at once, whether evoking Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s stag, or in “While Reading Sula,” identifying with Nel: “Why should I burn / while a man mumbled / Christ, scared, above me?” His grand gesture is a finale, “’Til Earth and Heaven Ring” which moves as epic and as song in its repetitions as a golden shovel using James Weldon Johnson’s “Til Earth and Heaven Ring,” a spine for “preparing the air around it to sing / about my father’s mother till / I get it right . . ..” Throughout, Williams makes thought sing.

Christian Wiman, The Dance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Christian Wiman’s newest collection has landed, complete with “Bad Literary Gathering,” at which there is “A kind of nude gloom in which everyone sees / everyone else’s death: a mortality colony.” Highlights include the more earthy lyrics: “Holding an Earthworm at Fifty-eight” offers up a childhood memory of worms with “the oily, eely /under of it all, /the viscid seethe” and “Reading Steinbeck,” which begins in media res: “, and the sorrows hardened, / and in the first light grew palpable, pliable.” Wiman’s formal meditations turn to lines such as “When sleep was sleep and dawn was ponderable” and, in “There Could Come a Cuckoo,” which muses on “the middle of your life’s journey,” the speaker quips, “You don’t even believe in breakfast, much less a sweet one, / but here you are, slathering nostalgia on a waffle.” Faith and formalism prevail, and Wiman brings a graceful touch to the pandemic in “The Word”: “Consider the shiver that goes through still water like a sound. /Who would we have to be to hear it?”

Franz Wright, Axe in Blossom: Last Poems & Fragments (Knopf)

“It won’t be long now, planet of ghosts.” So Wright addresses us in this posthumous collection, saying his goodbyes, whether in this prose address, “As in Sepia Visions,” or in “Everything Else Will Change,” a love poem, his notes remind us that these poems are both for and shaped with his wife, but we feel part of this “I” and this “you”, “Everything on earth will change when I am dead. /No one will notice but you. / No one will suffer but you.” These are “last poems and fragments,’ not a distilled collection as before, yet there’s something unbearably beautiful and cohesive about Ax in Blossom. We are in the presence of a wildly unmatchable poet whose future poems we will never hold. “Theology” opens, “There must be someone else / who wakes disturbed, alone; / too bad we can’t talk on our tiny phone.” These poems are that tiny phone, connecting us to Wright and all that his poems remind us we can endure.