Poetry is having “a moment.” Beginning with the first Trump presidency, through the dark days of the pandemic, and carrying into this time of extreme chaos and uncertainty, even sworn poetry-haters (I mean really?) are shaking the dust off English lit textbooks, scrolling the web, and tuning into poetry podcasts in search of the solace and enlightenment that poetry offers. Meanwhile, poets do what we do, writing through the darkness of this dystopian moment.
That’s how my latest collection tic tic tic came into being. I woke up on January 1, 2024, thinking about all that has happened in this short decade. Then, after a strong cup of coffee, I turned to the page to make sense of how to live through this urgent, tumultuous time, and frame it within the long expanse of history. How did we get here? What are living through? And what can we call on? These are the questions I wrestled with as I wrote in the months that followed. tic tic tic wonders if love’s small affections can buffet the storm, and if faith is a last resort or an act of defiance in a wrathful world. I arrived at more questions than answers in the process of writing, yet I came to realize that the human spirit is a persistent creature and that “the quick tsk of hope” is at the heart of our resilience.
Along the way, I gathered inspiration from poets who are responding to the rise of Trumpism, enduring violence, war, racial targeting, technology’s spiraling reach, and the increasing peril presented by the climate crisis. Their books give lyrical voice to fear and anger but also resolve. The ten collections gathered here brim with restive, resistant poems that speak into our moment, and nonetheless shed light on how to keep living with honesty, humor, faith, love, and an extra helping of hope.
Soft Targets by Deborah Landau
The lyric sequences in Deborah Landau’s collection name our vulnerabilities, the soft targets of our bodies and our beings in the spaces we once thought safe. Fear is in the cities and our bedrooms, “Stay off the beach, the street, the plane—.” It takes the shape of leaders and terrorists and a raging earth. If there is any sense of refuge, Landau rips that away line by line: “I’ll antioxidize as best I can/bat away death with berries and flax/but there’s no surviving/this slick merciless world.” These are smart poems laced with, albeit gallows, humor. Yet Landau offers up love and, in the final poem, the hope of “something tender, something that might bloom.”
[ominous music intensifying] by Alexandra Teague
American hymns and patriotic songs play through Alexandra Teague’s collection [ominous music intensifying] with titles such as “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory” and “My Country, Tis of Thee” that set the reader’s earworm in motion. The familiar song thrums in one’s head as the poem rings with the discordant tune, “and thee I sing of the sacred into and the clamped quiet/woods of shame bottle spatter and condoms spent…” an imagining of human cries and lives trampled by the industrial beast of our own making. In these poems, something is always out of tune, like the country riven by politics, gun violence, climate crisis and a pandemic. Teague probes this landscape of horrors with playful outrage—turning Americana inside out like a soiled sweatshirt.
Of Tyrant by Leah Umansky
In the face of rising political tyranny, Leah Umansky has given us a book of poems that name the tyrants all around us. What these poems discover is that, in being named, the tyrants are diminished. These are poems that march in the street, that chant their resistance with fury and urgency: “gather/gather your good/gather your good appetite/gather your filling/gather your filling/of hate.” These are not poems of solace, they are angry, demanding action, inciting the reader to shout them out loud. Go ahead, run out in the street and rage with the poems from Of Tyrant.
Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry by John Murillo
John Murillo speaks to the violence afflicting our communities with the voice of someone who has lived through it. The opening poem describes a moment when the speaker nearly shoots a man, “because I loved the girl, I actually paused/before I pulled the trigger–once/twice, three times–then panicked/not just because the gun jammed,/but because what if it hadn’t.” With his strong sense of musicality, Murillo creates a powerful chorus of voices that serve as witness to racial violence and social injustice in his spectacular crown sonnet, “A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn.” Within the framework of ars poetica, Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry realizes the role that poetry has in chronicling and illuminating our life and times.
The World That the Shooter Left Us by Cyrus Cassells
Cyrus Cassells wrote The World That the Shooter Left Us as an urgent response to the “Stand Your Ground” murder of a friend’s father. These poems stare the reader down with their honesty and brutality. They rage against a multitude of horrors such as child sexual exploitation and slavery and what has sadly become the backdrop of our lives, police brutality, political violence, plagues, school shootings. Cassells seems to dare the reader to look away. But we can’t. In the long poem for immigrant children forced into cages, “Icebox,” Cassells asks: “Was it your callous voice/Refusing the herded girls/Sanitary napkins, insisting/Let them bleed….”. Cassells’ invigorating and vivid language stands in powerful resistance to systemic violence and hatred.
To 2040 by Jorie Graham
What does the world look like after we’re extinct? Jorie Graham has been writing the clarion call as we barrel toward extinction in book after book. With To 2040, Graham brings us poems that are quiet in their warning: “…You there. Wake up. But/nobody’s here,/just the earth.” These poems contain the silence of what’s been lost, what remains, and what survives us. I am reminded of how the birds empty my garden and a quiet descends when the wildfire smoke arrives where I live. Despite, or maybe because of its spareness, To 2040 is a terrifying and energizing leap into the near future that climate catastrophe portends.
Regaining Unconsciousness by Harryette Mullen
Consider Regaining Unconsciousness a missive from the near future, as AI’s sentient soldiers take over, as the light is extinguished from the skies. Yet rather than dwell on the ravished landscape of our own creation, Mullen’s writing surprises with lush lyrical illustrations of the world we live in, “Origami-folded toads/lost in arched lands/where mountain snows might/whet the thirst of desert flowers” while slyly taking it away. Mullen shakes us awake with poems from our broken world delivered with bite and humor.
Smother by Rachel Richardson
Rachel Richardson confronts the challenges of raising children in a burning world with a mother’s courage and care. Smother is an embrace of motherhood, in all its challenges and complications. How exactly does one protect and nurture children in the face of catastrophic wildfires? How do you mother a family and a planet? Richardson responds to the questions of our times with poems that sing with heart and humor. In the title poem, smoke is personified: “The smoke never appears in family pictures./The smoke got up this morning and ran a marathon./She came in/first in her age group without trying.” Wildfire smoke may not appear in the family photos, but it is a real and present danger in Smother.
To Phrase a Prayer for Peace by Donna Spruijt-Metz
When Hamas terrorists breached the Gaza-Israeli border, slaying and kidnapping civilians, Spruijt-Metz started writing daily poems that chronicle the borders of her emotions and faith. In dialogue with God and biblical Psalms, questions and prayers accumulate like days, poem by poem. Each calling out to the divine from the remove of daily life, “ You get up/every morning,/dress in blacks/and greys, and/write poetry/about the war.” These are poems grounded in the self and aspiring to the spiritual.
Something About Living by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha has been a powerful voice for the Palestinian people as long as she’s been writing poetry. In the National Book Award-winning Something About Living, she meets the genocidal moment we are in with poems of protest and anguish. Unflinchingly, Khalaf Tuffaha brings the devastation waged against the Palestinian people onto the page and into the reader’s mind,, “We bury our dead at the fence, let their roots reach the other side of home..” And yet offers a thread of hope, “Let the stars fall. I have no idea/what hope is, but our people/have taught me a million ways to love.”