Seven Poetry Books for September: Chang, Hillman, Long Soldier

Layli Long Soldier's long-awaited second collection, We, arrives the same year she won a MacArthur Fellowship and became a National Book Award finalist — one of seven poetry books headlining this month's readings.

The month's list spans five new collections and two translations: Samuel Amadon's Divers, Erin Belieu's Cocklebur: New and Selected Poems, Tina Chang's Lion, Brenda Hillman's Still House in the Desert, Long Soldier's We, and translations of the sixteenth-century Indian mystic Mirabai and the contemporary Romanian poet Radu Vancu.

The reviewer frames the selection around a shared preoccupation: poets "searching memory and history to figure out how we got here, and where exactly we are."

What runs through the seven collections?

Tina Chang, Brenda Hillman and Layli Long Soldier all consider what mothers pass along to daughters, in what the reviewer describes as "a dark dangerous world lit by small, luminous acts of love." Erin Belieu weighs a lifetime of memories. Samuel Amadon, in the reviewer's words, "electrifies the ordinary with words." The two translations — Chloe Martinez's version of Mirabai and Paula and Cyrus Console-Soican's version of Vancu — "seek to inhabit and transcend the history that holds up the present."

Which books stand out?

• Tina Chang, Lion — her fourth collection meditates on mothers and daughters, visual art and myth, and threats to Asian American women during and since the pandemic. An extended sequence addresses the 2022 murder of Michelle Alyssa Go, pushed in front of an oncoming train. "I am destined to be brutally seen," Chang writes; "If only my people were not dying from being invisible."

• Brenda Hillman, Still House in the Desert — called "her most intimate and revealing book, and one of her best." The short lyrics and extended pieces draw imagery from the 1950s onward, opening "When nuclear testing began north of love/ & the Remington computer was placed in office use."

• Layli Long Soldier, We — a "capacious, wooly conglomeration of poetry and prose" mixing lyric sequences, visual poems, essays, photos and diagrams of constellations. Long Soldier writes that "when I say 'our history' I really do mean our — both Native and non-Native… Anyone who lives on this land is a treaty inheritor."

• Erin Belieu, Cocklebur: New and Selected Poems — a retrospective tracing the poet's development from 1990s poems of "graceful descriptions and encoded trauma" to the looser music and political engagement of the last decade.

Samuel Amadon, Divers — a seasonal day book of sonnets that doubles as an argument for paying attention: "Nothing startling happens yet so many things startle."

How do the translations read?

Chloe Martinez translates Mirabai from the Braj Bhasha in Blue Like My Beloved, rendering the sixteenth-century mystic in fluent modern American idiom — "Baddies can go jump in a fire." The reviewer predicts the book "will earn Mirabai new disciples."

Radu Vancu's The Rope in Bloom, translated from the Romanian by Paula Console-Soican and Cyrus Console-Soican, is an epic of grief radiating from the poet's father, who died by suicide and speaks in imagined dream monologues. Set in Dante-like tercets with prose commentary after each canto, it names John Berryman's Dream Songs and Seamus Heaney's Station Island among its predecessors.

The reviewer's closing counsel comes from Mirabai herself, via Martinez: "Be all-in, body and soul" — a 500-year-old instruction these seven books suggest still holds.