It’s December and we’ve almost made it, so we asked a few of our favourite poets and writers to look back at their 2020 reading and share with us their three top recommendations from this year.
Their picks are varied and personal and idiosyncratic — encompassing new poetry, 90s baseball, memoir, books in and on translation, pamphlets and indie publishers. A window into some of the reading that spoke to them and, hopefully, shining a little light on titles that might have passed you by in the maelstrom of all this 2020:
Andrew McMillan
Ok , so a confession, I’ve drank so much wine in lockdown that I think my memory is playing up. Another confession, I’ve been judging a couple of things this year, one of which doesn’t operate by the calendar year and one which does, so my sense of what was published when is a seesaw, like that time I took the dog for a walk at 2am to try and sober up. A final confession, my concentration for tasks beyond the necessary has been intermittent.
I greatly enjoyed If I had Your Face, by Frances Cha (Penguin, 2020), whose prose transported me to Seoul when I spent the year grounded in Manchester; a darkly comic and disturbing novel which has stayed with me long after finishing.
Just Us, by Claudia Rankine (Penguin), felt like essential reading and I left its pages with a long reading list of articles and monographs that I needed to seek out. The conversational directness of Rankine’s words, mixed with the weight of what they say, is a thrilling and implicating mix to encounter.
A lot of poetry I enjoyed has been noted already, by prize lists or the PBS, but I’d like to mention one book which moved me to tears, Return by Minor Road, by Heidi Williamson (Bloodaxe): a stunning and heart-breaking look at the Dunblane massacre, the way grief can infuse a place, and what the aftermath (in the literal sense of the beginnings of a new growth) of such an event feels like in such a close-knit community.
Is there an extra category for publisher of the year? I’d raise that glass to Broken Sleep Books, who continue to publish exciting and innovative poetry and prose, and introducing us to exciting new voices.
Rachael Allen
Three of my favourite pamphlet / chapbooks of the year! I have chapbook-lust over all of Ugly Duckling Presse's 2020 Pamphlet Series. Half sweet blush pink half duck-egg blue, they are beautifully made mini-collections of essays, poems, treatises. A favourite was Translation is a Mode = Translation is an Anti-Neocolonial Mode by Don Mee Choi (Ugly Duckling Presse), what and how different languages are upheld via mothers, Kim Hyesoon's poems and Ingmar Bergman.
Caren Beilin's Blackfishing the IUD (Wolfman Books. UK stockists: Good Press, Foyles, ) does what it says on the tin. Bringing what Blackfish did for SeaWorld to women's contraceptive, Beilin attempts to burn down the house of the outdated material we're expected to ingest and host in the name of not getting pregnant.
Finally, ecologically networked, complex poems of animal and memory are in Pratyusha's bulbul calling (Bitter Melon), a gorgeous rumination on language and relationships.
Rishi Dastidar
The book that has most profoundly moved me this year is Poor by Caleb Femi (Penguin). The more I read it, the more brilliant I think it is.
The book that most surprised me, in that I had no expectations that I would enjoy its evocation of a lost England as much as I did, was Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon (Faber & Faber).
The book that I used to escape from the world the most (and think about the infinite while doing so) was Bottom of the 33rd by Dan Barry (Harper Collins. UK stockist: Blackwells), an account of the longest game ever played in baseball.
Maya C. Popa
My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems by Yi Lei; Translated from the Chinese by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi (Graywolf Press). I was unfamiliar with Yi Lei's stunning work (this, despite the fact that she is one of China's most influential contemporary poets) prior to reading Tracy K. Smith's compilation. These sly, sensual poems are masterfully crafted.
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song, Edited by Kevin Young (Library of America). It's hard to overstate Young's contribution with this groundbreaking anthology, which is part act of historical preservation and re-animation, part celebration of Black American voices from the colonial period to present.
The Lost Spells by Robert MacFarlane (Author), Jackie Morris (Illustrator) (Penguin). This stunningly illustrated large format book features summoning spells (often in the form of acrostic poems) to flora and fauna, movingly capturing the verve and rhythms of the natural world.
Arji Manuelpillai
Poor by Caleb Femi (Penguin) — This book is like looking out the window for me. I’ve lived in SE London for so many years and I can’t remember seeing it so well reflected in a book of poems. The poems are accessible and quite easy to process but have layers like a double decker chocolate bar. It really is something to celebrate, it takes the concrete mundanity of everyday life and elevates it to what it should be, something which has all the sadness, joy and tragedy of life.
How to Wash a Heart by Bhanu Kapil (Pavilion Poetry) — Bhanu’s book is kind of like walking into a kaleidoscope of heritage. I love everything she does now, having found this book i have gone through it countless times. It’s not like other books this year, subtle, nuanced and in the astro-plane only really wild poets get into. If the book was in a pub it would be the lady with the trolley full of black bags, you always wondered what was in them and now you can find out. Go on, go have a peek, let the words wash over you, let them roll through you and when you come out you will have the stench of something new and precious.
Love Minus Love by Wayne Holloway-Smith (Bloodaxe) — This book is cool as hell. So cool it throws titles into the gutter, it sticks words together, it swings narratives round its little finger and it jumps on any preconception you have about poetry. This book runs like a comic strip, turning you on every page leading you up a path and then throwing you over a fence. Wayne is the don at the unexpected and I feel this trumps Alarum in its ability to speak things under the surface. Let me make a recommendation, read the book in one sit in, with some neat whiskey and a cig, do it when everybody is out, have it inside you and you will come out someone new.
Seán Hewitt
When Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat (Tramp Press) arrived, it transported me. A beautiful work of autofiction, essay, and translation, it calls on the ghost, the echo, of the 18th century Irish poet Eibhlin Dubh Ní Chonaill. Its exploration of motherhood and erasure almost becomes a detective novel, working through the archive to find a voice, and to see if that voice will speak back.
Danez Smith’s Homie (Chatto) was published early in year, and I worry that in the disorientation of 2020 those pre-pandemic books have been a little overlooked, seeming to belong to a different year altogether. Still, Smith’s collection is dazzling, energetic, and makes a blaze of elegy. I like best their sonnet sequence ‘for a dead homie’: ‘aren’t you all of it now? i call for God. / i call for God but out comes your name.’
I’d also love to give a shout to fourteen poems, an anthology series that started this year. Each issue collects 14 new poems by queer writers. Each time an issue has arrived, I’ve discovered new names, and names I’m certain will be at the vanguard of the form in the coming years. There’s no better way to get an insight into the diversity, bravery, and experiment of queer poetry today.
Joelle Taylor
It’s been a very weird year for me with regard to reading. It’s all been archival texts, and the books I’m working on. These are my favourite poetry collections that I’ve read this year so far:
Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz (Faber & Faber).
I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975 - 2014, by Eileen Myles (Serpent’s Tail).
The Actual by Inua Ellams (Penned in the Margins).
A note on book-buying: All titles above are linked to UK Bookshop.org where possible. We are not affiliates and don’t make anything on the clickthrough. Where titles aren’t available on Bookshop.org we’ve included links to non-A*azon UK stockists. We’ve also included links to purchase direct from publishers (in parentheses).
If you’d like to support your local independent bookshop directly, that would be fantastic and where they don’t stock a title they can usually order it in for you. There’s a fantastic resource here with a map of indie bookshops near you.