Paul Noodleman

2019 reading recommendations from the CSU Poetry Center

Here are some favorite books our staff read in 2019 (published anytime). Happy reading!

Ali Black

One of the reasons I read is to get inspired to write. These are a few books that I read in 2019 that really inspired me to not only write, but to also think deeply about education, blackness, personal responsibility and art.

We Want To Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina L. Love

A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib

How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir by Saeed Jones

Codependence by Amy Long

Art on My Mind: Visual Politics by bell hooks

Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom

On the Come Up by Angie Thomas

Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan

Leyna Bohning

Poetry:

Tantrum – Stella Corso

Nonfiction:

One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter – Scaachi Koul

My Private Property – Mary Ruefle

Fiction:

Find Me – Laura van den Berg

Severance – Ling Ma

Her Body and Other Parties – Carmen Maria Machado

Slade House – David Mitchell

Leila Chatti

Dorianne Laux – Only as the Day Is Long

Ilya Kaminsky – Deaf Republic

E.C. Belli – Objects of Hunger

Meg Freitag – Edith

Yanyi – Year of Blue Water

Mary Ruefle – Dunce

Ada Limón – The Carrying

Adélia Prado (trans. by Ellen Doré Watson) – Ex-Voto

Natalie Eilbert – Indictus

Alessandra Lynch – Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment

Leslie Harrison – The Book of Endings

Ellery Akers – Knocking on the Earth

Kristin Prevallet – I, Afterlife

Jon Conley

Aug 9 – Fog – Kathryn Scanlan

The most physically beautiful item (book) I can remember holding. Short, beautiful, mysterious passages torn from a found diary that you will quickly reread over and over and over.

Machine: A Novel – Susan Steinberg

Another aesthetically beautiful book—“linked” stories with words and punctuation like a painting, telling a story that resists narrative in the way life does.

Rosemary’s Baby – Ira Levin

If I had a dollar for every time... I’d have 4 dollars. Amazingly controlled narrative that produces terror and awe through the colloquial sentence.

The Driftless Area – Tom Drury

It’s like a mystical, airy ride through the currents of small town Iowa. Distinct voices speaking in wry prose, the whole book woven with the magic of coincidence and fate.

The Iliac Crest – Christina Rivera Garza

An unknown woman shows up at the narrator’s house and all existential hell breaks loose. An amazing and confusing walk through language and self, examining how they attempt to affect and define each other, or how they refuse to, or how they don't matter and also you do not matter. This book whipped me around like a little baby feather in the wind.

Paul Noodleman (aka Tube Guy)

Actual Air by David Berman

Blood Makes Me Faint But I Go For It by Natalie Lyalin

every issue of Sky Mall

Wild is the Wind by Carl Phillips

Caryl Pagel

Some writing I read and loved this year:

Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib (University of Texas Press)

Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Acker-Brodesser (Random House)

Litany for the Long Moment by Mary-Kim Arnold (Essay Press)

Blackfishing the IUD by Caren Beilin (Wolfman Books)

Way of Seeing by John Berger (Penguin)

Partial Genius by Mary Biddinger (Black Lawrence Books)

Earth by Hannah Brooks-Motl (The Song Cave)

Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole (Random House)

Being Here Is Everything by Marie Darrieussecq tr. Penny Hueston (Semiotexte)

Time Is A Thing the Body Moves Through by T Fleischmann (Coffee House)

Little Labors by Rivka Galchen (New Directions)

Heavy by Kiese Laymon (Scribner)

Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger tr. Natasha Lehrer & Cécile Menon (Dorothy)

Stet by Dora Malech (Princeton University Press)

Breakfast with Thom Gunn by Randall Mann (University of Chicago Press)

The “Happily” series by Sabrina Orah Mark (The Paris Review)

Blue Flame by Emily Pettit (Carnegie Mellon Press)

Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl by Jeannie Vanasco (Tin House)

Looking at Pictures by Robert Walser (New Directions)

The Appendix Project by Kate Zambreno (MIT Press)

Zach Peckham

10 Books I Remember Reading This Year, In Approximate Chronological Order, And So Should You

Soft Science – Franny Choi

Clap For Me That's Not Me – Paola Capó-García

The Life of Poetry – Muriel Rukeyser

Deaf Republic – Ilya Kaminsky

Destruction Myth – Mathias Svalina

Adagio Ma Non Troppo – Ryoko Sekiguchi, translated by Lindsay Turner

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude – Ross Gay

The Government of the Tongue – Seamus Heaney

Kings of the F**king Sea – Dan Boehl (but I read this book every year, so it maybe doesn't count)

Goat In The Snow – Emily Pettit

Hilary Plum

Read / reread especially gratefully in 2019:

Domestications: American Empire, Literary Culture, & the Postcolonial Lens by Hosam Aboul-Ela (Northwestern University Press)

Blackfishing the IUD by Caren Beilin (Wolfman)

The Walmart Book of the Dead by Lucy Biederman (Vine Leaves Press)

The Undying by Anne Boyer (FSG) & Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer (Ahsahta)

This Little Art by Kate Briggs (Fitzcarraldo)

Clap for Me That’s Not Me by Paola Capó-García (Rescue Press)

If I Were Another by Mahmoud Darwish, trans. Fady Joudah (W.W. Norton) (still always rereading)

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin (reread, after decades, and gladly)

“A Real American” by Farid Matuk (and still thinking of Matuk’s The Real Horse)

Xamissa by Henk Rossouw (Fordham University Press)

Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, ed. Larry Siems (Little, Brown)

Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked by Ivan Vladislavic (W.W. Norton)

Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf (reread; thanks, Caryl)