I read (almost) as many books as I did last year, and discovered even more poets, novelists, graphic artists, and playwrights. Here is an out-of-order list of 30 writers that really moved me this calendar year. Some books old, some books new. All worth your while.
Note: If any authors made my 2017 or 2018 lists and released books this year, they have been left off of this list. These include:
Zachary Schomburg’s Pulver Maar
James Tate’s The Government Lake
Heather Christle’s The Crying Book
Michael Earl Craig’s Woods and Clouds Interchangeable
Max Porter’s Lanny
All author hyperlinks redirect to previous interviews on my site.
Lastly, some shameless self promo, but if you would like a great free resource, this summer I released a PDF of writing prompts featuring advice and suggestions from 32 writers I have interviewed on my site. Spoiler alert: Dean Young’s writing prompt is “write your own damn poem.”
Mary Ruefle
Memling’s Veil (1982)
Selected Poems (2010)
Trances of the Blast (2013)
An Incarnation of the Now (2015)
Dunce (2019)
Of all the books I’ve had on my desk in the library, Mary Ruefle's books begin the most conversations. I began to read her poetry last year, but it wasn’t until this year that it really clicked. A spark was ignited. I listened to lectures, readings, spoke with her on the phone, and read a hodgepodge of her bibliography. Her observant, humorous, tender, heartbreaking, atmospheric writing is the kind of writing to have in your backpack (just in case) at all times. Ruefle always manages to dazzle and delight in new ways and while there is still a great deal left to read, I can say she was my sage this year. My guide. My fairy godmother, offering me a walking stick as I started to stumble.
C. Dylan Bassett
The Invention of Monsters (2015)
The Unpainted Shore (2015)
A Failed Performance (Short Plays and Scenes) (2018)
"I peel a banana and find a small yellow finger inside."
Of all of the books that I read this year, The Invention of Monsters is my favorite. Prose poems disguised as theatrical scenes that cover identity and bewilderment in an ultimate and endless search for meaning. In thrift stores, in junkyards, in churches, in skulls. What a book.
"I am surprised how easily everything bleeds."
The Unpainted Shore, Bassett’s other 2015 collection, shows grief in many forms through an image-driven voice poised in a four part eulogy. Heartbreaking and quiet and violent and divine. The icing on the literary cake is that Bassett (along with Emma Winsor Wood) translated the great absurdist Daniil Kharms for a collection of slapstick theatrics. Haunted caricatures that might kill you if they don’t break down crying first. Consider this the trifecta of my reading year.
Dalton Day
Tandem (2015)
Exit, Pursued (2016)
Interglacials (2017)
Spooky Action at a Distance (2018)
I started reading the work of Dalton Day in 2018, and while I loved what I read (enough to conduct an interview last July), I was only scratching the surface. It wasn’t until 2019 where I really started diving in and enjoying Day’s numerous releases. A surrealist, funny, heartbreaking, and insightful body of work. Humans with antlers, humans drowning, humans on fire, humans being devoured by tinier humans, humans refusing to answer a phone that never stops ringing. From a book of one-act plays (one of my favorite books ever, I carry it with me everywhere) to various chapbooks to blocks of prose poems to identically titled couplets to an unnamed collection where every poem begins with “Hello”, Dalton Day impressed me endlessly this year. An upcoming chapbook was a runner-up for Factory Hollow Press and I can’t wait to grab it when it is finally published.
Shane Jones
I Will Unfold You with My Hairy Hands (2008)
Light Boxes (2009)
A Cake Appeared (2010)
The Failure Six (2010)
Crystal Eaters (2014)
Paper Champion (2014)
Vincent and Alice and Alice (2019)
Shane Jones is the author of four novels, one novella, one collection of poetry and fables, one poetry/illustration hybrid, and numerous chapbooks. With each release, Jones crafts maps to new worlds. Altered realities and surrealist dystopias. After discovering his work for the first time earlier this year (first with The Failure Six and then Light Boxes), I made an effort to read his entire bibliography. Note: get your hands on A Cake Appeared and I Will Unfold You with My Hairy Hands. Most recently, Jones’ head spinning office novel Vincent and Alice and Alice (VAAAA) was released through Tyrant Books. The novel embodies the numbness of the workplace routine while also dancing with surrealism, heartbreak, helplessness, and humor.
To read Jones is to spit up a crystal and find a family in your sock drawer, to save the world at the bottom of the sea, to see yourself in an elevator on your quiet ride up to hell.
Kathryn Scanlan
Aug 9 - Fog (2019)
Kathryn Scanlan’s debut book moved me. Minimal and timeless and surreal and moving. This book makes you want to walk outside and write about the weather. It is a sparse yet compact reworking of a found journal from the late 70s that documents the final years of a woman’s life. After being stumbled upon in 2004, the diary was meticulously obsessed over by Scanlan, who began writing down some of her favorite lines and later editing, fine-tuning, rearranging, and tinkering. This process of patience unearthed lines like, “I painting. Clouding at noon.” Lines like “Flowers coming fast.” This act of interpretive restoration was done over a ten year period while (as she said during a reading I attended) she was learning how to write. With a collection of short stories arriving next year (The Dominant Animal), the hushed and tender Aug 9 - Fog is like an initial whisper. The beginning of breath.
Nathan Hoks
Reveilles (2010)
The Narrow Circle (2013)
Moony Days of Being (2018)
Chicago-based poet Nathan Hoks is the author of two collections of poetry: 2013’s The Narrow Circle (Penguin) and 2010’s Reveilles (Salt Publishing). In 2018, Hoks was awarded a one-month residency at the Tomaž Šalamun Center for Poetry in Ljubljana, Slovenia as a result of his chapbook Moony Days of Being (Factory Hollow Press). In all three of these collections, I was flabbergasted (in the best possible way) by every page. Hoks is a tugboat chugging through dreamland. Poems as self-portraits, storms of odes. Every sentence is reminiscent of an out-of-body daydream. "They pet us with their wings. / The wings are shaped like eyebrows. Their eyebrows / burn in water. The water is their home.” I am not ashamed to say that I wrote many Nathan Hoks imitation poems this year. Please read “Toy Cloud”.
Mary Zimmerman
Metamorphoses (2004)
The Secret in the Wings (2014)
When I found The Secret in the Wings, it was on display at my local Hyde Park bookstore. I was looking for a play to knock my socks off and this was the one to do the trick. The Secret in the Wings is a grouping of fairy tales and fables bouncing around the room. The windmill of conclusions and closures at the end is so well done. It all comes together, like a circus tent being installed across the street. Additionally, Zimmerman’s more well known Metamorphoses is a heartwarming and heartbreaking play of mythos and origin stories. The ending made me cry. I’d love to see both of these outside of a book and inside of a theater.
Sarah Rose Etter
Tongue Party (2011)
The Book of X (2019)
Relentless, disgusting, grotesque, brutal, painful, deeply sad. And yet. Magical, beautiful, moving, surreal, fabulist, tender, dreamy. I'm not sure if any novel has thrown me harder through a brick wall than Sarah Rose Etter’s The Book of X. This parable will split you in two and only you get to choose if you want to keep the top half or the bottom half. Goddamn. Along with her novel, Etter also has a 2011 collection of short stories that are equal parts disturbing and tasty. I can’t wait to see what she writes next.
Daniel Borzutzky
The Ecstasy of Capitulation (2006)
Arbitrary Tales (2007)
The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011)
The Performance of Becoming Human (2016)
Lake Michigan (2018)
Violent, barbaric, brutal surrealism shaped as absurdist plays. Like forgotten gods missing limbs. Like a prayer refusing to take shape. Like a haunted opera taking its intermission in the woods. Relentless. Unforgiving. Borzutzky’s dense bibliography is by no means light-reading. Each page is full of twisted magic. Every poem is a nightmare, every line a terrifying dream.
“And the joke turns into a mystery novel about how god keeps his hands from shaking when he is about to destroy the universe”
Jen George
The Babysitter at Rest (2016)
Holy smokes. Holy ghosts. Surreal, absurd, disgusting, poetic, perverted, hysterical, and as unique as they come. This debut collection of short stories by Jen George fits nicely in the Dorothy arsenal, squeezed perfectly between Leonora Carrington and Sabrina Orah Mark. They feel like part of a deranged and numb parallel universe, where the world is a bit more muted, and the rules are bit more loose. Without giving anything away, I’ll say that these are some of the best short stories I’ve ever read.
David Welch
Everyone Who Is Dead (2018)
My favorite kind of poetry often involves woodlands and mysticism and confusion and curiosity and the renaming of things and a simple cast of characters and a magical narrative. Is that too much to ask for? Welch’s debut collection is a beautiful example of a book that contains all of the above. Distributed through Spork Press, the collection runs rich with fabulism. To open this book is to enter an ongoing play, one that started millions of years ago, and one that will march onward centuries after we are all gone.
Kate Bernheimer
The Girl in the Castle inside the Museum (2008)
Horse, Flower, Bird (2010)
My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (anthology) (2010)
xo Orpheus (anthology) (2013)
How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales (2014)
I love fairy tales and Bernheimer feeds that endless hunger. With work often structured in sparse fragments reminiscent of prose poems, her collections are stuffed with dark and mischievous delights. Haunting tales to be read by candlelight after midnight. While her collections stand on their own just fine, Bernheimer has also released multiple children’s books, as well as an anthology on modern fairy tales and another on modern myths. Oh, and she founded Fairy Tale Review. I’m certain she owns a magic wand or at least a jar of fairy dust.
Rainie Oet
No Mark Spiral (2018)
Porcupine in Freefall (2019)
Narrative poems. Surrealist bits. One-act plays. Heartfelt, hallucinatory, and tender throughout. Rainie Oet writes the kind of poems I look for when I open a collection. Both their debut collection (Porcupine in Freefall) and last year’s chapbook, No Mark Spiral, are inventive delights. Books to be enjoyed on long car rides, in between video game marathons, inside a quiet restaurant, when everything seems a bit too normal.
Jeffrey McDaniel
Alibi School (1995)
Forgiveness Parade (1998)
The Splinter Factory (2002)
The Endarkenment (2008)
Chapel of Inadvertent Joy (2013)
This is what I look for when I read poetry. The imagination! The metaphors! The visuals! So many final lines pack a punch, while others provide equal laughs and devastations. A whirlwind of poetics. Before reading Jeffrey McDaniel, I had never laughed out loud at a book of poetry. Thank you to C.T. Salazar and boaat for showing me the way. I can’t wait for his upcoming collection, Holiday in the Islands of Grief (2020).
Victoria Chang
The Circle (2005)
Salvinia Molesta (2008)
The Boss (2013)
Barbie Chang (2017)
With poetry collections birthed by obsession and compulsion, Victoria Chang’s writing often connects to form cohesive assemblies of repetition. Tongue-twisters that dance between the playful and the dark. You know, like writing an obituary about a blue dress. I adore her rhythmic lines like, 'the workers the workers continue to do a fine job / the boss's boss's boss just wants a fine / job closes his outer lobe unless his son coughs / like a sea at night." I can’t wait for her anticipated upcoming collection, Obit (Copper Canyon Press, 2020).
Oliver Zarandi
Soft Fruit in the Sun (2019)
Bloody, gory, gruesome, disgusting, original, hysterical, and heartbreaking. A book of twisted fables like if Robert Rodriguez wrote and directed a fairy tale. The story “Blood!” might be my favorite. But also “A Good and Simple Life”. Read them all.
P. Scott Cunningham
Ya Te Veo (2018)
P. Scott Cunningham's debut collection is a wondrous rabbit hole to explore. Contained within the Miami resident’s book of poems is an eclectic display of imagination and insight. Through music, movies, video games, paintings, and more, the book draws from a seemingly bottomless well of inspiration. A particular favorite in this collection is “A Story About Marriage”, one I’ve read more times than I can count.
Molly Mendoza
Skip (2019)
This graphic novel is a breathtaking work of art. Each page, each panel has dilated my pupils forever. If I found some of these pieces in a zine or an anthology, I’d rip them out to hang on my wall. I can’t do that with this book. It’s too beautiful as a whole. It’s the only coffee table book on my coffee table.
Mark Leidner
Under the Sea (2017)
Salad on the Wind (2019)
I read Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me at the very end of 2018, so I can’t place that great collection on this list. That being said, I spent 2019 reading Leidner’s debut collection of short stories (Under the Sea) as well as his newest poetry chapbook, Salad on the Wind. No one writes like Leidner. No one. And yes, his Twitter account is very much its own form of thunderstorm literature.
Sasha Fletcher
When All Our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill the Streets & We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs in the Clouds (2010, 2019)
It Is Going To Be A Good Year (2016)
Fletcher’s novella (with maybe my favorite title of any book ever) is a beautiful and bleeding fever dream between two lovers. Apocalyptic, terrifying, mesmerizing, and plenty in between. Pluck some birds from your ears and be swallowed by this whale, a whale the size of a marching band. His debut collection of poets, meanwhile, features gallons of milk, 500 children, ghosts, make outs, the ends of the world (series), and even some more marching bands for good measure. The energy in both is highly contagious. These are books to keep in your backpack until the ground begins to crumble. Interview coming soon.
Annie Baker
John (2016)
Thoughts upon finishing this play: What the hell did I read? What is this play? I'm still floored. This play reminded me of Hereditary, if nothing ever happened in Hereditary. So minimal and yet so unsettling and half-mad. This is an anti-ghost ghost story disguised as a quiet play.
Carsten Rene Nielsen
The World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors (2007)
Forty-One Objects (2019)
These are great prose poems! The World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors is made up of selected translations by David Keplinger and a fine introduction into Nielsen’s work. I especially enjoyed the first section from the collection Forty-one Animals (originally published in 2005) and his brand new book, Forty-One Objects, is just as sharp. Fables as rectangles. Controlled mayhem and out of hand tranquility, ballroom dancing in a pool.
Stuart Ross
Hey, Crumbling Balcony! (2003)
Surreal Estate: 13 Poets Under the Influence (anthology) (2004)
Dead Cars in Managua (2008)
A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent (2016)
Espesantes (2018)
At times heartbreaking and at times hysterical (sometimes simultaneously), Ross’s poetry keeps me coming back for more. I’ve compared his writing to tripping into a lake full of your favorite things, all of them now damp and unfamiliar. A prolific Canadian writer (and editor), Ross deserves much more attention. Start with Hey, Crumbling Balcony! like I did, and keep it moving.
Eric Baus
The To Sound (2004)
Tuned Droves (2009)
Scared Text (2011)
The Tranquilized Tongue (2014)
How I Became a Hum (2019)
“…you can record yourself from the center of a parade. Clouds are large. You are little and the clouds are so large."
I love these mind-altering books. The scared text is sacred, the sacred text is scared. Like blending up a dictionary to create a new language. Musical, image-driven prose poems. Baus combines the tongue-twisting lyric with the vivid image, the internal rhyme with the vibrant eye. Every poem begs to be read out loud. Like a prayer in a new language. Like a chant. Like a hum.
Amelia Gray
AM/PM (2009)
Museum of the Weird (2010)
These two collections cracked my head open. AM/PM is made up tiny vignettes while Museum of the Weird is more fleshed out and wild. A date with a plate of hair, plans to craft a snake farm, birthing overnight babies, eating tongues, eating toes. Keeping a diary of a profound choking experience. It's apocalyptic, surreal, radical, and entertaining as hell. Exactly what I look for in short stories. I have her third collection, Gutshot, on my desk. It will be read in the dead of winter.
Robert Kloss
The Woman Who Lived Amongst the Cannibals (2017)
Holy shit - This is epic - This is myth - This is fable - This is twisted parable - This is mayhem - This is bible - both monster and god - This is a fever dream saga - a broken clock - a nightmare glaring back at the path - the path of instinct - a circular spin - unlike anywhere I've jumped - so stunned from within.
[available for free as a PDF, download it right now]
Brian Evenson
A Collapse of Horses (2016)
The Deaths of Henry King (w. Jesse Ball) (2017)
These have been two of my final (and favorite) reads of 2019. I already have two other books by Evenson sitting on my desk. While The Deaths of Henry King was playful and fun, with A Collapse of Horses (which I read on a beach) I found myself looking over my shoulder. For some ghosts, for some blood, for some dust. Bone-chillingly good stories.
Brian Barker
Vanishing Acts (2019)
These prose poems sing! Apocalyptic, surreal, twisted fairy tales bundled up in wondrously musical paragraphs. While each piece works as its own standalone narrative, the book fully functions as a dreamscape, a glistening and twisted depiction of a tilted reality. Vaudevillian and mesmerizing. My favorite piece in this collection is "A Story of Teeth". But also “Strong Man”. Wow. A million times wow.
Matthew Olzmann
Mezzanines (2013)
Contradictions in the Design (2016)
The first poem I read by Matthew Olzmann was about a beloved mayor dropkicking tiny animals. At first, it made me smile, and then it made me laugh, and then it made me quite sad. The rollercoaster sway between the tender and the comedic - a grin followed by wet eyes - is common in Olzmann’s empathetic and atmospheric work. These are two great collections to read, books that will have you standing on your ceiling trying to figure out how to get down.
Aglaja Veteranyi
Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta
(first published in German in 1999 and in English in 2012)
Sheeeeesh. This is one brutal fairy tale. I found out about this author through Sarah Rose Etter, who cited it as inspiration and guidance while writing her debut novel The Book of X (see above). First published in 1999, this tragic, beautifully written novel of traveling circus performers is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Ever. So why not save it for last?
Two Honorable Mentions
[because one is from 1964and because one contains no words]
Istvan Banyai / Jim Thompson
Zoom (1998) & Re-Zoom (1998) / Pop. 1280 (1964)
Zoom: Zoom out, zoom out, zoom out. Realize your size. Alter your perspective. Illustrator Istvan Banyai’s Zoom and Re-Zoom are two of the coolest art books I’ve ever flipped through. I wish I wrote how these books look.
Pop. 1280: The oldest book on this list (a Western thriller published over 50 years ago) was a pleasant change of pace from what I normally read (modern poetry and short stories). In one sentence? This is a hillbilly clustercuss where you will try (and fail) to remain one step ahead. I grabbed this because Yorgos Lanthimos is adapting it into a film and I am now even more excited to see how he approaches this psychotic (and often hilarious) quick novel.
