What I read this year... part 3
Olga....
⚓ I read Goodlord (Ella Frears, 2024) very quickly while struck down with a weird mid-June flu. I’m generally a fan of this style of writing (see Yara Rodrigues Fowler), but I left this feeling a little unsatisfied…
⛅ Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies (Heba Hayek, 2021) was somehow my only Hajar Press read of the year (?). Beautifully written vignettes about growing up and then leaving Gaza - I think this worked well without the song/playlist structure, but I guess it was fun to listen along.
👛 Half-Kindled, half-audiobooked The Coin (Yasmin Zaher, 2023) on a train to and from Cornwall. I really loved the first half of this - the stuff about cleanliness was so obsessive and unsettling in its detail and precision, even when this attention teetered on boring - but ended up wishing this had been split into 2-3 novellas.
🎧 Rein it In (Héloïse de Satge, 2024)—still can’t get over the feeling of reading something by someone you know in real life! I’d heard a couple of the poems of this in performance so it was dead exciting to see how they sat on the page versus in the pub.
🃏 I hadn’t expected to love Them! (Harry Josephine Giles, 2024) as much as I did: bleak, funny, experimental, petty, visual, ecologically interesting. I especially liked ‘The Reasonable People’ (it’s got these ziney overlapping stanzas that progressively get more jumbled) and the tarot references.
🦪 Antonyms for Burial (Ellora Sutton, 2022) was a long overdue pamphlet read: lots of gorgeous images I’ve been chewing on since, including an earlobe drooling a pearl… I definitely owe this one a reread in the coming year.
🔪 Penance (Eliza Clark, 2023) was another indulgent reread to get out of a slump. I think this is so formally brilliant - Frankensteiny in its layering of characters’ voices and timely deploying of info. Also a beautiful testament to Tumblr (RIP).
🖼️ Kaveh Akbar is one of my favourite poets of all time, but for some reason it took me a couple of attempts to get past the first 50 pages of Martyr! (2024). I read a review describing this as ‘kaleidoscopic’: it’s at once fractured and confident in its density, full of moving parts (the protagonist versus death, Iran, poetry, art, his mother). I was less convinced by the dialogue/dream sequences with Lisa Simpson etc - I wonder if KA had written several more and ended up cutting almost all of them out?
🎤 Spaces of Significance: an Off the Chest Poetry Anthology (ed. Aaron Kent and Jake Wild Hall, curated with Iftikhar Latif and Ella Dorman-Gajic). Full disclosure, I made the cover and interviewed Aaron and Jake for this. I love Off the Chest! If you’re looking for a taste of what the contemporary scene in the UK has to offer, this is an excellent place to begin.
🍋 Poor Artists (Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad, 2024) was possibly my most anticipated book of the year… I loved how true this was to The White Pube, zooming through philosophical musing, game show, diary entry, stream of consciousness, surreality. I’d expected this to be far more cynical/acerbic (e.g. I enjoyed ‘how can I be a fascist I’m literally bisexual’), especially given the sincerity of the ending.
🫀Flights (Olga Tokarczuk, 2007) !!! I loved this, as I’d hoped too: reading this felt like slowly turning the dial on an old radio, fuzzing in and out of different storylines/historical periods/modes of writing without necessarily desiring to land on any one in particular. <3
🏚️ In the Dream House (Carmen Maria Machado, 2019) had been at the back of my mind all year, so it felt spooky to find it in the book swap pile at The Walrus in Waterloo. Reading this on paper (not Kindle) made me spend more time thinking about this as a set of prose poems - cc Kareem PB’s Magma essay.
Reckon I would’ve loved We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (Samantha Irby, 2017) if I’d read it in 2017… Much sadder than I’d expected, given the hype. I think Samantha Irby is a decent (and funny) writer, but I don’t feel compelled to pick up another of her books immediately. Then again, I never really know what to think of an essay collection. Maybe I’ll get her newest essay collection out of the library next time I have a long train journey…
Slide (Mark Pajak, 2022) was an interesting lesson on how to write a poem versus how to write a collection of poems. I wrote a long rambly review of this after reading/watching a bunch of interviews with him. I need to get a life (lol)