2021: Poetry's Year in Prose

As another long pandemic year draws to an unsettled close, poetry remains a beacon—as always. In 2021, the Poetry Foundation published nearly four dozen longform features that illuminate many of the year's best books. Included in the reading list below are fresh looks at stalwarts such as Paul Celan, Maureen McLane, Robert Walser, Jack Spicer, Rosemarie Waldrop, and Stephen Crane; ambitious surveys of Maria Stepanova, Nazik al-Mala'ika, Susana Thénon, Marie Uguay, and other international poets; vivid encounters with the private lives of Thom Gunn and James Merrill; a profile of the underread countercultural poet Jim Brodey; appreciations of Henry Dumas, N.H. Pritchard, Douglas Kearney, and other visionaries who've made inventive use of the Black radical tradition; an eloquent appraisal of John Ashbery's final work; a dramatic account of how George and Mary Oppen were branded enemies of the state; an interview with Patricia Smith, winner of the 2021 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and much, much more. We hope you'll find plenty to think about in the essays below.

Happy holidays. And happy reading.

— The Editors

 

"The Thousand Darknesses of Murderous Speech"
Paul Celan wrote brutal poetry for a barbarous world.
By Becca Rothfeld
(published January 11, 2021)

"The Violent Years"
George and Mary Oppen were branded enemies of the state. Their FBI files document just how deep their activism went, and the price they paid for it.
By Joel Whitney
(published January 18, 2021)

"He's Building a House"
Frederick Seidel writes what people don’t want to hear. Will they even want to read it?
By J. Howard Rosier
(published January 25, 2021)

"But Is It Concrete?"
A new anthology highlights women’s contributions to a hybrid poetry practice dominated by men.
By Lucy Ives
(published January 25, 2021)

"Differing Freak Wonder"
Jim Brodey was a messenger of chaos who blazed through the rock music and experimental poetry scenes of New York. What happened to him? 
By Nick Sturm
(published February 8, 2021)

"Two-Track Mind"
Cortney Lamar Charleston’s Doppelgangbanger reflects the psychic toll of being Black in America. 
By Omari Weekes
(published February 22, 2021)

"Little Funny Things Ceaselessly Happening"
Hope Mirrlees’s Paris, “modernism’s lost masterpiece,” is both an aesthetic landmark and a queer love letter in disguise.  
By Dustin Illingworth
(published March 1, 2021)

"Pleasures of the Lowdown"
A woman from the country meets the big city in Diane Seuss's new collection of sonnets. 
By Kathleen Rooney
(published March 8, 2021)

"Bird and Shaman"
Will Alexander’s The Combustion Cycle combines surrealism and the Black tradition in a visionary ecological text.
By Johannes Göransson
(published March 15, 2021)

"Some Requiem"
On the doomed glory of Henry Dumas.
By Harmony Holiday
(published March 22, 2021)

"Ones and Zeroes" 
A new edition of N.H. Pritchard's The Matrix reintroduces one of the most conceptually rigorous texts of the Black radical tradition.
By Quinn Latimer
(published March 29, 2021)

"Nobody Here But Us Ghosts"
Douglas Kearney's new projects—a book and a live record—continue his dynamic experiments in Black performance.
By Joyelle McSweeney
(published April 12, 2021)

"Memory Tricks"
Maria Stepanova, one of Russia's greatest living poets, comes to America.
By Jennifer Wilson
(published April 19, 2021)

"The Woman Who Came In From the Night"
A new volume reintroduces English-language readers to the trailblazing Iraqi poet Nazik al-Mala'ika.
By Porochista Khakpour
(published April 26, 2021)

"Too Mousy, Alas"
Thom Gunn’s letters showcase his many sides: rebel, friend, egoist, icon, failure, sexpot.
By Declan Ryan
(published May 3, 2021)

"Why Ruin Everyone's Life for Dolls?"
In Hoarders, Kate Durbin turns to reality TV to show lives buried under capitalism.
By Sandra Simonds
(published May 10, 2021)

"Don't Stop Me if You've Heard This Before"
Amy Gerstler’s Index of Women is a chorus of voices evoking womanhood.
By Jennifer Krasinski
(published May 17, 2021)

"How Lovely It Is to Be Small"
For Robert Walser, writing was an epic journey into the miniature. 
By Ryan Ruby
(published May 24, 2021)

"I Hope I Haven't Bored You"
In James Merrill’s gossipy letters, anything goes.
By Christopher Spaide
(published June 7, 2021)

"A Chaos That Can Cry"
Susana Thénon’s poems of deeply lyrical protest.
By Kathleen Rooney
(published June 14, 2021)

"It Just Sort of Happened"
Michael Robbins makes music from pop myths.
By Sasha Frere-Jones
(published June 21, 2021)

"Soon There Was Nothing Left"
A posthumous volume from John Ashbery troubles the line between finished and incomplete. 
By Albert Mobilio
(published June 28, 2021)

"Yesterday Never Existed"
Osip Mandelstam's tender nostalgia ran counter to an era of ruthless modernity.
By Sophie Pinkham
(published July 6, 2021)

"Workshops in Utopia"
Three books memorialize the creative gestalt around Bolinas, California.
By Lucy Ives
(published July 12, 2021)

"Why Feel Bad About Beauty?"
More Anon charts Maureen N. McLane’s career-long ambivalence toward the Romantic canon.
By Gillian White
(published July 19, 2021)

"Starting From the Middle"
Adrian Matejka on his new book, Somebody Else Sold the World.
By Lily Meyer
(published July 26, 2021)

"Name Everything for the First Time"
Marie Uguay’s meteoric rise was cut short, but her work marks a turning point in Canadian poetry.
By Ben Libman
(published August 2, 2021)

"Crying Online Like a Normal Person"
Melissa Broder's poems share the exaggerated candor of her popular Twitter account, but they obscure as much as they reveal.
By B.D. McClay
(published August 9, 2021)

"The Places Bodies Can't Reach"
The South Korean poet Yi Won blurs the boundaries between the virtual and the real.
By Mia You
(published August 16, 2021)

"We, Too, Have Been Beguiled"
A new volume reintroduces Walter de la Mare’s eccentric, haunted, sonically rich poetry.
By Declan Ryan
(published August 23, 2021)

"Mirror Life"
In Pilgrim Bell, Kaveh Akbar reaches across languages to write "documents of barbarism."
By Kamran Javadizadeh
(published August 30, 2021)

"Mind the Gaps"
Rosmarie Waldrop’s poems suspend time to achieve the experience of instantaneity.
By Ryan Ruby
(published September 7, 2021)

"The Job of a Poet Is to Witness"
A conversation with Patricia Smith, winner of the 2021 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
By Saeed Jones
(published September 14, 2021)

"Keep Your Dying to Yourself"
In Yellow Rain, Mai Der Vang assembles witness testimonies and declassified documents into a stunning indictment of US bombings in Laos.
By Diana Khoi Nguyen
(published September 20, 2021)

"There Was Once a Sea"
Phillip B. Williams’s Mutiny asks how Black poetry can and should be read.
By Omari Weekes
(published September 27, 2021)

"Small Maneuvers and Big Effects"
Garrett Caples wrestles with “the impervious world” in his latest collection, Lovers of Today.
By Kevin O'Rourke
(published October 11, 2021)

"No One Sleeps in the World"
Fernando Valverde’s America continues the long tradition of Europeans reporting on life in the US.
By Rhian Sasseen
(published October 25, 2021)

"He Stood Alone"
Steven Reigns’s documentary poetics point to the vexed relation between the poetry of the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis and the official record.
By Tausif Noor
(published November 1, 2021)

"Anyone Can Write a Poem"
A new compilation of Jack Spicer’s uncollected work deepens our understanding of the seminal cult poet.
By Eric Sneathen
(published November 8, 2021)

"They Came, and I Wrote Them"
Paul Auster's new biography is a monumental account of Stephen Crane—a writer whose life, and work, remain enigmatic.
By Stephen Matterson
(published November 15, 2021)

"Everything Is Flowers"
Notes on Charles Baudelaire.
By Wyatt Mason
(published November 22, 2021)

"She Would Quite Like to Kill Me"
Assia Wevill is remembered as the mistress who came between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Was she more than that?
By Emily Cooke
(published December 6, 2021)

"Things Are Getting a Little Out of Hand"
Erin Taylor's Bimboland reads like the diary of a young woman grappling with sex, feminism, and life online.
By Nina Renata Aron
(published December 13, 2021)