Friday, January 4, 2013

Books read in 2012!

About half of these are repeats / books I've read before. Several of these books I also read more than once this year. As Sheri said, yes, I am in grad school. The land of close reading. I'm currently working on finishing up my "critical thesis," focusing on books that have both prose and lineated poetry. My five favorites (if I count only "new" reads; i.e. Crush is still my favorite, and I still want to marry Liz Waldner, and I still want to marry Anne Carson, and Karen Volkman, and Richard Greenfield, etc, etc) were: Letters to Yesenin, Tjanting, My Life, The Vicious Red Relic, and Point and Line. Tjanting changed my life. The Vicious Red Relic was unlike anything I've ever read, and the other three favorites? Well, damn if I don't wish I'd written them myself. The Apocalypse (#3) was also life-changing in that part of it became the epigraph for Waiting Up for the End of the World. Without further ado... the list:

1. Letters to Yesenin – Jim Harrison
2. Dismantling the Silence – Charles Simic
3. The Apocalypse – John of Patmos
4. Dream Songs – John Berryman
5. Trilogy – HD
6. That This – Susan Howe
7. The Home Book – James Schuyler
8. Fjords vol. 1 – Zachary Schomburg
9. Splay Anthem – Nathaniel Mackey
10. The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song – Ellen Bryant Voigt
11. High Windows – Philip Larkin
12. Tjanting – Ron Silliman
13. The New Sentence – Ron Silliman
14. My Life – Lyn Hejinian
15. Meditations in an Emergency – Frank O’Hara
16. Eyeshot – Heather McHugh
17. Under Albany – Ron Silliman
18. 3 Poems – John Ashbery
19. The Lost Son – Theodore Roethke
20. 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking – Tan Lin
21. Slow Lightning – Eduardo C. Corral
22. The Latest Winter – Maggie Nelson
23. Selected Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins
24. Kora in Hell – William Carlos Williams
25. Out – Ronald Sukenick
26. Close Your Eyes Look at Me – E. Marie Bertram
27. Museum of Accidents – Rachel Zucker
28. Erasures – Donald Revell
29. A Point is That Which Has No Part – Liz Waldner
30. Homing Devices – Liz Waldner
31. Facts for Visitors – Srikanth Reddy
32. Voyager – Srikanth Reddy
33. Point and Line – Thalia Field
34. The New Black – Evie Shockley
35. My Common Heart – Anne Boyer
36. Delivered – Sarah Gambito
37. Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie – Joshua Harmon
38. So We Have Been Given Time Or – Sawako Nakayasu
39. Girls – Nic Kelman
40. Savage Girls and Wild Boys – Michael Newton
41. Anabranch – Andrew Zawacki
42. The Vicious Red Relic, Love – Anna Joy Springer
43. In Media Res – Karen An-hwei Lee
44. The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound – Marjorie Perloff & Craig Dworkin (ads)
45. Peculiar Motions – Rosmarie Waldrop
46. Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry – Gary L. McDowell and F. Daniel Rzicznek (eds)
47. Clamor – Elyse Fenton
48. The American Prose Poem – Michel Delville
49. Deepstep Come Shining – C.D. Wright
50. Heart First into the Forest – Stacy Gnall
51. Dora: A Headcase – Lidia Yuknavitch
52. The Revolution Happened and You Didn’t Call Me – Maged Zaher
53. The Balloonists – Eula Biss
54. This is Not a Novel – David Markson
55. Except by Nature – Sandra Alcosser
56. The Guardians – Sarah Manguso
57. The Pharmacist’s Mate – Amy Fusselman
58. Paris Spleen – Charles Baudelaire
59. The Very Thing That Happens – Russell Edson
60. The Elusive Embrace – Daniel Mendelsohn
61. Letters to Wendy’s – Joe Wenderoth
62. Plainwater – Anne Carson
63. Free Verse – Charles O. Hartman
64. The Book of Embraces – Eduardo Galeano
65. Within the Context of No Context – George W.S. Trow
66. Spar – Karen Volkman
67. Sad Little Breathing Machine – Matthea Harvey
68. Crash’s Law – Karen Volkman
69. Speedboat – Renata Adler
70. The World Doesn’t End – Charles Simic
71. Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy – Keith Waldrop
72. Early Poems – Charles Simic
73. Saying the World – Peter Pereira
74. Paterson – William Carlos Williams
75. Goldbeater's Skin – G.C. Waldrep
76. There Are Three – Donald Revell
77. Invisible Bride – Tony Tost
78. Melancholia – Kristina Marie Darling
79. Bin Ramke – Matter
80. A Carnage in the Lovetrees – Richard Greenfield
81. Just Whisper: A Valentine – C.D. Wright
82. The Firestorm – Zach Savich
83. Remote – David Shields
84. Crush – Richard Siken
85. Notes from Irrelevance – Anselm Berrigan