Poetry Books for the Winter Season

Since 2014, first for the Santa Barbara Independent and then for the California Review of Books, every National Poetry Month, I’ve offered one very short review of a single-author poetry collection for each of the 30 days of April. However, this past winter and spring, I was teaching in Rome, and I didn’t have time to give the Poetry Month reviews the attention they deserved. As a result, in 2022 I’ve moved my “month of poetry reviews” to December, just in time for holiday gift-giving. I read nearly 200 new books of poems over the course of four months, and while many of them were excellent, these are the 31 that truly stuck with me, those I felt I could recommend, without hesitation, to someone who wanted to gift a book (or two, or three) to a fan, or potential fan, of contemporary poetry. While this isn’t exactly a “Best Poetry Books of 2022” list, it does serve something of that purpose — to help readers sift through the many collections published this year. The books are listed in alphabetical order by author’s last name, and in keeping with the best traditions of poetry, I’ve tried to make each review as brief as possible. Happy reading!

Bron Bateman, Blue Wren

There’s a working-class wit and tenacity throughout Blue Wren (Fremantle Press), which is perfectly expressed in Bateman’s poem “Ambitions”: “My parents’ plans for me, / dizzying in their simplicity: / be the first in my family to attend university. / Be a teacher or a librarian. / Work hard, / pass, / get a job. / The soft bigotry of their low expectations — / surpassed.” The book’s triumph, though, is the sequence “Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird,” which shows us images of the poet from age 4 to 56, as she deals with molestation, depression, academic accomplishment, and the birth of many children (her biography says she is a “mother of nine”). Not only does Bateman’s unconventionality and honesty make every poem a surprise, but it’s also a treat for those of us in the northern hemisphere to hear the distinctive voice of a poet from Western Australia.

Anuradha Bhowmik, Brown Girl Chromatography

Whether she is making acrostics from words in AOL instant messages or taking fieldnotes about growing up — “Big boobs don’t count if you’re fat said the skinny white bitches & their white boy counterparts,” Bhowmik, winner of the prestigious Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for a best first book of poetry, does a superb job of showing how the immigrant experience does, and does not, graft onto life in America. This memoir in poetry is full of painful recollections, as when she realizes the white women at the department store makeup counter “couldn’t match me to my proper foundation shade,” or when she recalls how her older brother “kept walking the halls / while jocks hurled taunts my way.” She is “the fat kid with OCD and B’s // in math,” while her brother would go on to “become Ivy League and Medical School.” In contrast, she “was only good at / the things that didn’t matter.” Ironically, of course, one of those was writing poetry. (Pitt Poetry Series)

Caroline Bird, Rookie: Selected Poems

To get a proper taste of Caroline Bird’s wickedly funny poems, a reader need only turn to the opening lines of the title piece: “You thought you could ride a bicycle / but, turns out, those weren’t bikes / they were extremely bony horses. And that wasn’t / a meal you cooked, that was a microwaved / hockey puck. And that wasn’t a book, that was / a taco stuffed with daises.” The line breaks work like pauses before a killer punchline, and it’s all in the timing for this poet of impeccable rhythm and golden irony, who resurrects the surrealist storytelling of James Tate and Charles Simic and hones her mini-narratives even as she is amping the surprise up to 11. (Carcanet Press)