Poetry Picks for the Holidays

Dorothy Barresi, American Fanatics (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2010): “Reading the newspaper lately,” Barresi writes in the title poem, “you’d think America had been educated // in a single ray of handsome and murderous light,” and the poems in this powerful book don’t turn away from that murderous light, even as the poet finds a dark beauty among the lives of cynical night nurses, aging film stars, lapsed Catholics, and the pimps of Akron, Ohio. A can’t-miss collection for anyone who’s ever admitted, “Lord, I’m scared.”

Kamau Braithwaite, Elegguas (Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2010): If this is the most uneven collection here, it is also the most ambitious: part history lesson, part screed, full of different fonts and different voices. As its title suggests, elegies predominate. The poems are surrealistic, expansive, political, and the poet is nearly always in visionary mode: “i sweat / cause i man am wearing the tam of i dream in i head.”

Stephen Burt and David Mikics, eds., The Art of the Sonnet (Harvard Univ. Press, 2010): If you’ve ever taken a literature class, puzzled over a poem, and wondered, “What am I missing?” this book will go a long way toward answering that question. Burt is one of our most insightful critics and Mikics proves himself to be equally astute. Together, they explicate 100 sonnets, from Thomas Wyatt to D.A. Powell. The result is a thorough history of the sonnet: “[A] shape where strong emotion might make sense, where lyric invention might still take place.”