Book Club

Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2020

NPR's Best Books of 2020

National Book Award in Poetry, Longlist

Frank Sanchez Book Award

After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world. In Obit, Chang writes of "the way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking." These poems reinvent the form of newspaper obituary to both name what has died ("civility," "language," "the future," "Mother's blue dress") and the cultural impact of death on the living. Whereas elegy attempts to immortalize the dead, an obituary expresses loss, and the love for the dead becomes a conduit for self-expression. In this unflinching and lyrical book, Chang meets her grief and creates a powerful testament for the living.

When you lose someone you love, the world doesn't stop to let you mourn. Nor does it allow you to linger as you learn to live with a gaping hole in your heart. Indeed, this daily indifference to being left behind epitomizes the unique pain of grieving. Victoria Chang captures this visceral, heart-stopping ache in Obit, the book of poetry she wrote after the death of her mother. Although Chang initially balked at writing an obituary, she soon found herself writing eulogies for the small losses that preceded and followed her mother's death, each one an ode to her mother's life and influence. Chang also thoughtfully examines how she will be remembered by her own children in time.--Time Magazine

Bryn says: Chang, like most of us, is grieving personal losses that go beyond the deaths of her parents. She mourns Ambition, Friendships, and Memory in a way that is so full of life, and gives small moments the recognition they deserve. Chang doesn't look away and neither could I.

The final book of poems by Tony Hoagland, "one of the most distinctive voices of our time" (Carl Dennis).

Over the course of his celebrated career, Tony Hoagland ventured fearlessly into the unlit alleys of emotion and experience. The poems in Turn Up the Ocean examine with an unflinching eye and mordant humor the reality of living and dying in a time and culture that conspire to erase our inner lives. Hoagland's signature wit and unparalleled observations take in long-standing injustices, the atrocities of American empire and consumerism, and our ongoing habit of looking away. In these poems, perseverance depends on a gymnastics of skepticism and comedy, a dogged quest for authentic connection, and the consolations of the natural world. Turn Up the Ocean is a remarkable and moving collection, a fitting testament to Hoagland's devotion to the capaciousness and art of poetry.

Doug says: Loved his work before he died, love it even more given this collection after his death. It's a safe bet that the works we choose for Poetry Book Club are must-reads for poetry lovers and aspiring poets. This one goes above and beyond. Hoagland inspires me to write the vivid real, convey with artful utterance things I resist saying in order to spare listeners, and expose my denial without excuse. The Afterword by his wife, Kathleen Lee, is a meaningful, personal and essential note.

Winner of the 2017 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry

Winner of the 2017 Book Award from the Society of Midland Authors for Poetry

2016 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for poetry

2017 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award finalist

2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award finalist

Named a top poetry book of spring 2016 by Library Journal

Part fact, part fiction, Tyehimba Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.

So, while I lead this choir, I still find that
I'm being led...I'm a missionary
mending my faith in the midst of this flock...
I toil in their fields of praise. When folks see
these freedmen stand and sing, they hear their God
speak in tongues. These nine dark mouths sing shelter;
they echo a hymn's haven from slavery's weather.

Detroit native Tyehimba Jess' first book of poetry, leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TEDxNashville Conference. Jess is an Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.