Books I've Blurbed This Year: Your Holiday Reading List

[Photo by Arif Riyanto]

I was reflecting on the wonderful books I’ve blurbed this year and so I thought I’d share them with you. I’ve had so many conversations with other writers recently about the (usually later in your writing career) realization that this work is less about trying to become famous (not gonna happen) and more about our passion for reading, writing, teaching, editing, and supporting other writers (yes, really). I like to call it the getting over yourself stage. Which also doesn’t stop most of us from simultaneously still trying to create a book that will sparkle. Here are the books that have sparkled for me this year (it sounded better in my head) along with my blurbs for them…

In Four Fields, Dorinda Wegener deftly journeys through spectacular forms of trauma and transcendence. Four Fields pushes the boundaries of what language can do, twisting words until they move in astonishing ways. The poems in this powerful collection stitch together timeless and modern idioms to foreground the horrors and joys of being human, how we are taken apart but also how we put ourselves back together again through language.

In this brilliant, lyrical haunted house ride to the point of no return, Patricia Grisafi takes us on a swift, knife-sharp investigation of everything from the far reaches of creativity and the erotics of the archive to captivity narratives and trauma metaphysics. Grisafi is David Lynch meets Anne Sexton, and when she asks to be made into a book when she dies, I think it’s best that we obey her.

Jiwon Choi’s searing, darkly humorous, and important new poetry collection, A Temporary Dwelling, pulls no punches. This book probes the limits of utopia, exploding the myth of the American Dream. Choi questions such complex notions as nation, truth, body, race, gender and genre, and in doing so she offers blueprints for our collective survival: by staying, by looking, by writing, by eating, by living, by laughing, by loving anyway, “by savoring the unruly honeysuckle eating all the bread and drinking all the wine.”

Ian S. Maloney’s South Brooklyn Exterminating is a time capsule, a Whitmanian ode to writing and old Brooklyn, all the way down to how to properly pronounce the Kosciuszko Bridge. It is also a love letter to its protagonist Jonah’s larger-than-life father, Jimmy Bugs Fennell, a character as compelling as he is unpredictable, an artist of extermination. In a fascinating move, South Brooklyn Exterminating interweaves Jonah’s early efforts to become a writer with his adventures in pest control, culminating in his decision to write about being an exterminator’s son for a college process essay, his dad helping him find the thread. Maloney deftly explores the parallels between squirrel trapping and termite work and writing to remind us that penning an essay is also a way of working with one’s hands, and extermination, too, an act of shrewd intellect—a tough calculus of death, taught by the incomparable Jimmy, a veritable professor of battling rats and finding roaches in teapots.

Seb Doubinsky’s stunning fever dream of a novel, The Horror, winks at us from the beginning, playing with genre and form. Everyone knows this story. But do they? With well-earned nods to the horror greats, this prismatic book uses its unreliable narrator who poses dangers of his own—a horror writer who goes to a small town to find still more horror—to foreground questions of truth, history, race, gender, and the unofficial stories that live beneath the official ones. In a thought-provoking twist, the worlds of the novel-within-a-novel, which reflects on the atrocities of World War II, and the book itself intertwine in ways that make us ponder the horror of our own times.