2023: A Year in Reading & Writing
In our forever struggle to understand and coexist with the painfully abstract yet highly consequential concept of linear time, we at the CSU Poetry Center sometimes find it helpful to periodically mark its passage with appreciative and ceremonious lists. These annual round-ups, as they appear, are professed of a vehemently celebratory spirit. Our hope is that they can serve as moments to celebrate life and thought through moments in reading and writing, which are the moments by which we tend to find ourselves measuring our days, in spite of everything, one way or another. Thanks for another year!
—CSUPC
Caryl Pagel, Director
What are some memorable books you read this year?
Some of the books I read this year that will stay with me are Hilton Als’s My Pinup; Mirene Arsanios’s The Autobiography of a Language; Kate Beutner’s Killingly; Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place; Richard Meier’s A Duration; Marie NDiaye’s The Cheffe (tr. Jordan Stump); Hilary’s Plum’s Excisions; Ed Roberson’s MPH and Other Road Poems; Elizabeth Robinson’s Thirst & Surfeit; Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes; and Angela Woodward’s Ink.
Thoughts on the ampersand?
I’m for it, especially in Michael Joseph Walsh’s Innocence and the last long poem (“first love”) in Melissa Dickey’s Ordinary Entanglement. I think it’s an elegant, silly, tense symbol imparting perfect pressure, anticipation, and grace. It’s also a little nostalgic; I always imagine the ampersand stamped into a creamy 70s-style textured paper, deep and plump, a handshake, a sailor’s knot, community-minded, future-oriented, overly insistent, hippie-child, a little wild. It doesn’t touch or tether (like a dash) but still connects, performatively. Polite but casual. Definitive. Fun at a party. And the ampersand is readerly. Look at it closely—a small child waiting patiently for their story: &.
Some of your writing/reading plans for 2024?
My to-read stack contains Gwendolyn Brooks’s Annie Allen; Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap; Marie Darrieussecq’s Sleepless (tr. Penny Hueston); Nancy Langston’s Sustaining Lake Superior; Meghan O’Gieblyn’s Interior States; and Justin Torres’s Blackouts. I’m also excited for Lauren Shapiro’s Brid and Zach Savich’s Momently, both out this spring. Between the CSU Poetry Center and Rescue Press I get to help bring five books into the world next year: Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s No One Knows Their Blood Type (CSU, novel, tr. Hazem Jamjoum); Sam Ace’s I want to start by saying (CSU, essay); Daisy Atterbury’s The Kármán Line (Rescue, poetry/prose); Jacqueline Feldman’s Precarious Lease (Rescue, nonfiction); and Madeline McDonnell’s Lonesome Ballroom (Rescue, novel).
Hilary Plum, Associate Director
What are some memorable books you read this year?
In 2023 I did a lot of rereading. Sometimes to consider craft, genre, how a book was made; sometimes to teach a powerful beloved book; sometimes to experience again a remembered magic; sometimes to try to reconnect my life with itself. I won’t include the rereads in this list, but I do recommend, in general, rereading. Some books I loved and was undone by for the first time this year (surely also forgetting some) are Isabella Hammad, The Parisian; Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies; Angela Buck, Horses Dream of Money; Lisa Wells, Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World (I listened to this as an audiobook, which the author reads; my favorite kind of audiobook is when the author reads and this is a profoundly memorable example); Sarah Minor, Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit; Meghan O’Gieblyn, God Human Animal Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning (I also listened to this as an audiobook, though in this case I wish I’d read it on the page because I could have taken better notes); Hussain Ahmed, Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile; Harmony Holiday, Maafa; Paul Killebrew, Impersonal Rainbow & The Bisexual Purge; and Kate Greenstreet, case sensitive.
Care to share any reading/writing plans for 2024?
I am going to try to write about why the movie The Departed is so good, or so important to me, or to America, or something. This is probably a way to rewrite a novella (unpublished thank god) I wrote in the aughts whose main plot was just, like, imagining what Leonardo DiCaprio was reading.
What’s a topic you could stand on a soapbox and rant about for an hour?
This question is really dangerous for me. I love having opinions. I love to stand in my kitchen and rant. To be nice to myself I think of these opinions as “think pieces” but that is really over-crediting them. A few topics might be: how everything in the US has become more and more like our health insurance system (lethal exploitative dysfunctional nightmare); how at first there are a bunch of apps for something and then there’s just one remaining but it’s never the best one; ways in which Microsoft Outlook sucks; other opinions about email; how sports metaphors should be used less in politics but maybe more in writing; endless things that happen to women & femme people which you know are sexist, but you couldn’t prove it in a court of law, but you could prove it in any bar in America.
Kristen Tetzmann, Editorial Assistant
What are some memorable books you read this year?
Jesse Ball’s Autoportrait; Mitchell Jackson’s Survival Math; Jami Nakamura Lin’s The Night Parade; Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s Song; Lauren Shapiro’s Arena; Peter Burzyński’s, A Year Alone Inside of Woodland Pattern; Christopher Mohar’s short story “Chaos Theory”; and around every New Year I reread The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (in English, unfortunately); and these (Rennie Ament, Xavier Cavazos, and Melissa Dickey).
Weirdest thing you’ve used as a bookmark?
A spoon, a protein bar, or maybe a clean sock.
What’s a topic you could stand on a soapbox and rant about for an hour?
The absurdity of placing a mirror in front of a toilet, or maybe when baristas accidentally make the wrong drink and dump it out without asking if anyone wants it. Deep stuff, I know.
Reading/writing plans for 2024?
My to-read lists are endless. I highly regard any recommendations from my mentors and colleagues. (I’m also planning to read all their published work.) Autoportrait altered how I think about writing creative nonfiction relating to the self. I’m looking forward to reading the hundreds of poetry manuscripts submitted to the CSU Poetry Center. One small goal I have is to start writing book reviews.
Marlowe Jones, Editorial Assistant
Weirdest thing you’ve used as a bookmark?
I don’t usually use bookmarks. I just dogear the pages. It’s my book, who’s really going to care?
Pen or pencil?
Pen. I can’t use a pencil without breaking it.
Which English word makes you violently ill?
I don’t love the word ‘wart’.
Got any writing plans for 2024?
I just want to finish my thesis!
Without any preparation, what’s a topic you could stand on a soapbox and rant about for an hour?
The geographic progression of the bubonic plague.
Joey Rooney, Editorial Assistant
What are some memorable books you read this year?
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris; We Eat Our Own by Kea Wilson; Midnight Doorways by Usman T. Malik; Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer; The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III by Ian Mortimer; and Dickens and the Broken Scripture by Janet L. Larson. Regarding poetry, call me biased, but I seem to recall that the CSU Poetry Center published these (Ament, Cavazos, Dickey) books of poetry this year. . .
Pen or pencil?
Pen! Black, not blue—and definitely not red.
Got any soapbox rants at the ready?
The ending of Lost is brilliant and inspiring and a work of creative genius! Which is actually the majority view among longtime fans of the show, though you wouldn't know that if you only listen to the pop culture pundits.
Worst writing advice?
“Get up early and write!" No, you get up early and write, dammit! I sometimes think that I do my best writing after midnight.
Favorite thing you’ve written?
I don't play favorites with my writing projects. I only do that with my children. (I have no children.) That being said, I am currently working on two novel projects: (1) a historical fiction novel set just before the outbreak of the Black Death in England; and (2) a horror-adjacent novel that plumbs the depths of psychological despair to which a twelve-year-old boy might sink when faced with cosmic powers of evil. So, some real bubbly stuff! But, then again, I've always believed that where darkness abounds, grace abounds all the more.
Zach Peckham, Managing Editor
What are some memorable books you read this year?
Christian TeBordo’s The Apology and Eugene Lim’s Search History; I’ve had Murakami’s Norwegian Wood next to my bed all year, intermittently picking it up without bookmarking and forgetting where I am, reading a section and realizing I read it weeks ago, and it’s been really comforting, I’m actually afraid to finish it; I re-read The Great Gatsby and some of Fitzgerald’s short stories this summer, I guess because I wanted to feel like I was also drinking highballs on a Long Island estate with reckless abandon and no one to answer to, and was surprised by all the class subtext I’d never noticed before and great descriptions of early-modern juicing technology; Michael Clune’s White Out (memoir, but is it nonfiction); I taught John Guillory’s Professing Criticism in my publishing class so was obliged to read the whole thing, which was equal parts punishing and edifying; Johannes Göransson’s Transgressive Circulation; new issues of Chicago Review and European Review of Books contained some of my favorite criticism this year. Paul Killibrew’s Impersonal Rainbow & The Bisexual Purge, Kai Ihns’ GREEN SKY, Bill Carty’s We Sailed On The Lake, Cody-Rose Clevidence’s Aux/Arc/Trypt/Ich, Ian Dreiblatt’s forget thee, Collected Poems of Gustaf Sobin, Hilary Plum’s Excisions, Jon Conley’s House Hunters International :: Sonnets, Angelo Maneage’s Ball Pit Bucket Filled With Bridge Water, everything Spiral Editions and Beautiful Days Press did.
Weirdest thing you’ve used as a bookmark?
A sneeze.
What is your favorite piece you’ve ever written (so far)?
Lamely I’m still pretty fond of the poetry manuscripts I made toward the end of my time in the MFA here. Both were scary and surprised me, but also felt kind of easy. I can’t explain it. I think I had successfully worked myself into such an unmanageable froth that I could finally let go sufficient to start writing poetry “naturally” (for me) for the first time, or again, or something. I also have an essay about environmental memory I published in Territory in 2021 that I care about enough to secretly want to try building a book around. Don’t tell anyone though.
Without any preparation, what’s a topic you could stand on a soapbox and rant about for an hour?
Geopolitical maneuvers and resource extraction projects carried out on behalf of industrialized states by contemporary paramilitary organizations in the global south.