May 2017

These are poems that I have either taught or plan to teach in my poetry workshops. If you are an educator, add them to your curriculum. If you aren’t, read them and send them to your friends.

1. Mathias Svalina – “One Night” (Poets.org)
2. Lisa Ciccarello – “At Night, By Marriage” (Poets.org)
3. Tarfia Faizullah – “Aubade Ending with the Death of a Mosquito” (Poetry Foundation)
4. Sherwin Bitsui – “River” (Poetry Foundation)
5. Omar Sakr – “Ghosting the Ghetto” (Cosmonauts Avenue)
6. Sam Sax – “Doctrine” (Poets.org)
7. Nils Michals – “The Key, the Lock” (PANK)
8. Srikanth Reddy – “Four Poems” (Jacket Magazine)
9. Kim Hyesoon – “Three Poems” (Asymptote)
10. Natalie Eilbert – “Imprecation“ (Poetry Society of America)
11. Solmaz Sharif – “Social Skills Training” (Buzzfeed)
12. Charif Shanahan – “Wanting to be White” (Lit Hub)
13. Richard Siken – “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out” (Poetry Foundation)

Joanna C. Valente is the author of Sirs & Madams, The Gods Are Dead, Marys of the Sea, Xenos, and the editor of A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault.

This week, I rounded up some fiction you should read.

1. Ilana Masad – “Hamlet, Claudia, Zanzibar” (Volume 1 Brooklyn)
2. Michelle Lyn King – “Ghosts You Loved More” (Joyland)
3. Rion Amilcar Scott – “The Party” (Joyland)
4. Kamil Ahsan – “The Bare-Bones Facts” (Entropy)
5. Han Yujoo – “The Impossible Fairytale, excerpt” (Cosmonauts Avenue)
6. Henry Hoke – “Genevieve Exists” (Entropy)
7. Bud Smith – “Temporarily Here” (Digging Through the Fat)
8. Celeste Mohammed – “When a White Man Paints Black People” (The Rumpus)
9. Becky Mandelbaum – “Straw House” (The Rumpus)
10. Chavisa Woods – “A New Mohawk” (Lit Hub)
11. Nick Cave – “The Sick Bad Song” (Lit Hub)
12. Kerry Cullen – “Tell Me What to Do” (Luna Luna Magazine)
13. Justin Lawrence Daugherty – “This Is Conquest” (Joyland)

Joanna C. Valente is the author of Sirs & Madams, The Gods Are Dead, Marys of the Sea, Xenos,  and the editor of A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault.

If you’re going to read anything, read these.

1. T Kira Madden – “The Feels of Love” (Guernica)
2. Sarah Gerard – “An Incomplete List of My Failures” (Hazlitt)
3. Libby Leonard – “How to Be with Others” (Volume 1 Brooklyn)
4. Morgan Parker – “How to Stay Sane While Black” (NY Times)
5. Mira Ptacin – “What Happens When You’re Pregnant in Prison” (Elle)
6. Esme Wang – “I’m Chronically Ill and Afraid of Being Lazy” (Elle)
7. Porochista Khakpour – “My Life in the New Age” (VQR)
8. Jayy Dodd – “Why I’m Scared of White Women” (The Establishment)
9. Aila Boyd – “My Life as a Trans Woman Teaching High School in a ‘Bathroom Bill’ State” (Broadly)
10. Jenny Zhang – “They Pretend to Be Us While Pretending We Don’t Exist” (Buzzfeed)
11. Kate Moore – “The Forgotten Story of the Radium Girls” (Buzzfeed)
12. Nicole Dennis-Benn – “Growing Up with Miss Jamaica” (Elle)
13. Margaret E. Jacobsen – “I’m Non-Binary, And Here’s How I Talk to My Kids About It” (Romper)

Joanna C. Valente is the author of Sirs & Madams, The Gods Are Dead, Marys of the Sea, Xenos,  and the editor of A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault.

We all could stand to read more poetry. I say this as a poet who is immersed in poetry daily. You can never have too much of it–and personally, I don’t understand why more people don’t read poetry more. It’s short, which means you can digest a poem (the first time) anywhere. It’s all very momentary. Of course, this doesn’t mean you can’t go back to the poem later, and reread it with new eyes.

This is why I’m rounding up 13 poets writing about resistance whose work I admire. We can always cope with more poetry, am I right?

1. Danez Smith – “You’re Dead America” (Buzzfeed)
2. Robert Balun – “No-Titled” (Yes Poetry)
3. Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib – “The Day After the Election I Did Not Go Outside” (The New Inquiry)
4. Catherine Valdez – “Three Poems” (Heavy Feather Review)
5. Jen DeGregorio – “Three Poems” (Heavy Feather Review)
6. Guillermo Filice Castro – “Poems & Photographs” (Tarpaulin Sky)
7. Jennifer S. Cheng – “Inside Our Killing” (Tarpaulin Sky)
8. Jericho Brown – “Bullet Points” (Buzzfeed)
9. Yehuda Amichai – “The Place Where We Are Right” (On Being)
10. Maya Angelou – “On the Pulse of Morning” (University of Wisconsin)
11. W.H. Auden – “As I Walked Out One Evening” (Poets.org)
12. Octavio Paz – “Proem” (Poets.org)
13. Anne Waldman – “Endtime” (Poets.org)

Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), The Gods Are Dead (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015), Marys of the Sea (2016, ELJ Publications), & Xenos (2016, Agape Editions) and the editor of “A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault” (CCM, 2017). They received their MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Joanna is also the founder of Yes, Poetry, as well as the managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine and CCM. Some of their writing has appeared in Prelude, Apogee, Spork The Atlas Review, The Feminist Wire, BUST, The James Franco Review, and elsewhere. They also teach workshops at Brooklyn Poets.