I read 139 books while everything whirled.

2023 was the year books held me still.

The slow conscientiousness of text garners my faith more easily than most things. While we run around this world in faster and more chaotic circles, hankering for progress and production, responding to action with quick and thoughtless reaction, it is books (and often only books) that I trust to be methodical and considered.

Of course, not all books. This industry is, like all of them are, derailed by capital and the pressure to be a perpetual motion machine or a factory floor. And still writers resist this pressure: in the act of paring down each sentence, in the act of selecting the exact right word for their meaning, in the act of editing their own thoughts over years to acquire greater integrity with their art’s purpose.

This year I found it hard to read with the intentionality I strive for — I didn’t always come to books with my best self. Instead, I let reading whisk me away from all the muchness, and still it grounded me in pages when I failed to ground myself in the world. But I did a better job as a writer.

2023 was the year I defended my thesis, a book on the Rocky Mountain West and religion, inheritance and bodies in pain. At the University of Idaho, the thesis defense is open to the public — a candidate gives a reading followed by an hour or more of answering lengthy questions from her committee. And all I wanted to do in the oral defense was to be as a book is. I promised myself not to “um,” not to end any winding answer with “does that make sense?” or “do you know what I mean?” I promised I would sit in silence in front of the many gathered people for as long as it took me to ingest a multi-part question, make notes to myself, and gather not just the beginning of a thought but that thought’s direction. In every day conversation, such pauses seldom feel accessible — so quickly railroaded in another’s rush to eradicate the possibility of awkwardness. Often, I am the other doing the railroading. And so: books. I love the time the sentences take, the luxury of a full-length text, a fully developed thought. The long form. Too, the pauses these modes of expression encourage in me as a reader and then as a person. Perhaps I spend as long staring into the distance between pages of a book as I do reading their words, and, in such, a conversation passes between reader and text — each thought elongating the exchange and co-creating with a poem or essay a particular meaning only possible in the space between one specific mind and one book.

So much of my thesis work spun around this idea: that each book has hundreds of selves, given that the book is different in the mind and ear of each reader. Each mixes with the individual it’s touching in a given stretch of time, becoming something unique to that meeting. I am committed to being a writer who stays sane by giving over power to readers to collaborate with what I make, and I’m devoted, religiously so, to being a reader who does my half of the work to make meaning with a text. Such practices played out in myriad ways over 2023, as reading became more than ever a choreography I entered with other artists.

When my partner Adrien took me to a rehearsal of Martha Graham’s dance company at the University of Denver in the fall, I saw a readerly sensibility in the parallel shuddering of bodies. There on the stage was text — its meticulousness and intentionality — there was the physicality that I know most recently from words in the dancers’ abdominal inflections and the light bouncing off a flickering palm. Months later at The Nutcracker, I observed myself turning a dancer from woman into snowflake in my mind’s narration — the co-creation I know from reading — which drew my whole body into the knocks of her toe shoes, my shoulders rolling as her fourth position arms switched left to right to left.

It is, of course, too simple to say that it’s empathy I’m speaking of. Not only too simple but not correct. This is not one stepping into another’s world and dissolving the self in order to feel wholly what it is to be there. I understand that some people read for the opportunity to do this, but it’s not why I read or why I write. It’s instead, to create a pace at which two parties can do three things: meet, fully express, and fully witness, maintaining both wholeness of self and porosity through the exchange. One can say “I have a brush” and the other “I have some paints,” and each can take bountiful time to explain the uses of their tools as if they’re novel and to take in the uses of the other’s so that they can, together, make something of the encounter. Paint. Perhaps something beautiful and certainly something all its own.

This year, I let the books I read direct my life far more that I directed them in any way — I chose at random and followed when they led me to others of their kind. The point, inevitably, was to practice — first in reading — a gentle deference or openness, a willingness to be nudged, a humility I aspire to in personhood. I looked for things to appreciate in books instead of reasons to put them down (and sometimes, as with JoAnna Novak’s Contradiction Days — my hardest read of the year to get through — this proved stunningly difficult). Where the books pressed on my reaction points, was there anything interesting to study about myself? Could I still build something with a text causing me upset? Of course, plenty of books invited me into the easy engagement of old friends bringing new tidbits and wonderful thoughts to the dinner table. All gave me reason to practice the acts of collaboration and creation.

Here is the link to every book I read this year. I’m an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores and booksellers instead of billionaires, and I earn a small commission when folks buy from my book lists on their site.

And now for the lists of my favorites and recommendations, starting with:

The List of Lists (or What You Can Expect to Find Below)

1. The TL;DR list
2. The long fiction list
3. The nonfiction list
4. Books for sharing
5. On Palestine and beyond
6. Prose books that make writerly moves I admire: a 2023 list
7. Poetry collections that make writerly moves I admire: a 2023 list
8. My writing & publications of 2023

We begin.

The TL;DR list

If you don’t want to get into the long stuff to come, here are the books I cherished most most most in 2023. I write about each of them in depth (and many others) below.

1. The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (novel)
2. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Jamil Jan Kochai (short stories)
3. Happening by Annie Ernaux (memoir)
4. The Unwritten Book: An Investigation by Samantha Hunt (genre-bending nonfiction)
5. Horizon by Barry Lopez (essays)
6. Fatal by Kimberly Johnson (poems)
7. And not-yet-published collections by my dearest friends: Where the Fuck Is the North Star? by Libby Croce and Even the Parts I Promised to Myself by Cady Favazzo (poems)

The long fiction list

1. Western Lane by Chetna Maroo got to me as a writer first and then as a person who’s experienced parent loss. This book follows a young girl and her sisters who have lost their mother. Their father throws them into the sport of squash, pressing upon them an intensive training regimen in an effort to shove off their grief and his. I was strangely giddy reading this book, not because of its content, but because I recognized in it a writer creating an entire novel adjacent to grief — one that captures loss not by addressing loss but by drawing, for two hundred or so pages, everything around it. Western Lane is a place where a book’s form perfectly enacts the shape of its unspoken content. As a bonus, it’s a book that makes literary grace of a sport, which is rare and thrilling to me, given how much of my selfhood I acquired through athletic and somatic endeavors.
2. I finally read Big Swiss by Jen Beagin this fall, after hearing about it all year. An unmoored woman who works transcribing client sessions for a sex therapist ends up enmeshed in a kind-of-mean, kind-of-horrid, kind-of-hot gay romp with one of the clients, a woman she calls “Big Swiss.” This book was what you’d imagine from something reviewed by Cosmopolitan and described as “super fun” and “funniest book in a long time” again and again, but that’s usually not enough to make me feel anything more than temporary escapism. The reason I loved Big Swiss though is that, in addition to offering hilarity, it also made my brain light up with connections to other texts that utilize translation or transcription as a narrative device. Though it’s entirely different from these books, it made me return to favorites by Valeria Luiselli (Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How it Ends), This Little Art by Kate Briggs, Mona by Pola Oloixarac. Of course, there’s meta intrigue here: the protagonist Greta comes to know Big Swiss by transcribing her words — something related to reading, to how we readers come to know any character, and even more akin to writing. We listen to the voices of our speakers and narrators. We write them down. Whatever slips our attention never lands on the page or remains in memory, and so we fail in the damning and intriguing ways that translation and transcription fail; we make something that is not a copy but a new creation. I love how Beagin gives characters and bodies to such failure: we get to watch on the page as Greta misses Big Swiss, her image not quite overlaying on the woman’s “real” physical self. Incredible!
3. Paradise Rot was the debut novel of eccentric Norwegian musician Jenny Hval and was translated to the English by Marjam Idriss in 2018. This feels more like a study in how to write a soggy novel than a story, per se, but it does follow the development of desire in a queer young woman. Very hot, a little moldy, lots of spit, sopping wet. Feels like a little sibling of Big Swiss.
4. I finally read The Friend by Sigrid Nunez for the first time this year! When it came out (and won the national Book Award) I was being weird and judgy about the concept of a dog book. I love my dog more than God and am equally convinced that I could not possibly write anything about her that’s not far too saccharine to stomach. So. I thought surely Sigrid Nunez couldn’t either write well about a dog, and I was wrong. The Friend follows a woman left stuck with her mentor’s Great Dane when the man dies. Like Western Lane, though, this book rides a line adjacent to its subject area, being both about a Great Dane and about a great loss, but somehow not landing with two feet on either at any moment. Like Rachel Khong’s brilliant Goodbye, Vitamin, this book captures grief in the mundanity and quiet of muttered dialogue or the choice to position oneself between a horse of a dog squatting in the street and oncoming traffic. Nunez allows us to see a woman struggling with aging and writing and attraction, even as the mass of her grief lives in the physicality of a giant new being in her small New York apartment. In some ways, the animality of The Friend gives it a quality of performance art rather than book — a thing that endears me to it completely.
5. Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada was wild. And noisy. A surreal romp (or really three interconnected romps) filled with exotic fish and pattering, chaotic weasels. This slim novella works best in its contrasts: bitter winter storm and muggy roomful of aquariums; human silence or discomfort and raucous animal interruption. Oyamada is a smart surrealist whose prose feels distinctly like musical composition.
6. Released in 2023, Megan Kamalei Kakimoto’s debut story collection, Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare, is ripe, saturated, and thick with smart threads that run across stories. This book is stuffed with feminine coming-of-age, menstrual blood, a rotting corpse flower, and Kanaka storytelling that draws the land and water and creatures of Hawai’i into and through the stories’ human characters. It’s rare to find a fiction collection that truly needs each of its stories to be whole, but this is one; every single piece has the richness of a writer confident and knee-deep in the telling.
7. I read Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah because I was floored by his brilliance in the story “Zimmer Land” from his debut collection Friday Black. Chain Gang is the sort of book that’s physically painful to read and impossible to look away from; it’s set in a private prison system that uses gladiator-style fights to the death between inmates to raise money for its own expansion. The winningest competitors can eventually fight to acquire the prize of their own freedom, but the system is of course not designed to let them go easily and ultimately pits two lovers against each other for their final battle: Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Staxx” Stacker. This is one of those books whose dystopia really raises truer images of the present than could be brought in the realm of literary realism. Chain Gang creates a visceral portrait of the prison-industrial complex, anti-Blackness, and dehumanization, and it does so in a near-cinematic way, engulfing the reader in its world.
8. As a non-gamer, I wasn’t sure I’d connect with Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, whose center is two friends creating a video game together. I listened to this book on audio, which was helpful — it came through my headphones on a flight and on the light rail in Seattle. So much of this book is about distance, the space between friends or the space between a person and themself. It’s about collaboration and separation, intimacy and everything between two people that isn’t intimacy. So much of it is about falling apart, and I was able to feel this in my body as I walked onto and exited transit. Toward friends and away. Toward writing community (I traveled for a writers conference) and away, back to working in solitude. Though my work is very different than that at the center of this novel, I could connect spatially, and certainly the dynamics among Zevin’s characters were crystalline and painful. For anyone who’s ever had and lost a friend; for anyone who’s ever changed too much to hang onto the people who loved their old self.
9. In summer of 2022, I took a class with Pam Houston in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and she said she couldn’t recommend anything more highly than The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Jamil Jan Kochai (ultimately a finalist for the National Book Award that year). This book is violent and gruesome; I should say that — certainly be warned. It centers Afghan characters in Afghanistan and the U.S. and the stories range from feeling contemporary to feeling of another time. Many capture a diasporic feeling of owing something of oneself to a land or people, and within this is woven the violence of the U.S. military fuckery in Afghanistan and its lasting consequences. Jan Kochai is a master of telling things slant, and especially telling through image. I often struggle to remember details of books, but scenes from this one are emblazoned in me (I won’t describe them here because of the aforementioned greusomeness). Like Megan Kamalei Kakimoto’s story collection (above), every story in this book adds an important facet to the whole. Of all the fiction on this list, this is the book I recommend most this year.
10. After debuting with The Great Believers in 2018, Rebecca Makkai published I Have Some Questions for You this year. Before reading it, I was skeptical of her debut because it’s rare for me to like a book with multiple narrators, and I tend to find jumping across time gimmicky, but once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down. In I Have Some Questions for You, it’s easy to see that Makkai has gotten more dextrous — where before she divided multiple storylines into distinct chapters with different narrators, here each subplot and timeframe is happening at once. This novel reminds me of a page in the hair-braiding tutorial book my dad gave me as a child (excellent gift) on the five-strand braid (as I remember it, nearly impossible to do on myself, but I spent hours twisting my neck around with the effort). I bet Makkai could do that braid. Here, we follow well-known podcaster Brodie as she returns to the private boarding school where her roommate was murdered in their youth in order to teach a handful of podcasting production classes. At once, her ex-husband is being canceled on Twitter for misogyny, memories from adolescence are flying, and Brodie’s beginning to take apart the pieces of a shoddy police investigation that was rooted in racist ideas of who is a “victim” and who is a “villain.” In a different writer’s hands, this might’ve been a thriller, but in Makkai’s, it’s literary and critical fiction at its most dense (in a totally complimentary sense of the word).
11. The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty — I loved this so much and remember so little of it. A fever dream? A 2024 re-read to come? It reminded me of Chelsea Bieker’s Godshot, which is a perfect book.
12. The much-lauded If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery feels like a study of the fallings-short in the perpetual forward churn toward the “American Dream.” Funny and sharp (and both in ways that hurt), these linked stories of a Jamaican family in Miami have brothers Delano and Trelawny at their heart, and they jump around, giving more of a chopped-up family video feel than a linear narrative. Some parts seem recorded-over and missing, while the characterization — especially of Trelawny — runs strong throughout. Read this if you’re a person who loves people, character, or voice.
13. Blue Hour by Tiffany Clarke Harrison is fractal-like in its investigation of parental ambivalence. The protagonist, a photographer, observes and survives a world whose violence toward Black bodies — bodies like hers — is nearly too much to bear as she wavers on the edge of the decision to have a child or not. Artful in the way of Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, this novel utilizes the narrator’s artistic medium as a second lens (in addition to the textual lens) through which to ask her narrative questions. Brilliant; cannot compliment highly enough.
14. While everyone this year was blown away by Justin Torres’ new (and National Book Award-winning) novel Blackouts, I was finally getting to his debut from 2011, We the Animals, which a bookseller friend recommended to me some years ago. This is in the vein of what I hoped Brutes by Dizz Tate might be but wasn’t quite — a fast, dizzy look into a collective childhood (in this case, that of three brothers) untethered to stillness or stability and untethered to the idea that the group might not always share everything. Sweaty, claustrophobic, and the sort of book that clamps down on your insides.

The nonfiction list

1. I listened to the audiobook of Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant on a plane. I’ve always been afraid of fires — I had a nightly recurring nightmare for years in childhood of our house burning — and since Covid, I’m now, too, afraid of planes. It seems many people acquired new anxieties in the last few years. Though I’m very afraid of Covid, the plane thing has nothing to do with infection and everything to do with inexplicably falling from the sky. Or completely explicably falling from the sky (is it not impossible that these sheets and sheets of metal can fly to begin with?). Something about being faced (in the pandemic) with the reality that everything that once seemed solid can fall apart in a matter of days. We who grew up in the West, of course, should know this anyway, from what’s been happening with our fire weather for the last couple decades — colonial fire suppression finally turning healthy fire cycling into something monstrous. Vaillant’s Fire Weather investigates such catastrophes of the Pyrocene (a term coined by fire historian Stephen Pyne in 2015), focusing in especially on climate change and human resource extraction, which is particularly relevant to his focus area of Alberta, Canada. Fire Weather is both a work of journalism and a historical study of bitumen mining (Alberta’s Athabasca tar sands are the biggest bitumen deposit in the world) in and around Fort McMurray, which was built to service the oil operation, and the explosive fire that occurred there in 2016, displacing nearly 90,000 people and creating a fire storm that ran up to 1600 degrees Fahrenheit. With the so-called “Fire Number Nine” as the anchor to his story, Vaillant bounces outward to explore everything from the history of government subsidization for the oil and gas industry to the petroleum-based products like furniture and kitchen-goods we use to outfit our homes. The fire in Fort McMurray ultimately burned for well over a year, covering thousands of square miles of forest and, in its first week, “vaporizing” rather than “burning” some 2000 buildings in its wake. Patient and meticulous, the prose here is astounding, operating on every scale with care.
2. I knew Cristina Rivera Garza for her fiction (especially the wonderful, dark novella The Iliac Crest) and was eager (if heartbroken) to meet her nonfiction voice in Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice. In 1990, Garza’s younger sister Liliana was murdered by her ex-boyfriend in Mexico City. Liliana’s case was allowed to remain open but discarded, never leading to any sort of “justice” or prosecution. This memoir is Garza’s attempt to earn her sister justice — if not of the sort sought in a courtroom than of narration. The author travels back to Mexico City to dig into evidence — not just of Liliana’s death, but also of her life in those final months, when she was a twenty-year-old architecture student and swimmer with a light that magnetized friends to her, even as she was far from family and wading through the quiet of gendered violence. Garza reaches across time to bring her sister’s story to the page, from Liliana’s own letters and notebooks and her friends’ accounts to sparse police documents Garza had to fight to get access to. Due to corruption in the Mexican government and bureacratic go-arounds, no one filed a warrant for the arrest of Liliana’s murderer until months after her death — by which point her ex-boyfriend was long gone. As Garza points out, the term “femicide” did not yet exist in 1990. She argues that the government’s inadequacies then and now line up perfectly with misogyny’s edges; ten women and girls on average are still murdered each day in Mexico. Liliana’s Invincible Summer is heavy with the weight its author carries as she pushes at great personal risk to publicize and understand a story that’s true and one which remains distressingly familiar to many.
3. Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons by Kris Newby was sticking out from a shelf at Barnes & Noble of all places, looking like hell, like it’d been there since it came out years ago. Still, having Lyme disease, I read it and Adrien read it and her parents read it and my mom did too. The title pretty much tells you what you need to know about its substance. It’s the sort of journalism you wish in many ways not to encounter, its implications too horrifying; and yet, still, there is something comforting to me always in the validation of a terrible thing I know in my body to be terrible (but which is still oft not acknowledged publicly to be so). On the large scale: it’s all worse than I knew. Adrien and her mom and I watched a documentary later that Newby participated in creating, and I cried because of the ways I can’t move my body and the pain it’s always in. If you want to better understand Lyme, I recommend too Porochista Khakpour’s Sick, a memoir of her experience, and Richard Horowitz’s more scientific books: here and here.
4. I read In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country by Kim Barnes because I felt a kindredness with her. Kim taught at University of Idaho in the MFA program for some decades and retired the year before I arrived, a fact I remain quite sad about. She grew up in Idaho and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1997 for this memoir, which details her wild youth as the child of a logger father and homemaker mother turned rigid Pentecostals. This book is severe and wide in a way that’s out of vogue now but intensely admirable in its own right. Barnes pans from one corner to another of a setting before placing her child self in it, which creates a visceral quality for a reader that’s hard to match (if you’re willing to be patient with her). For readers of Marilynne Robinson and Tara Westover.
5. I’d not read any Barry Lopez until early 2023 when I was preparing for my thesis defense and picked up Horizon. I knew the book from how it flew off shelves of the bookstore in the winter of 2019 and how often I had to order more copies to replace it. His last book — Lopez died on Christmas of 2020 — Horizon is a massive collection of essays, nearly 600 pages spanning decades of his life and travels to every portion of the globe. I came to it with the tenderness of having read his wife Debra Gwartney’s sparse and perfect essay “Fire and Ice,” a pick for Best American Essays in 2022 and originally published in Granta. The essay circles her husband’s final days and a fire that forced them to evacuate their home. I’m so behind on Lopez I don’t know what I can say. Horizon is magnificent, a final note that is as complex as Barry the man is painted to be in Gwartney’s piece. It’s a masterpiece of environmental writing and one I’m overwhelmed but desperate to return to.
6. I started They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers in the last couple days of 2023 and haven’t yet finished it, but already I can see how vital it is as a historical text. I still remember the awe with which my sales rep from Yale University Press pitched this book to me years ago when I was buying books for Tattered Cover — and she was quite right. This is a deep and fastidious history of white women and their role in the slave economy of the U.S. South. Too, it’s a history of many Black people held as slaves by said white women. This book pushes back with mountains of evidence against the idea that white women were, due to patriarchy, less responsible for the harms of slavery or less empowered to enact the abusive role of “master.” Indeed, it details how white women were trained from childhood to manage and build wealth from slave-holding. A must-read correction to so many colonial history books. I’m sure this will end up on next year’s list as well.

Books for sharing

This year, I delighted in conversations with Adrien about the sometimes-quite-varied worlds we built with nonfiction books we both read in 2023. Here are the ones I recommend for book clubs or family reads.

1. Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect by Will Guidara is part memoir, part collection of restauranteur advice from the former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park in New York, which achieved the status of best restaurant in the world while he was at its helm. His approach is remarkably unpretentious and touched my and Adrien’s hearts with its humanizing quality. Guidara decided at one point that EMP’s food was the best it could be and that the restaurant would only rise to the top by shifting its focus to improving hospitality. Under his new program, to the table of out-of-town guests witnessing snow for the first time out the window, a waiter delivered shiny new sleds and sledding hill recommendations in Central Park with dessert. For the table of foodies lamenting that they forgot to try out a real New York hot dog while visiting, a waiter ran out to a street vendor and plated the hot dog she collected, incorporating it between courses of their elaborate meal. Ultimately, Guidara made full time positions for employees enacting such magical moments; he called them dreamweavers, and their jobs were to listen closely to diners and to get creative, providing unique experiences that turned meals into lasting stories of being totally cared for. Adrien and I talked a lot this year about our relationship’s purpose. As in: who are we to the world when we’re together? In what way does our partnership embody a whole that’s greater than the sum of the two of us as individuals? We’ve long had the sense, I think, that the careful listening of good hospitality is a huge portion of this purpose. Adrien delights in inventing a massive cooking project that allows her to dote on our friends, throwing whimsy and newness into a shared experience. I’m ultra tactile and love to carefully arrange flowers or table settings, to keep notes to myself on what makes a friend light up and to surprise them with a decorated package in the mail months on. Guidara’s book is helping Adrien and me to explore all the ways we might magnify each other’s tendencies and let ourselves be guided by the fun we can have in co-creating experiences for our loved ones to feel held.
2. The Hank Show: How a House-Painting, Drug-Running DEA Informant Built the Machine That Rules Our Lives by McKenzie Funk was our holiday book club book of 2023 — an annual tradition in Adrien’s family that started when she was a teenager and with the rules only that the book must be nonfiction and under 350 pages. This absolutely WILD read follows the life of Hank Asher, who’s relatively undiscussed but developed the software at the root of pretty much every way that we’re tracked online. Asher was a serial entrepreneur who started his career as a house painter and then drug smuggler before turning his mind to collecting and condensing data, creating more efficient hardware and eventually software systems for doing so. The Hank Show looks at the origins of his interest — buying up DMV records in the state of Florida — and follows its years of expansion to collecting and aggregating consumers’ buying information, interests, family members and connections, medical histories, arrest histories, and anything else you can think of. Where the technical jargon and tens of acronyms here could’ve made it impossible to get through, Funk demonstrates a keen ability to provide not just clarity but shocking intrigue. Terrifying, but also great journalism.
3. This Is What it Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says about You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas is something I read on the side while taking a poetry workshop focused on sound/music. Susan Rogers is a music producer — she produced Purple Rain among many other notables — and this is her book on the theory of music taste (for the lay person). She outlines seven “areas” in a song that might draw a person in or push them off. The idea is that each person’s taste is determined by how they rank the importance of these seven. The areas are rhythm, melody, lyrics, authenticity, realism (as in the spectrum from acoustic sounds to electronic ones), timbre, and novelty (how far a song is from what our ears are trained by the pop music of our particular culture to expect). Rogers — who also has a doctorate in neuroscience — argues that each individual has a “listener profile” specific to our ordering of the importance of these things. All taste is taste, she says; there is no “good” or “bad.” With This Is What it Sounds Like, she offers a form in which to understand and discuss your own taste with others. Rogers describes gathering with friends to do what she calls a record pull: each person plays a recording of a song that they love, and they talk about which qualities speak to them. I realized in reading this book that my oldest friend, Madison, and I have had many conversations about music in this vein for years, but it was fantastic to each read this book and use its shape to direct our understanding of each other. Adrien, too, read This Is What It Sounds Like, and we’ve enjoyed discovering what music must sound like to the other’s ear as she describes her feeling for the rhythm of something and I describe my love of discord or strangeness in melody. Madison took this to her book club and had a record pull when they all met up to discuss; 10/10 fun idea. I have truly 700 more things to say about this book, so let me know if you want to come over for a record pull and chat in 2024. The book’s website is also great.
4. I read Jenn Shapland’s debut, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, three or four times between its pre-release press era and studying it for a portion of a nonfiction class in melding the personal with research. I came to think of it as a single long essay in book form (although it’s marketed as a memoir), Shapland’s capacity to trace one thought for an enduring period of time something that endeared her writing to me. This became my favorite quality of Thin Skin, her collection of five essays from this year, which Adrien and I and my friend Martha all read, one after the other. I flipped its pages in the parking lot of Home Depot, read part in the garage as we cleaned it out in an effort to turn it into a studio. I talked with Martha on the phone about the middle essay, the last essay, while hanging lights from the rafters with the spiders. The images of life that accompany the reading of a thing feel important to me: this is the landscape — my landscape — that the content and landscape of a book entered into and mixed with. Shapland’s Santa Fe (a place deeply familiar to me) met my Denver summer; her efforts to be unfettered, an artist in queer love, a woman who respects and also wishes not to become her mother for all of the reasons of decades of trapped womanhood. It’s the final essay in the collection that starred in most of the press (and that Shapland proclaimed she was most nervous to see enter the world). “The Meaning of Life” painstakingly walks through the entirety of her perspective against having children. Much of the essay is about womanhood — what’s expected of us (as in, even if you don’t have children, you must like children). She does not want to have to like children. She doesn’t want to have children. Further, she says that having children is the worst choice one can make for the environment (true, of course, and made more poignant by the environmentalism of essays that came before it, especially the book’s titular opener, “Thin Skin”). While I feel as Shapland does and have chosen to preference art over children (not a hard decision for me, as it wasn’t especially for her), this is, to me, the most pedantic of the essays — and it undercuts the incredible balancing act she manages in the other four. Essay comes from the French essai, meaning “test, attempt.” Earlier: from the Latin for “weigh” or “draw out.” When a piece becomes pedantic, it is no longer an essay in my mind. An opinion piece, perhaps. I lament, though, that I’ve spent more time toying with my frustration over the last piece this year than discussing its merits and those of all that came before it. “The Toomuchness,” the book’s middle essay floored me. Shapland’s control, particularly in pieces of this length and complication, is unrivaled. On slow fashion, consumption, production, and femininity, “The Toomuchness” became the conversation I wanted to be having with everyone in the summer of 2023. Where sometimes Shapland’s thinking is so similar to my own that I blow through it, this essay’s long endeavor to understand complicity gave me a partner with which to engage. As Susan Rogers’ music book (above) gives endless avenues for conversation, Shapland’s varied collection offers hundreds of threads to follow and bring into a walk or dinner with a friend — from the atom bomb to writing, wellness and aging to dresses made in China, childlessness to the harm in learned white femininity.
5. Run Towards the Danger by Sarah Polley is another essay collection, this one recommended to me by Adrien because the last essay focuses on the writer’s head injuries and their treatment (I’ve had six concussions and deal with their lasting impact, so this is a source of interest for me). Sarah Polley is a well-known Canadian actress, though neither of us was familiar with her, and much of this collection deals in fame — especially as it pertains to being a child star. Scenes from this book came to mind again when I read Elliot Page’s memoir Pageboy and when Adrien read Britney Spears’ memoir The Woman in Me, and we spent time in conversation about liability, which nudged a part of my brain that thinks often of child athletics (I’m returning lately to an old essay about gymnastics and questions of power and abuse). This book had hits and misses for me, but the two essays that were memorable were very much so, and I found the writing clear and striking. Polley’s lens of film comes through clearly in the way she creates scenes and slides from one to another, moving the boxes of narrative around.

On Palestine and Beyond

Because the end of 2023 was marked by the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, I read a handful of histories on Israel and Palestine in hopes of finding books to recommend to anyone feeling like they have an incomplete understanding and to add to my own. These are reviews of all the books on the subject that I read (I don’t recommend them all, but I’ve included notes on each at the off chance that they’re useful).

1. They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl’s Fight for Freedom by Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri is a straightforward and personal account of Tamimi’s Palestinian childhood in the West Bank. Ahed Tamimi transitions from being a young child to a well-known activist over the course of the book, and she includes background history, family experiences, discussion of her prison time, and many observations of the IDF. It’s often the small details she includes that create the clearest picture of her life: as children, she and her cousins and friends would play “Israeli soldiers and Palestinians” in much the same way that children in the U.S. played “cowboys and Indians” in decades past. The kids pretending to be IDF soldiers would play shoot at or bomb the Palestinian children, and the Palestinian children would trade off between throwing rocks in response and tending to the wounds or play-dead bodies of their family members. In They Called Me a Lioness, Tamimi lays out scenes again and again that are hard to turn away from, and she backs those scenes with concrete information that gives a useful introduction to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and what it has meant for colonized people there.
2. Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman is a book I’d only recommend to people who are already quite clear that what’s happening in Gaza is a genocide. Bergman is an Israeli journalist with a clear Zionist bent (a la The New York Times coverage) that’s extremely troubling and hard to get through. Even with that being true, this (extremely long, ~800 page) book exposes some unfathomable horrors of the IDF that I wish everyone could know about. It’s on a reader here to remember how nationalist and biased Bergman’s coverage is and to imagine the reality is much worse than what’s in these pages.
3. The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict by Jonathan Schneer (also long, ~500 pages) is dry and winding — I imagine this is one that could suit true history book readers but had so much information that it became hard for me to hold it all. That said, this would be a useful book to explore in slow bursts over some months or a year — the sort that you study rather than read. Its detail is striking, and it provides an in-depth frame (though one that’s also shaped by a colonial bent — something to be aware of).
4. I’m currently reading: Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems by Mosab Abu Doha because I believe that poetry is often better at conveying truth than historical text, and I just took out The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine by Ben Ehrenerich from the library. As always, when I finish these, I’ll put some notes about them on Instagram (and perhaps they’ll show up on next year’s list).

Prose books that make writerly moves I admire: a 2023 list

1. At the beginning of 2023, I’d read only one text by Annie Ernaux — a sort of accidental blip before I had any sense of who she was (or that the books are much heftier when read all together). So this year, mostly in summer, I read fifteen of her books, piling them up next to the public pool or taking them to lie in the park. I wrote about reading Ernaux here, but I have to say again how important Happening was to me. I read it on the rug below our record player and its speakers, and it was strange to have music move over my ears while having the sound of Ernaux’s voice inside them: on the impossibility of finding an abortion as a young woman. On the growing desperation and the weighing of options. The slim book feels as though it happens both in real time and in the whir of panic-time passing. What I admire is the frankness and the unwillingness to be shamed, not to mention the ability to capture the frenetic feeling of a time that had already passed by the time Ernaux was writing.
2. Percival Everett, in general. Everett taught at USC when I was in undergrad, but I never read him until this year. He has some twenty or twenty-five novels, a slew of poetry collections, and some other odds and ends. But even just reading his most recent fiction, The Trees, Telephone, and Dr. No, I got a sense of the wide variance in his projects. Telephone follows a distracted paleobiologist whose family life is crumbling around a sick daughter and apathetic marriage while he studies his small swath of the Grand Canyon and jets off to help a stranger instead of facing his own life. The Trees centers the horrific legacy of lynching in the U.S. as bodies that look like Emmett Till keep appearing at crime scenes for other murders. Here, Everett is sharp, churning plot so forcefully and precisely that a reader can’t escape for a moment. Dr. No follows a mathematician who studies the concept of “nothing,” which gets him recruited by a spy-movie style villain intent on stealing “nothing” from the U.S. government. Each of Everett’s books is philosophically dazzling. He ties logic around, seemingly in knots upon knots, and then pulls both ends of its string at the end to show off a perfectly unknotted stretch. He overcomplicates in order to show off the ridiculousness of over-complication, and reading him feels like going to an excellent and discomfiting magic show.
3. Stephen van Dyck’s People I’ve Met from the Internet is a catalogue of everyone the writer first encountered online and then met in person over the course of twelve years. It includes hundreds of men encountered while cruising on AOL chat rooms and gay dating sites, folks from eBay and Craigslist who helped move a couch or became roommates or brought a dish to so-and-so’s party, MySpace commenters turned fuck buddies or hand holders. Each encounter includes information connoted in a careful lettering system about What Happened. Kiss? K. Suck? S. And on. I admire this project primarily for its duration — the notes that led to it clearly beginning long before the project as “book” existed. It makes me imagine writing on a longer timescale: what might it be to begin now a project that can only come to fruition when I’m 40? 50?
4. The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen is a novel that got a lot of attention this year as a finalist for the National Book Award. Ostensibly, this is a sweeping and doomed love story between an indigenous Sámi reindeer herder in the Arctic Circle and the daughter of a Lutheran minister who’s come to convert native people to his faith. “Sweeping” and “doomed” are not descriptors of books I usually like, but I committed to read everything on the NBA longlist for fiction this year as an experiment, and what I found in The End of Drum-Time was something quite different than what all the press promised. Of course, the relationship between Willa and Ivvár is a feature of the book, but two other relationships between folks among the multiple communities in the landscape of this text are equally prominent. Pylväinen fractures a reader’s attention across the three relationships, forcing us to pivot from one to the next as if our gaze is being cut by a cold wind. This manner of directing a reader mimics the icy landscape itself, which is brilliant and under-discussed in what I’ve read of the book’s criticism.
5. For a while, everyone was talking about Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer. Adrien and I had a picnic with friends who hated it; everyone posted their pros and cons online. This is a thinky book of criticism about artists who have done terrible things — Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, Miles Davis and Michael Jackson — and how we might think about engaging or not engaging with their work. Monsters spun out from Dederer’s 2017 essay “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” in The Paris Review; it’s philosophical, personal, declarative and also willing to be wrong (but not really ever tentative). I didn’t love this book because I agreed with Dederer’s every conclusion (or lack of conclusion), but I loved it because she was willing to go out and have the conversation in public, rather than cloistering herself away with her thoughts, as so many of us do in an era when we’re deeply afraid to be wrong out loud. How much better we might become if we talked through things with others, changed our minds, made amends, tried again. I kind of love Dederer for the invitation.
6. I’ve written about The White Book by Han Kang in multiple of these lists, but I read it again this year, so here, again, it is. It’s a miracle that a novel can so clearly embody its subject in its sentences (particularly when we know how well Kang can embody different content in totally different sorts of sentences). Every phrase in this story of a Korean writer in a wintery European city has the delicacy and the sharp-softness of snow. As she meditates on her long-dead elder sister, every line holds the mutedness of a cotton swaddle, a white storm. I also read Kang’s newer novel, Greek Lessons this year, and I’m quite sure she’s one of the greatest living fiction writers.
7. In 2023, Samantha Hunt published her first work of nonfiction, The Unwritten Book: An Investigation. Hunt is one of my all-time favorite fiction writers — I’ve written on her books The Seas, The Dark Dark, and Mr. Splitfoot in past years of this list — and The Unwritten Book is one I anticipated more than perhaps any other book in years. In a strange (and strangely laid-out) melding of memoir, sleuthing, philosophical inquiry, writing practice, and practice in personhood, Hunt explores everything that haunts her. She looks at piles of objects and at every book she’s every read or written, all of their words phantom-like in her body. The premise of this book aligns exactly with so much of the thinking behind my own writing over the past few years: that illness and pain, physical texts and conversations, intergenerational harm and stories pile up in a body, puppeteering and haunting it. Hunt’s book reminded me of a tool I loved in Rebecca Solnit’s memoir, The Faraway Nearby; here, Solnit writes as usual, disparately— about travel to Iceland and about Mary Shelley and and the Marquis de Sade — but along the very bottom of each page is a single line that runs parallel to her expansive essayistic tellings. This line of text sits across the bottoms of every page in the book, and to read it, you must flip the pages rapidly, skipping over the paragraphs and paragraphs of everything else. This text is about apricots. When Solnit’s mother was losing her memory, she lost the ability to care for her apricot tree, so three boxes of ripening (and then rotting) apricots landed on the floor of Solnit’s bedroom. In the single line on each of some 250 or 300 pages, she watches and smells the apricots in decline; this parallelism gives a fermenting and grieving quality to everything else on the pages, sort of regardless of what order you read in (normal text, then apricots, or apricots first). Hunt’s The Unwritten Book, too, has intratextual elements, though they’re not so easily categorized as Solnit’s because they operate in more than two layers or parts. Chapters are divided into multiple sections with other chapters shoved in their middles. Footnotes, which are mostly memories of specific words and their appearances in Hunt’s life or writing, take up whole pages. I love the way this book values randomness and the way Hunt allows herself to make a mess while seeking a pattern. I love that the mess was allowed to remain. This book offers a remarkable education in what it is to be a writer and one who is free with herself.
8. To review it for Fugue, I re-read Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin in the spring. It floors me every time — one of my very favorite novels. I won’t repeat myself, but you can read the review here.

Poetry collections that make writerly moves I admire: a 2023 list

1. Until this year, I hadn’t read Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky. I knew it was a gaping hole in my internal library, especially because I love a “project” book of poems (a la Franny Choi’s Soft Science, Kimmy Grey’s Systems for the Future of Feeling, etc.) — a book that is in its an entirety an experiment in the act of something, as opposed to, say, a group of poems collected by theme. Deaf Republic uses tools of fiction and nonfiction in its project, which includes creating a setting and giving that setting narrative. This book is placed in an occupied, presumably Eastern European country, where soldiers early in the book kill a deaf boy named Petya. Intensely sound based, the collection tells us that at the blast of the murderous gunshot, the entirety of the town goes deaf. Under their new state, the townspeople are not allowed to communicate, but the people rise up against their occupiers using secret sign language (hands are drawn throughout the text, sparking in the dark silence that presses on its words). This book’s poetics flicker through the many facets of silence, metaphoric and literal, neutral and beautiful and violent.
2. Lizzie Davis, former editor at Coffee House Press and now editor at Transit Books, assigned Memorial: A Version of Homer’s Iliad by Alice Oswald for a virtual class I took with her (and Alex Highley and Monika Woods, hosted by the new and exciting Great Place Books) in the fall. Compared the the tome that is The Iliad, Oswald’s volume is slim. This is because Oswald has removed the narrative from the original entirely; what she’s left is just description of the war itself — violence enacted upon bodies, death in droves covering fields. She’s replaced The Iliad with a miraculous hundred page elegy, and one that finally allows for the magnanimity of grief that is often masked in the masculine glory of the Greek original. I love the audacity of this, the chutzpah of a translator gone rogue. Davis is, herself, a translator, and she brought to us a handful of nontraditional translation texts to study in the class. Translation is always, to me, a “second text” — a new thing created loosely after another, but never a copy of the first. For a translation to own this newness and use it to an end that’s bigger than remaking something else is endlessly inspiring to me. Reading Memorial made me want to invent wild experiments in which to write, which is a huge gift.
3. I think I could write a whole fan book about Fatal by Kimberly Johnson. Certainly a very long essay. It’s hands down one of the smartest and most lasting collections I’ve ever touched, and, in a loving tie with Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Paige Lewis’ Space Struck (and the two not-yet-released collections below), it’s my favorite book of poems in the whole big world. Every poem title in Fatal starts with an F — “Farthingale,” “Fission,” “Frescoes,” “Funerals,” and so on. Too, the poems are interspersed with diagrams from the CDC on deaths from F-related causes — “Fever,” “Firework Discharge,” “Fluid Overload” — in the year 2001, the year that “suddenly, the whole world seemed fatal” to Johnson because her son was born. Through sound and the spinning-out of one fraught letter, Johnson refracts the wounds and threats of a human life, following especially closely the decline and death of her own husband. In “Foley Catheter,” she writes: “When I vowed for worse / Unwitting did I wed this // Something-other-than-a-husband, jumble / Of exposed plumbing / And euphemism.” Johnson’s expertise in Renaissance and devotional literatures informs her syntax and sometimes-rhyme-schemes; her toolbox is deeper than most, making her a true poet’s poet. And still, the emotion in these pieces would translate to anyone. When I met her in a classroom, she talked about her love of music but failures as a musician; she said she tried to do with a page what she couldn’t do with her fingers on an instrument, leading with her ears instead of her hands. It shows. Of fidelity, she writes “Do me cerulean through.” Of a firework, “In the basin’s brass / A bouquet of ash.” Of rock climbing and risk, “We palm-fondle / We fetish with thumbs, we toothbrush off / The grains of sand.” I have no doubt I’ll learn from this book every time I pick it up — that anyone would.
4. I gratefully re-read multiple times my wonderful friend Cady Favazzo’s Even the Parts I Promised to Myself this year. It’s not yet published, but you can find a poem from it here). Cady is the writer who makes me feel most like a human, like a real live person, and for that, her writing is the most important writing in my life right now. The hand-to-god full honesty of her poems tears the paper they’re on away entirely and leaves a portal to true life, which you walk through as a reader — finding yourself sitting exactly in the chair you’ve been sitting in but wholly there in a way you weren’t when you started. Cady’s poem, “To Everyone I Have Ever Loved, I Still Do” begins: “I’ve been trying really hard and I’ve been operating / in good faith. I take the tweezers and they zap / against the sides of this day. No wishbone. / I’ve been trying really hard to be good. / I’ve been trying really hard. When I find a lemon seed / in my dinner, I chew it up. I do not grimace.” She applies this associative move often: in which she takes instruction from a word (in this case, operates) to form the image that comes next (the game of Operation). She uses games and candies, colors and prizes, to carry her speaker through sometimes extraordinary difficulty, sometimes regular old difficulty that hurts just as much. In “During the Dance Recital, They Put the Spotlight on Me,” she writes “My mom came to dance / class to demand that I earn Dancer of the Day / because I was trying very hard and isn’t it true / that those awards are not actually meant to reward / skill? And what a cunt I must have had for a teacher / that she was willing to withhold from the anxious kid / with a unibrow and a potbelly the glory / of feeling good about herself, the joy / of a fairy sticker and salt water taffy.” In a collection that explores class and the semi-rural Mountain West, family and memory, queerness and the girlhood that sticks with its speaker as she becomes an adult, the clear image-making and non-reliance on figurative poetics grants a sharp clarity that’s impossible not to fall in love with. I carried these poems around in my bag and tucked them under my keyboard when I sat at my desk all year, and I’ll do the same in 2024. Cady — I love you; I’m so grateful for you.
5. Where the Fuck Is the North Star? by Libby Croce is the other book in manuscript form whose poems I read over and over in 2023 (and 2022 and 2021 and 2020). Not-yet-published as a collection, its titular (prize-winning!) poem can be found here, selected by none other than Kimberly Johnson. Libby and her heart/brain are rare, really truly rare; she’s able to capture in words those fleeting sublime observations that most of us forget how to hold in place when we fall out of childhood. I wish I could copy and paste every word, but I’ll just show you some of Libby’s moons, which are often the images I love most. “Last week the moon was so full you could crush it / to powder and sugar your waffles.” “I try to unfasten the dark with my teeth, but to no avail. / The moon’s a tough little button, choked in its hole.” “The moon is the yellow end of a Q-Tip. Half chocolate, half vanilla. A little round sandwich, crust gnawed off by some picky eater.” “I’d rather be studied / by moonlight instead of the other way around.” “Overhead, the moon / dissolves with indifference — the world’s largest breath mint.” “If you just looked, your eyes / raked wet with moonlight, long enough for me to drop a mouse at your feet.” “It’s Atlantis, I say, like we’re at the bottom of the ocean, like someone / is bringing a box of dusty moons up from the basement. I can’t unconvince myself / of the myth and I’ve stopped trying. I know the lights are probably green apple flavored, / but my fingers are crossed for lime. Devotion doesn’t have to be my ruin.” I have a folder in my file box called “favorite poems by pals” and it’s easily two-thirds Libby poems, most of which I was lucky to encounter for the first time in MFA poetry workshops and thus watch evolve over years. She’s the sort of poet who makes you look at the world better, raking images into giant piles that you want to jump into, and she’s the easiest person in the world to celebrate. Where the Fuck Is the North Star? investigates desire and all of the spinning we do in hopes of finding direction, some magnet to hold us on course. It’s tender and hot as hell; it’s funny and it also hurts impossibly badly sometimes, as the poet reckons with plodding a path toward an uncertain destination. I can’t wait till it’s on every single person’s end of year list and everyone is talking about the lines, “The first time I had sex, I didn’t know that icy-hot lube / would effectively transform my high school boyfriend’s penis / into a Bic lighter. Add it to the list of things that are supposed to tingle / pleasurably, but really feel more like arson.” But also, “I try to bring the shovel down on a robin whose spine is all but jutting / out of its neck, but I can’t. When it turns to look at me, its eye the smallest / magnetic compass, I can’t tell if it’s asking please or don’t or are you a field?”

My writing & publications

This year I wrote about the poets Linda Gregg and Jack Gilbert for The Millions and Poetry Northwest.

As mentioned above, I reviewed Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes for Fugue.

I was thrilled to have three pieces from my thesis manuscript, Other Places We Learned Religion, published in 2023: an abecedarian on art, chronic illness, and pressing against the dark in DIAGRAM, a prose pantoum on the crimes that marked a childhood in Denver and my Grandma Ginny who reported them in the paper in jmww, and a short story set in the body of a woman in pain at Terrain.org, which was generously nominated for a Pushcart. Other pieces from this manuscript, one on Denver roller coaster history and hauntings, one on everything my family turns to instead of “God,” are forthcoming in Passages North and Fence.

I’m equally grateful to have had pieces from other projects published this year: a dispatch from Moscow, Idaho in The Common, an ekphrastic poem on the giant blue horse statue at Denver International Airport in Redivider, a lengthy study of friend loss in Epiphany Magazine, and a short story set in a cooperative living community in Action, Spectacle, also kindly nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

I have other essays and poems forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, Pleiades, and the Driftwood Press Anthology in 2024, which you’ll find linked from my website when the time comes.

Happy new year, all!