2020 in Poetry
Aarik Danielsen
Attempting meaningful discourse in 2020 often felt like playing a contact sport in an otherwise contactless year. But certain voices cut through the noise and carried us above the fray.
Doctors offered the best available advice for loving our neighbors as ourselves. Probing journalists read between the lines, sifting fact from deliberate fiction. I leaned on these sources for survival.
But I hung any hopes for flourishing on every word of the poets I encountered. My favorite poetry texts of 2020 offered places to burrow into comfort without entering echo chambers. They charged through the overgrowth, clearing any number of paths I wished to take—through rage, sorrow, and desire to somewhere resembling peace and affirmation.
Here is a short list of the poetry collections which made me come alive, then made that life worthwhile, in 2020:
1. Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison, In the Field Between Us My favorite book of the year, across genre, will no doubt reach into every future age. But it holds special resonance in a year when we are acutely aware of our neighbors’ bodies and our own. Brown and Nevison create new possibilities for the epistolary poem, addressing one another on matters of disability and pain, of mourning your body and praising it. The pair achieve profound kinship, then extend this affinity to the reader: we see our true selves in the words of those who know us fully and love us without condition.
2. Jen Stewart Fueston, Madonna, Complex Fueston’s boundless curiosity about the world—as it is, as it can be—spills over the brim of these poems. She catches her breath and steals ours in midlife and mid-love, before the inherent magnetism of a Rothko painting, at the edge of woods that will outlast us. Most important, she nimbly unites her inquiring inner child and the present-tense version of herself—the one who distinguishes ends from means—to topple the idols of purity culture, political expediency and an insufficient gospel that sees other humans as projects to finish, not people to love.
3. Catherine Pierce, Danger Days Pierce stares down the end of the world in this weary yet gorgeous collection. Meeting the poet’s compassionate and magnetic gaze, apocalyptic forces—our poisoned discourse, a sweltering planet, the ever-present specter of school shootings—don’t exactly halt their doings. But they ease up on the reins long enough to let us breathe. Because we are always in the hour of dying, Pierce submits, we keep searching for reasons to live. And she finds enough to sustain us for a few more days.
4. Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem “Like Church,” a poem in Diaz’ latest, offers a fitting alternative title for the whole. Diaz makes altars everywhere, worshipping—or, at least, experiencing the complications of ecstasy. She reveres her lover’s hips, the wild wolf within and games of reservation basketball where “a tribal kid’s shot has an arc made of sky.” Deftly mingling exaltation with damnation, Diaz censures expressions of organized civic religion: white nationalism, violence, the efficiency of American genocide. Such practices threaten Diaz’s body and label her loves heretical, but the poet pushes toward something purer.
5. Adam Clay, To Make Room for the Sea Time and again, Clay’s verses draw us into a life rich with interiority yet attuned and attending to the wider world. Whether freshly reckoning with the American South he calls home, tracing a cover song to its mouth or stopping to sense the pinpricks of age and connection, Clay is ever paying attention, ever calling us to do the same. “Beneath / every question is an elegy,” he writes, “and beneath / every elegy lives the promise that a life / will persist long after its song.”
6. Sally Thomas, Motherland Thomas’ painterly work renders the haziness of memory and impression with appropriately broad strokes while committing to the fine details of light, damp, conversation and daily chores. Poems often set within, or just along the edges of, domestic life illustrate how other people anchor and distract us. Thomas’ narrators describe the particular freight of caring beyond your own self-interest, but never treat beloved ones like beasts of burden. There is beauty in being tethered, Motherland ultimately concludes.
7. Sarah Sloat, Hotel Almighty Working within the untamed confines of found poetry, Sloat coaxes meditations from the pages of Stephen King’s Misery. Scratching out, coloring through and circling King’s words, medium and message engage each other in a flawless tango. We are always in the process of becoming, Sloat suggests; seize chances to rewrite the source material you’re given, crafting a more satisfying, suitable narrative.
8. Jabari Asim, Stop and Frisk Asim pens one of our great protest albums, a soul record descended from Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. It just happens to be a book of poetry. Among the instruments he arranges: the “mad noise” of dead children manifest by feet marching across America, the cadences of Black parents convening “The Talk” with their children, and the dream of a “drumbeat summit, / millions of men stepping and sliding in electric syncopation” on behalf of their sisters who suffer violence.
9. Christian Wiman, Survival is a Style “Absolutely unmixed attention / is prayer. Hell / is the inability to love. / Forever is composed of nows.” The best of our poets ground us in this moment, this breath even, while teaching us to locate ourselves within a longer conversation. Wiman expresses sympathy for the devils which hound modern man—and the details in which they live—while mercifully reminding us we are not unique. Giving fair hearing to doubters and the spiritually promiscuous, he acknowledges faith as a 2,000-year-old game of telephone yet a call still worth taking.
10. Mischa Willett, The Elegy Beta In the epic coda of this book, Willett riffs on Rilke, weighing earthly matters against unseen glories that wriggle free from the names we give them. Willett’s desire to balance momentary reality and eternal presence doesn’t just show up in this title poem. On every page, he proves a reliable guide to the delightfully unfathomable nature of existence.
Aarik Danielsen is the arts editor at the Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, Missouri and teaches at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He writes a weekly column, “The (Dis)content,” for Fathom Magazine, and has been published at Image Journal, Plough, EcoTheo Review, and more. Find him on Twitter @aarikdanielsen or at aarikdanielsen.com.