STAFF PICKS 2022: A Year in Reading

The CSU Poetry Center staff are here to praise some favorite books we read in 2022 (published whenever! We love the new, the old, the in-between). Thanks to all these glorious and necessary writers, editors, translators, publishers, readers, & you. Happy new year! —HP

CARYL PAGEL, director

For me, this fall contained an abundance of live readings (in Cleveland and elsewhere, in person and remote). I was moved by so many moments of humor, improvisational grace, and good will. Thanks to the hosts and presses and bookstores and venues that do the work of bringing writers together. Thanks to those who believe in the importance of experiencing literature off the page; those who support the magic of performance, surprise, vulnerability, and communion. My recommendations are books by those I’ve seen read their work in front of a live audience since August:

Sara Deniz Akant’s Hyperphantasia

Dara Barrois/Dixon’s Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina

Caren Beilin’s Revenge of the Scapegoat

Ali Black’s If It Heals at All

Katy Didden’s Ore Choir: The Lava on Iceland

Victoria Chang’s Obit

Dan Chaon’s Sleepwalk

Jon Conley’s House Hunters International

Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights

Lauren Haldeman’s Team Photograph

Alen Hamza’s Twice There Was a Country

Walt Hunter’s Some Flowers

Hajar Hussaini’s Disbound

Raúl Gómez Jattin’s Almost Obscene (tr. Katherine M. Hedeen & Olivia Lott)

Donika Kelly’s The Renunciations

Daniel Khalastchi’s American Parables

Jeffrey McDaniel’s Thin Ice Olympics

Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders

Chessy Normile’s Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party 

Hilary Plum’s Hole Studies 

Adrienne Raphel’s Our Dark Academia

Michael Robins’s The Bright Invisible

Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Borealis 

Lindsay Turner’s Songs & Ballads

Divya Victor’s Curb 

Michael Joseph Walsh’s Innocence

Jameka Williams’s American Sex Tape

JOEY ROONEY, editorial & research assistant

Poetry:

Emily Jane Brontë: The Complete Poems edited by Janet Gezari (Penguin)

Orient by Nicholas Gulig (CSU Poetry Center)

Quiet Orient Riot by Nathalie Khankan (Omnidawn Publishing)

Fiction:

Watership Down by Richard Adams (Avon Books)

Bleak House by Charles Dickens (Penguin)

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman (The Dial Press)

Nonfiction/History:
Inheriting Abraham: The Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam by Jon D. Levenson (Princeton University Press)

The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century by Ian Mortimer (Touchstone)

JOEE GOHEEN, editorial & production assistant

A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance, Hanif Abdurraqib

Volcano, Garret Hongo

Out of Nowhere Into Nothing, Caryl Pagel

The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde

Micrograms, Nicole Walker 

Mountains Piled Upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene, Jessica Cory 

Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Claudia Rankine

Department of Elegy, Mary Biddinger 

CLARISSA JONES, editorial & marketing assistant

Fiction:

They by Kay Dick

Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda, tr. Sarah Booker

Fruiting Bodies By Kathryn Harlan

Nonfiction:

The Last Days Of The Dinosaurs by Riley Black

Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants by 'Wildman' Steve Brill and Evelyn Dean

Sincerely, Your Autistic Child edited by Emily Paige Ballou, Sharon daVanport and Morénike Giwa Onaiwu

Poetry:

Index of Haunted Houses by Adam O. Davis

Rue by Kathryn Nuernberger

Superdoom by Melissa Broder

Yearly Rereads:

Spring: Watership Down by Richard Adams

Summer: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal

Bad Stuff In The News: The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel

HILARY PLUM, associate director

I’ve loved rereading & working on our new books for the CSU Poetry Center (Michael Joseph Walsh’s Innocence and Raúl Gómez Jattin’s Almost Obscene, tr. Katherine M. Hedeen & Olivia Lott) and I’ve loved reading a number of MSS by friends, theses by students, other still-secret, still-in-motion projects I hope will be out in the world soon… Some books that challenged and incited and brightened my year:

Caren Beilin, Revenge of the Scapegoat (Dorothy)

Hayan Charara, These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit (Milkweed)

Dot Devota, PMS (Rescue)

Ian Dreiblatt, forget thee (Ugly Duckling Presse)

Hajar Hussaini, Disbound (U Iowa P)

Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing (Doubleday)

Clarice Lispector, The Complete Stories (tr. Katrina Dodson) (New Directions) (really I’m still reading this!)

Caryl Pagel, Free Clean Fill Dirt (U Akron P)

Adrienne Raphel, Our Dark Academia (Rescue)

Joseph Earl Thomas, Sink (Grand Central)

Lisa Wells, Believers (FSG)

Matvei Yankelevich, Dead Winter (Fonograf)

I also read a few dozen detective novels this year (normal for me, I guess), highlights including Ann Cleeves, Raven Black; Sophie Hannah, The Cradle in the Grave; Jane Harper, The Dry; Jane Pek’s very fun very smart The Verifiers; Sujata Massey, The Widows of Malabar Hill; Val McDermid’s moving 1979, as well as a pile of her Karen Pirie novels, recommended; David Heska Wanbli Weiden, Winter Counts.

In 2022 I reread some fantastic books, each of which I already loved, yet they were somehow even better and more urgent than I remembered: Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl (tr. Keith Gessen); Tana French, Broken Harbor; Stephen Graham Jones, Ledfeather; Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of the Mortal Girl; Adania Shibli, Minor Detail (tr. Elisabeth Jaquette).

ZACH PECKHAM, managing editor

I only read one book this year. Is that possible? It depends what reading is.

If reading is something done for work, for routine, as a means to an end, a step in a process, for class, to inform teaching, to confirm facts, as research, toward correction, in editing, to get news, to catch up, to coordinate logistics, to give feedback, to absolve guilt, to be productive, to get paid, to manage projects, to choose what to eat, to make a budget, to infer position, to solve a problem, to complete a task, to learn where to be, to know how much to pay or save, to make a joke, to accomplish an objective as part of a goal-oriented activity, then I read a lot.

If reading is something done for pleasure, in defiance of time, refusal of obligation, and rejection of material conditions as inherent terms of an inescapable and coherent reality, a flat surface of unseeable time on which one has been stranded for an indefinable period for no fucking reason whatsoever, then I only read one book this year, and it was Christian TeBordo’s Toughlahoma.

I’ll admit, characteristically, I couldn’t help reading parts of the book with an eye toward whether it could ever become a “text,” which is to say something I could assign the writing students in one of my classes in service of learning outcomes, which is just one of the ways in which my reading has become corrupted, and while I believe this could very well have taken place, and that there are, or could be, or could have been things to be learned from the reading of this book, maybe if I was a better teacher, or smarter, or less worried, my own reading of it continually refused any of the farcical contraventions that would have been necessary to enable it to become recognizable as a component of any goal-oriented activity, nevermind pedagogy.

In fact, I read the book in such an intermittent, splattered manner, divided by such long periods of time spent using language as utility, handtool, handhold, ice pick, pierced by so few moments in which I thought, “hey, I should read something!” and even fewer in which I actually acted on the thought and looked at the contents of the book without an eye toward how long I’d be able to spend reading it, or what it could do or help me do in the context of a job or class, where students had paid to be situated in learning or where I had been obliged to be in service, often just before sleep, in that particular state of half-consciousness you already know all about, sometimes in bed, much too late, again, failing, again, to wring blue light from behind corneas and seal off the brain from the two sides of worry that are the day and the night, or just as often in bars, again, stolen away from one or more week’s work spaces in late afternoons or early evenings, over plates of donut-sized onion rings and tall cans of Miller Lite, chuckling in early indoor dusks as the sun oranged itself to death over Lake Erie, that my recollection of the events and details of the book are so entirely disjointed that even though I know I read parts of it multiple times over without noticing I remain unsure as to whether I even read it at all.

I became so located in the language problems of Toughlahoma and its delightfully meaningless plot and impeccable shitty jokes, grease-smeared and blood-sprayed yet somehow still entirely dessicated, reaking of seared meat and absurd erotic violence, ground as though into walls of restaurants off of highways that haven’t allowed smoking in fifteen years but you know as soon as you enter them that they used to, that even if I figured it out or remembered where I was or if I was reading or had been it wouldn’t have mattered, wouldn’t now. I had become a citizen of Toughlahoma. I was there. So were you.

I don’t actually know what reading is.