Rachel Richardson’s Most Anticipated Books of 2016

2016 is going to be a great year for poetry, it’s already clear. So much anticipated work from major poets is heading our way. I’m also looking forward to debuts and second books from emerging writers I’ve been getting to know more recently. Here’s a very partial list of books on my current radar:

Window Left Open, Jennifer Grotz (Graywolf, February 2) Jennifer Grotz writes such precise lyrics–I always learn from the way her lines and thinking swerve as they move down the page. The distance she navigates from individually-observed phenomena to the grand global scale is always impressive.

The Halo, C. Dale Young  (Four Way, March 1)
C. Dale Young’s fourth book seems a dramatically different kind of project from his previous, moving through the adolescence of a single central character–a man with wings–to his adulthood.

Border Towns, C. S. Giscombe (Dalkey Archive, June 10)
Giscombe’s new work, a book of essays, purports to be–maybe–a discussion of poetry. I am intrigued by his reticence to define his projects, or to assent to formal limits.

Shallcross, C. D. Wright (Copper Canyon, April 12)
I read everything C. D. Wright writes, so a new volume of hers is automatically on my list. This book takes on several poetic sequences, and I look forward to seeing how she will once again expand and challenge my thinking about the work of documenting the world.

Look, Solmaz Sharif (Graywolf, July 5)
I have been reading everything Solmaz Sharif publishes in eager anticipation of the poems being collected in a book. Her voice is a powerful addition to the conversation about war and Middle Eastern/U.S. politics, race and ethnicity, and terror. Every one of these poems keeps the clarity of the vulnerable human voice at the center, even while speaking forcefully to these outward injustices. I can’t wait to see how these poems read compiled in a book.

The Destroyer in the Glass, Noah Warren (Yale UP, March 29)
Warren’s first book, a Yale winner, takes on ambitious and intimate subjects–a close, unflinching look at the self, which is maybe the hardest thing of all to write well. I look forward to hearing this new voice.

Rachel Richardson is a contributing editor for Memorious. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford. She is the author of two poetry collections, Copperhead and Hundred-Year Wave (forthcoming). She lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.

 For original poetry, fiction, art song, and more interviews, please visit our magazine at http://www.memorious.org.

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