“You know when you watch a movie and there's a crumbling bridge and somebody's running, trying to make it to the other side?” Flores told me, describing the mad dash of writing that allowed him to slow down when he got to Valleyesque. “And when a character makes it to the other side, they are like, I can't believe it, the bridge is gone. Yeah, I feel that way all the time, that I made it past the crumbling bridge, miraculously.”

Even as she draws on autobiography and research, Rojas Contreras maintains her sense of wonder, likening herself to a shapeshifter who appreciates being changed by stories.

In 1930’s Denver, Luz Lopez is left to fend for herself after her older brother, Diego, is run out of town by a violent white mob. She begins to have visions of her Indigenous homeland in the nearby Lost Territory, bearing witness to sinister forces that have devastated her people and their homelands for generations. In the end, it is up to Luz to save her family’s stories from disappearing.

What the novelist Rudolfo Anaya did for New Mexico, or what cultural critic Fran Lebowitz does for New York City, Raquel does in BROWN NEON for Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Tucson. Every generation and community should have their master portraitists. Gutiérrez is one of ours.

The God of this novel is infinite, inside everything, and yet its absence can be felt on every page. This diffuse and elusive God requires a different kind of prayer, one that is collective and connecting, and so, much of the small action of the novel—the hand-holding, cloud-watching, and land-working—carries the weight of prayer.

Central to Beast at Every Threshold is the question of one’s identity and place—the poet writing against disappearance, but also to weave a tapestry of loved ones and influences. To choose tenderness in spite of hurt is an act of resistance.

It is not Lee’s intent to trivialize any type of death or trauma by juxtaposing the simultaneous banality and brutality of isolation; it is perhaps not even Lee’s intent to distinguish between mourning that is psychoanalytic or sociological vs. suffering that is individual and proprietary (à la Barthes). Rather, Lee contextualizes each character’s experience of loss within the ecological disaster that serves as the quiet backdrop of her novel—the city in which the Writer, the Photographer, and the Old Man live, where the hillside burns regularly, and birds and children fall from the sky to their death with little regard from the humans and nonhumans who survive them, absorbed in their own individual experiences of death.

Inter State is infused with some of the same passions many of us youth poets had back then, not just for our craft, but for our immediate surroundings—for our respective slice of the City or the Town. Vadi echoes the very growing pains of those of us who moonlighted as formidable proponents of the mini halfpipe and open mic alike. Written with all the angst that only a grandson of a Mexican farmworker can muster, Vadi opens up the landscape of California as a breathing, living history susceptible to the erosion of time, memory, and development.

Among the many significant collections of poetry that plunked into the roiling depths of 2020 was Lucille Clifton’s How to Carry Water: Selected Poems, put out by the late Clifton’s longtime publisher, BOA Editions, Ltd., and carefully edited by poet Aracelis Girmay. How to Carry Water joins two previous volumes that each span multiple decades of Clifton’s trailblazing poetry—Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 and The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010—prompting a fair question from readers who may feel that Clifton’s work already occupies a stout presence on their bookshelves. Who really needs How to Carry Water?

Before the release of her New York Times bestselling memoir Crying in H Mart, which met national acclaim, Michelle Zauner was a songwriter. Born to a Korean mother and a Jewish-American father, she came up in the Pacific Northwest’s alternative scene. She spent her allowance on CDs and frequented the concerts of local indie heroes like the Rock ‘n’ Roll Soldiers and Modest Mouse.