Starting off our series of “Best of 2017″ lists curated by the entire CCM-Entropy community, we present some of our favorite selections as nominated by the diverse staff and team here at Entropy, as well as nominations from our readers.



This list brings together some of our favorite poetry books & collections published in 2017.

(For last year’s list, click here.)

In no particular order…

1. Inherit by Ginger Ko (Sidebrow)



Inherit is a really striking collection, constructed out of an emotionally-packed lyric on family, culture, gender imbalance and history. —rob mclennan

2. When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Future Possibilities by Chen Chen (Boa Editions)

Chen Chen refuses to be boxed in or nailed down. He is a poet of Whitman’s multitudes and of Langston Hughes’s blues, of Dickinson’s ‘so cold no fire can warm me’ and of Michael Palmer’s comic interrogation. What unifies the brilliance of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities is a voice desperate to believe that within every one of life’s sadnesses there is also hope, meaning, and—if we are willing to laugh at ourselves—humor. This is a book I wish existed when I first began reading poetry. Chen is a poet I’ll be reading for the rest of my life. —Jericho Brown

3. Whereas by Layli Longsoldier (Graywolf)



It’s no exaggeration to say that I was blown away when I read Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS—such trenchant, beautiful thinking and writing about the relationship between official political speech and literature’s capacity to write back. And write back Long Soldier does, with a sensibility so tough and gentle, so sure of itself and so questioning, that I find myself simply standing back in admiration, savoring every perfect, necessary word of her intervention. I imagine the whole of WHEREAS one day being read in its entirety to and from the hilltops, in all its intimate wonder. I hope to be there.—Maggie Nelson

4. Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith (Graywolf)

These poems can’t make history vanish, but they can contend against it with the force of a restorative imagination. Smith’s work is about that imagination—its role in repairing and sustaining communities, and in making the world more bearable. . . . Their poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy. . . . But they also know the magic trick of making writing on the page operate like the most ecstatic speech. —The New Yorker

5. Beast Meridian by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal (Noemi Press)

In Beast Meridian, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal braids searing lyricism and intimate narratives into utterances and patterns that radicalize the heart and the eye. Rooted in the borderlands, Villarreal’s language—scarred but alive—confronts and refutes the violence of erasure and assimilation. ‘Every brutal abandoning’ of the self and of the flesh is rigorously and intensely rendered. Line after line shimmers with grace and fury. Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is an innovative and necessary poet. Beast Meridian is a high watermark in Latinx poetry. I will be teaching it often. — Eduardo C. Corral

6. In the Language of My Captor by Shane McCrae (Wesleyan University Press)

In this fifth collection, Shane McCrae has created a masterful hybrid that at once revels in the lyric and mocks it for its failures. What good is knowing the language of the oppressor, the jailor, In the Language of My Captor seems to ask, when articulation can’t enact liberation? The voices in this book create a landscape, indeed a village, haunted by abandon, intrusion, imprisonment and determinacy. In the vein of Robert Lowell and in conversation with poets such as Anne Carson and M. NourbeSe Philip, the poems in Language explore revelation, through juxtaposed narrative and situation, in a way that has kind of ruined me. The part I can’t quite put into words is how much this book means to me.” —francine harris

7. Field Theories by Samiya Bashir (Nightboat Books)

Field Theories is flush with blue notes, swung in the exercise and exorcism of blue devils. Our tongues are in the pitch black mouth she conjures and records. This is our music. —Fred Moten

8. Nature Poem by Tommy Pico (Tin House)

A thrilling punk rock epic that is a tour of all we know and can’t admit to. Pico is a poet of canny instincts, his lyric is somehow so casual and so so serious at the same time. He is determined to blow your mind apart, and . . . you should let him. —Alexander Chee

9. There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé by Morgan Parker (Tin House)

This is a marvelous book. See for yourself. Morgan Parker is a fearlessly forward and forward-thinking literary star. ―Terrance Hayes



10. The Yellow House by Chiwan Choi (Civil Coping Mechanisms)

I have replaced god / with longing,” writes Chiwan Choi in his latest The Yellow House, a phrase that acts more as earthbound apotheosis of survival than it does as mere thesis. Here, Choi recasts the familial legacy of war and displacement, but also of joy and triumph, into a private spiritual kingdom, where “even after the city is destroyed” he writes, “I will touch you on the surface of everything.” This is poetry as preservation, as an unrelinquished archive of ghosts, but mostly, it arrives, to our luck, as a testament of a self earned and re-earned, like how yellowness, caught in its own dizzying light, turns itself golden. This book is golden. —Ocean Vuong

11. I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On by Khadijah Queen (YesYes Books)

I’m So Fine is an accumulation that is the feminine memory that has had enough. This book is strength, is a critique, is subversive, is a woman, a fist, an lol, an F.U., a refusal, a gaze back at the gaze, is inevitable freedom wearing a flowered dress Kente cloth bomber jacket red lipstick white jeans a velvet choker white platform sandals a black turtleneck electric blue column dress an eggshell blouse with a high collar & pearl buttons is wearing a powerful woman’s body and mind. —Natalie Diaz

12. In Full Velvet by Jenny Johnson (Sarabande Books)

Johnson’s first book of poems takes on subject matter such as growing up queer in America and how politicized the queer female body is. Her imagery is sharp, and she consistently brings us into liminal and charged spaces…reminding us that states of transition and what is considered in between have always been a part of human experience that is in constant relationship to change and flux, as gender is. —Academy of American Poets

13. Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar (Alice James Books)

The struggle from late youth on, with and without God, agony, narcotics and love is a torment rarely recorded with such sustained eloquence and passion as you will find in this collection. —Fanny Howe

14. Here High Note, High Note by Catherine Blauvelt (Prelude Books)



A record of forms of thinking, feeling and hearing which are new to the universe. These poems are brilliant, fast, committed and strange objects which channel an almost unbearable sympathy for almost everything. —Caleb Klaces

15. Outplace by Lital Khaikin (Solar Luxuriance)



A text that explores the impossible with a tenacity that very few other writers dare even consider, Outplace does not describe this “outside,” but rather speaks from the heart of. If Beckett wrote monologues from the center of the void, Khaikin’s work reveals the speech of the “outside,” an ontological proposition that challenges the complicity of where it is that we all find ourselves stuck.

16. recombinant by Ching-in Chen (Kelsey Street Press)

The sweat of migrants, the starving bodies of impoverished workers, the they-children raised for export, the identification cards of the disobedient bodies with multiple names, the testimonies in interrogation rooms, the manufactured girl-bombs: the historical and linguistic presence, aliveness and residue of ancestral, immigrant lineages…in recombinant these entities are synthesized into brilliantly engineered narratives that chronicle the limits of what can be held at the borders we construct around our various identities, be they bodily, linguistic, national, occupational, familial, commercial….This is an intricate, careful, impression-making, impressive novel of a poem that necessarily exposes the secret testimonies and histories of the worlds among us that our larger world wishes us to never understand or see. —Daniel Borzutzky

17. love, robot by Margaret Rhee (the operating system)

The poems of LOVE, ROBOT are delicate and smooth, witty and touching, and yes, occasionally odd and strange, as human beings themselves are. In a paradoxical and wonderful way, Margaret Rhee’s robot love affairs make us rethink what it might mean to be human. —Viet Thanh Nguyen

18. Together and By Ourselves by Alex Dimitrov (Copper Canyon Press)

Dimitrov can sound at once hip and naive, devoted to the sincerities that other sorts of poets reject or obscure. —Publishers Weekly

19. Good Stock Strange Blood by Dawn Lundy Martin (Coffee House Press)

Martin uses a whiplash of short, punched-at-us phrases that offer a powerful sense of African American history and the struggle to define oneself for oneself, not as others would . . . An important work for sophisticated readers —Library Journal

20. Ordinary Beast by Nicole Sealey ( Ecco Press )

Ordinary Beast is my favorite kind of book, charged with quiet wisdom and exquisite lyric attention…Nicole Sealey is a poet for the ages and this is a stunning debut. —Tracy K. Smith

21. Thousand Star Hotel by Bao Phi (Coffee House Press)

Bao Phi’s Thousand Star Hotel is a vividly inward look at an Asian American experience that never flinches from the hard realizations of humanity. Bao ties generations together at his personal crossroad of fatherhood and lets the reader see, feel, and hear the electricity of his renowned stage performance blossoming on the page. Bao’s poems haunt our collective American psyche until a “new region of the tongue is discovered’ that lets us know what ‘tastes like the middle of the crosshairs of a drone bomber / tastes like science concocting survival.” —Tyehimba Jess

22. Desgraciado by Ángel Domínguez ( Econo Textual Objects )

This epistolary chapbook consists of a series of letters-as-prose-poems from the author to Diego de Landa, a historical colonialist and Catholic missionary celebrated in Spanish history for the information he relayed to his home country about Mayan culture. Dominguez criticizes and fights this celebration—though his relationship with Diego is complex. They move between being pen pals, enemies, surrogate father and son, cross-temporal lovers—it’s complicated. —Kimberly Ann Southwick, Ploughsares

23. The Flayed City by Hari Alluri (Kaya Press)

In THE FLAYED CITY, Alluri gives an intimate look into the lives of city dwellers and immigrants, imagining the souls that reside in “broom-filled nights,” “skyscrapers for buoys,” and under an “aluminum rising sun.” The charged poems in the collection sweep together “an archipelago song” scored by memory and landscape, history and mythology, desire and loss. Driven by what is residual—of displacement, of family, of violent yet delicate masculinity, of undervalued yet imperative work—Alluri’s lines quiver with the poet’s distinctive rendering of praise and lament steeped with “gravity and blood” where “the smell of ants being born surrounds us” and “city lights form constellations / invented to symbolize war.”

24. Field Glass by Joanna Howard & Joanna Ruocco (Sidebrow Books)

Howard and Ruocco present us with a collaborative fiction that only could have been written under ground, among hovel-dwelling radicals, post-apocalyptic profiteers, beneath the murmuring of machinery, in the inversion of the field; orchestrating a literature of failure, where the supposedly long-dead I bursts from the We in the most concerted moments of togetherness, bringing forth an intense perpetual dislocation and vivid hilarity. —Renee Gladman

25. Madness by Sam Sax (Penguin Books)



[A] simmering debut . . . at once clinically precise and brazenly effusive, vulnerable, and extraordinarily daring, sax’s poems redefine ‘madness’ altogether . . . feral, soaring, and uncommonly beautiful.” —Booklist

26. Hollywood Forever by Harmony Holiday (Fence Books)

Holiday curates poems-as-text and image-as-impression, lyricism and activism. The “legacies” of Miles Davis and MLK and Billie Holiday and other icons collide, harnessing taboos they upheld triumphantly. Layers of a story coalesce in restricted space producing ghettos, or a mythological advertising omniverse wherein shadow and light integrate, complicating our fantasies.

27. The Happy End / All Welcome by Monica de la Torre (Ugly Duckling Presse)

Mónica de la Torre is an exceptional writer who somehow manages to plumb and retrieve items from the inexorable spaces created by time and translation. —Richard Maxwell

28. A Turkish Dictionary by Andrew Wessels (1913 Press)

A wall of roses and a different sky–these are the policy Andrew Wessels commends to our disfigured and redacted world. And the commendation is not only timely, tender, and beautiful, though it is all that and much, much more. It is the sovereign lexicon of our best future. A Turkish Dictionary parses prophecy, word by word. —Donald Revell

29. The Most Foreign Country by Alejandra Pizarnik (trans Yvette Siegert) (Ugly Duckling Prese)

Estranged, helpless and anguished, Pizarnik’s haunting words have garnered a 40-year following, earning her a reputation as perhaps Argentina’s most important female poet. —The Argentina Independent

30. Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2017 by Frank Bidart (Farrar, Straus Giroux)

Relentless and ever willing to face his demons, no matter how terrifying, in the interest of making great art, Bidart is, to my ear, one of the very few major living poets who never wavers, never repeats himself (though he has always orbited the same concerns), and extends his questing and questioning through each new work. This collected poems is an almost overwhelming bounty, a permanent book.” ―Publishers Weekly

31. MyOTHER TONGUE by Rosa Alcalá (Futurepoem)

The legacy of womanhood, the blessings and dangers of the female body, and the shifting cultural identities from one generation to the next, are a few of the threads that stitch together this dazzling journey through one woman’s matrilineal story. —Rigoberto González

32. The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded by Molly McCully Brown (Persea)

This is nothing less than a revelatory debut that reveals how to stitch something undeniably beautiful out of immense pain and solitude. —Ada Limòn

33. Thrust by Heather Derr-Smith (Persea)

In her latest work, a Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award winner, Derr-Smith uses an intently packed, beautifully crafted pile-up of images to explore a rural Southern upbringing defined by the ugliness of abuse. In a world shaped by violence, by the casual male assumption of authority, and part of “a family of seekers, pick ax and lust,” she’s a girl pursuing the intensity of experience on her own terms. Passion thrums through these poems as counterbalance and power, and there’s uneasy satisfaction in watching the speaker turn her mean world around to her advantage so that finally “She outlasted them all.” —Library Journal

34. Gnome by Robert Lunday (Black Sun Lit)

Employing a language that devises to question the renegade forces of experience that the soul must both adorn and endure, Lunday confronts the unstable yet tempting relationship between expression and proof, memory and personal reality. Invoking physiological positions from figures ranging from Georges Bataille and Max Picard to Kobo Abe and Elaine Scarry, GNOME is a monologue of mad reveries that endeavors to develop its own impression of love and death, proving that the surfaces we encounter are the materialization of the endless depths at our disposal.

35. the magic my body becomes by Jess Rizkallah (University of Arkansas Press)

Rizkallah’s the magic my body becomes is an exciting new book from an exciting young poet, a love letter to a people as well as a fist in the air. It is the first book in the Etel Adnan Poetry Series, publishing first or second books of poetry in English by writers of Arab heritage.

36. In the Still of the Night by Dara Wier (Wave Books)

With her typical subtle and eloquent emotionality, Wier offers up harmonious meditations on disquieting themes. . . . Without pedantry or obfuscation, Wier’s lines cohere into a philosophical discourse about the poet’s relationship with the world. —Publishers Weekly

37. Afterland by Mai Der Vang (Graywolf Press)

Afterland’s voice seems to transmigrate, riding the trance of memory from one image to the next. . . . Vang’s work moves in the realms of ecstatic appeal where meaning is revealed cumulatively. Her ambient revelations read more like incantations. . . . She teeters and ultimately tumbles headlong into the realms of memory and dream, expertly crafting fine and elegant passages on her way. —Los Angeles Review of Books

38. Lessons on Expulsion by Erika L. Sánchez (Graywolf)

Lessons on Expulsion does brilliant work blending one sensory experience with another . . . such that the eye and ear never feel far apart. . . . In this intensely visceral debut, Sánchez paints a compelling picture of the human experience, at once cruel and full of tenderness. —Guernica

39. Gray Market by Krystal Languell (1913 Press)

Gray Market is an unauthorized communique from the pneumatic tubes of “tiny little workers without power” to the state, the agencies, the producers and consumers (of folly), and the people of the United States. Depending on who you are, you’ll either feel antagonized or incredibly inspired to never again settle for the “stopgap sex act.” The antagonized poet pushes back realizing she has (and we have) demanded too little. Krystal Languell’s work makes me evermore committed to stay with her on the job, as Poet, where the job is to hack up shit language and redeploy it to make more room for the living. —Stacy Szymaszek

40. Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut by Vickie Vértiz (University of Arizona Press)

Vértiz is a powerhouse. Her work is incredibly nuanced with a full sensibility of place without sentimentality, without pity, and without need to justify its worth. These poems are smart, sassy, sonically enhanced, and scintillating. A must-read. —Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

41. Light Into Bodies by Nancy Chen Long (University of Tampa Press)

The poems in Light into Bodies amaze me with their verbal precision and richness. Revealing a tonal range that bridges scientific specificity and dream-like spontaneity, Nancy Chen Long makes good on her ambition to explore necessary questions about family, race, history, and spirituality. She answers not with pat conclusions, but an illuminating openness, a quickened vulnerability from which her poems derive their lasting strength. Her emotional power and formal mastery are cause for gratitude. —Peter Campion

42. Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now Edited by Amit Majmudar (Knopf)

An anthology that asks readers to put themselves at the intersection of the personal and the political . . . A welcome tool for the essential task of patriotism, and many others. —Barbara Berman, The Rumpus

43. Some Beheadings by Aditi Machado (Nightboat Books)

One way to think of these crystalline (brilliant, light-filled, prismatic, latticed) poems is as interlocking gears in a jeweled surrealist watch that has been put to bed in a transparent glass case and yet, day after day, it refuses to sleep. The parts can be seen continually moving, although at variable speeds: as soon as one goes faster, another carefully slows its pace. Each element is mesmerizing in its elegance. To attempt to deconstruct these poems would be to blow them apart. That said, what can be said is—They are utterly contemporary. They are deeply intimate. They are the lashes of a forest of thought. —Mary Jo Bang

44. I Love It Though by Alli Warren (Nightboat Books)

In I Love It Though, growing authority and growing bewilderment appear to be out on a date, perhaps married, “the bottom / of the surface of the sound” never not in effect. Propelled by closely parsed internal commotion, the book is a great follow-up to Here Come the Warm Jets, itself a great follow-up to the earlier books that rightly put Alli Warren on the map as a poet to watch, be reckoned with, read and reread. —Nathaniel Mackey

45. Good Bones by Maggie Smith (Tupelo Press)

The truth of these poems flies out of the honesty and realness of Smith’s experiences, her language richly accurate, deep and yet readable as if it were our own thoughts written down, brimming with feeling, and attuned through imagination’s watery grasp. —Z.G. Tomaszewski

46. Map To The Stars by Adrian Matejka (Penguin Books)

Matejka offers a fresh set of figures for describing the youth of Black Americans now entering middle age. . .There is truly an astounding wealth of material here, cultural artifacts that add up to an ironclad allegory for the plight of urban African Americans in the ‘80s, which serves to point the way to where we are now. —The Los Angeles Times

47. I Remember Nightfall by Marosa di Giorgio (trans. Jeannine Marie Pitas) (Ugly Duckling Presse)

These new English-language collections by Marosa di Giorgio, long considered a major figure in Latin American literature, are the product of a great translator who has immersed herself, with thoughtfulness and dedication, in the life of a writer whose work is spooky, mystical, dangerous and magnificent. Everywhere in di Giorgio’s work there are wars, crimes, monsters, possessed plants and animals, ghosts, illnesses and miracles animating a world that is always on the verge of explosion. In the later works, the unnamed presence of the brutal Uruguayan dictatorship lingers menacingly in di Giorgio’s pastoral childhood gardens where the animals are going crazy, where the fruit is bubbling and murmuring, and where corpses noisily decompose in the ground. Di Giorgio’s writing is as foreboding as it is tentacular, as intricate as it is unsettling. Jeannine Marie Pitas’ ongoing and remarkable engagement with di Giorgio has brought us this exciting and valuable gift. —Daniel Borzutzky

48. Hard Child by Natalie Shapero (Copper Canyon Press)

Shapero writes in an urgent vernacular that flirts, stings, implores and demands with apparent abandon. —Houston Chronicle

49. Prosopopoeia by Farid Tali (trans. Aditi Machado) (Action Books)

Out of the decaying body, Farid Tali has wrought song. Every sentence surprises, adding up to an exquisite book unlike any other. —Maggie Nelson

50. Adrenalin by Ghayath Almadhoun (trans. Catherine Cobham) (Action Books)

This is political poetry at full force. This is what political poetry must look like if it is going to be serious. We cannot be satisfied by less complex texts–they are so hopelessly infantilizing. In this crucial political poetry, war’s contradictions and suffering are portrayed in endless nuances. This is our wake-up call. —Aase Berg

51. My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter by Aja Monet (Haymarket Books)

Aja Monet’s poetry offers us textures of feeling and radical shifts of meaning that expand our capacity to envision and fight for new worlds. From Brooklyn, USA to Hebron, Occupied Palestine, we take a feminist journey through rage and serenity, through violence and love, through ancient times and imagined futures. This stunning volume reminds us that conflict and contradiction can produce hope and that poetry can orient us toward a future we may not yet realize we want. —Angela Y. Davis

52. fast by Jorie Graham (Ecco)

Fast is a great book about the nature of social life in the 21st century, a book in which past and future unfold in “every cell’’ across the vast space of a few words. —The New York Times Book Review

53. Adam Cannot Be Adam by Kelli Anne Noftle (Omnidawn)

Kelli Anne Noftle’s second collection of poems reveals a brilliant mind observing a shifting subject, the “holographic man,” doubled in memory’s mirror and in the magical distance of love. Finely wrought and restlessly inquisitive, the poems hover over the point where intimacy “converges with light” in the mind, tinkering with perception, optical illusions, and visual imagery. Noftle’s poems are like origami animals, new shapes folded out of the ordinary material of life, offering the reader a transcendent guidebook on “how to see/ a picture/ made of uncountable/ refractions. —Molly Brodak

54. Anemal Uter Meck by Mg Roberts (Black Radish Books)

Mg Roberts’ ANEMAL UTER MECK defies category at every turn. Here we are repeatedly being reborn into different forms as we heal our severed wings and fly. Our new body inhabitations are woven with scars and our every encounter with meaning is eroticized. Are we the so-called alien forming the foundation of the real or an impossible unicorn creating new rituals for a world that awaits us? These poems are where a constant ‘hallucination of presence’ adds origins and ways to being monstrously and divinely human. With her torch of internal expansion Mg Roberts brings us the fire and lights up the Sea. —Roberto Harrison

55. Open Epic by Julia Drescher (Delete Press)

Julia Drescher’s Open Epic is both examination and complex. In the context of this cosmology, Drescher’s pre-origin meditations interrupt creation per se and its attendant orders, “Descending errata” as another name for the great chain of being. In the very divide which opens language, every “behalve” compels “behave” in order to “belong.” Open Epic cannot wriggle free of the horns of this dilemma but it can, and does, wriggle, like a bell, shaking, shaken. —Tyrone Williams

56. Pizza and Warfare by Nikki Wallschlaeger (Garden Door Press)



Through a series of frenetic, densely lyrical prose poems, Nikki Wallschlaeger’s Pizza and Warfare foregrounds the linkage between abusive dynamics, globalized violence, and rampant consumption: pizza as both cheese-covered salve and wound.

57. Unaccompanied by Javier Zamora (Copper Canyon Press)

In [Nueve Años Immigrantes], he writes about living apart from his parents and then traveling alone over 4,000 miles across multiple borders to reunite with them as a nine-year-old. My students, Salvadoran in background or not, were amazed—they saw themselves and heard their families’ stories in these poems. Someone who looked and lived like them—young, immigrant, and undocumented—had written a book. —Zócalo Public Square

58. The Book of Endings by Leslie Harrison (University of Akron Press)

It’s often snowing in these inconsolable poems of beautiful refusal . . . refusal to accept death, refusal to be silent in the face of ever-accumulating loss. Almost always, the poems unfurl using a line that feels continuous, like a sustained exhalation, making each poem an emotional river. While the poems have delicacy of image, they are relentless in their momentum. The gradual erosion and dispersal of our physical selves, our decomposition into the elements, these perpetual disappearances mortality insists on, are sung of here, along with the fact that spiritually and scientifically, all this leave-taking is also a form of fecundity. These are incantatory and hypnotic poems. —Amy Gerstler

59. To Love the Coming End by Leanne Dunic (Chin Music Press)

Leanne Dunic’s meditative collection To Love the Coming End embodies Yukio Mishima’s characterization of Japan—her writing is at once elegant and brutal. In these fervent poems of disparate landscapes are catastrophic feelings of sadness, loss, and alienation. —Doretta Lau

60. What’s Hanging on the Hush by Lauren Russell (Ahsahta Press)

What I especially admire about What’s Hanging on the Hush is the understated dynamism that builds sound by sound & line by line. Lauren Russell’s poems create surfaces out of need & the need for range. They’re infused with humor in the face of inordinately intense and ordinary life conditions. And they drive forward with a slantwise musical sensibility inventing itself via angular rhythms, dense and sparse spaces, and an open feel for texture that is powerfully sensitive, and rare. The poems’ under-rhythm sounds to me like it’s saying, ‘here is a life, hyper-particular, nonetheless coexisting with all other lives, there’s no single way to do this.’ A serious, fabulous work. —Anselm Berrigan