1) Sylvan Esso, “No Rules Sandy” / The latest from Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn is a quietly buzzy gem that prioritizes first, aesthetic impressions and a gradually transformative vibe over some swing at significance. This is mood-altering music (in the best, most necessary way).
2) Pale Waves, “Unwanted” / I dig what this punk-influenced English band is up to. Huge hooks, even bigger drums and crunchy guitar tones reflect the best rock radio tracks of the past three decades. “Unwanted” feels both retro and fresh all at once.
3) Ottessa Moshfegh, “Lapvona” / The latest novel from Moshfegh features absolutely beautiful writing about some of the ugliest acts imaginable. This Middle Ages tale features abandonment, cannibalism—and, somehow, worse— while examining how we respond to the gods we make in our own image. Because of its wicked twists, it’s hard to recommend “Lapvona,” but leave it to Moshfegh to craft exquisitely haunting inner monologues and breathtaking elemental writing in the midst of all the devastation she inflicts.
4) Claire Schwartz, “Civil Service” / “A person can be with a word like they can be with a body: Wash it. Accompany it. Be changed by its nearness,” Schwartz writes on one of the last pages in her new collection. That relationship, and those parallels—between language and embodiment—suffuse the book, modeling something to us while working it out through us. Narrative poems, visually-oriented poems, elemental poems and poems marked by sharp humor meet each other to underline all Schwartz believes about the material power of words.
5) Melody Gutierrez, “Abandoned homesteads fascinated me. My childhood home is one” for the Los Angeles Times / Grateful for the way Gutierrez approached this first-person report with a depth of soul and journalistic rigor. The writer softly traverses a specific feature of the Southwest: houses that are no longer homes and, actually, are barely houses. Gutierrez’s piece twines art, sociology and personal reflection in an effort to understand, or at least chronicle, why and what we leave behind.