1) Foxing, “Draw Down the Moon” / I feel as though I blinked somewhere around 2018, and Foxing became one of our great American bands. The St. Louis indie-rock outfit reads every piece of my emotional mail on its latest, an album caught up in the chaos and bittersweetness of living right now. Few songs understand me in 2021 like the ballad “At Least We Found the Floor”:
Oh fuck
Here he comes again
The bad luck demon that I can't stop kissing
He's a rock slide on Halloween
He's a totaled rental in 2016
We didn't really need him then
We never really do but he said
Well honey
At least you found the floor
It can't get much worse than this …
2) Laura Stevenson, self-titled / Stevenson, a New York native, has spent the last decade turning out quietly terrific records. Her latest is a thoughtful, thorough musical statement, exploring the degrees of shade and tone within a certain musical range. She offers up three-minute, Phair-ish guitar jams, more autumnal and loping folk-rock, and atmospheric ballads. All of it unites under Stevenson’s warm, melancholy voice and commitment to great songcraft. Stevenson is a songwriter’s songwriter who never loses sight of her greater audience.
3) Maggie Smith, “Goldenrod” / Smith’s work begets anticipation—and emotional preparation; I have to ready myself before opening one of her books, knowing her poems will see and know me from page one.
“Goldenrod” is no doubt her best work to date, full of lines that lend our deepest aches and joys new, necessary language. There are numerous poems to commend (had I not checked out “Goldenrod” from my local library, I might have underlined a solid third of the book), but nothing landed quite like “The Hum.”
Here, Smith seeks answers for how we might “live / with trust in a world that will continue / to betray us.” Her proposition is gorgeous and heartbreaking; she detects “a small hum” within, “an appliance left running.” Listening closer, she clarifies and tunes to this sound:
I’ve started calling the hum
the soul. Today I have to hold
my breath to hear it. What question
does it keep not asking
and not asking, never changing
its pitch. How do I answer.
4) Matt Bell, “Appleseed” / I’ve honestly never read anything like Bell’s latest novel; what might be called science fiction, speculative fiction or cli-fi (climate fiction) arrives not only as a work of profound vision, but one with a poetic soul. My best attempts at a plot description would land with a thud. Just know that Bell follows characters through three time periods as they try to reckon with what we’ve made of our planet.
“Appleseed” is the most captivating literary consideration I’ve seen of what theologians call the “cultural mandate” (the call for Adam, Eve and their descendants to steward the planet); somehow Bell crash-lands the book of Genesis within the book of Revelation, asking readers to sit with what we’ve made and unmade. Bell’s prose will haunt you, but its beauty will also usher you toward possibility and the hope that we might meet our calling just before it’s too late.
5) Jane Zwart, “Long Distance” for HAD / I tire of prescriptions for parenting; give me poetry for what I already sense. One of my favorite poets, Zwart captures the great bargains we make as our stations change: childlike understanding for grown-up counsel, a desire to be approved for the sharp need to deliver our sons and daughters better than we formed them. Zwart beautifully understands how words that seem disparate, in the grammar of covenant, actually become synonyms.
I have come to the edge of myself
and here can see how some furies
are also love.