1) Benjamin Booker, “Lower” / Booker’s first record in more than seven years is gorgeous and gutting, translating the soul of an artist through difficult moments and thrilling glimpses of clarity.
2) Lilly Hiatt, “Forever” / Lilly Hiatt always delivers, and what she delivers here is a brief but potent set of guitar rockers that sear with their poetry and seize every chance to set the body moving into alignment with itself.
3) The Laughing Chimes, “Whispers in the Speech Machine” / This Athens, Ohio outfit seems to pipe past and future music into the present, channeling some of the truly great post-punk, New Wave and college-rock records we know through this very moment.
4) Forrest Gander, “Mojave Ghost” / In what’s dubbed a “novel poem” from last year, this Pulitzer winner moves through the desert chasing the intricacies of love.
I admit: all my gestures are addressed to you. You,
the starting point, the rhapsodic precedent.
Even now, these years later, I’m still
turning my head, listening for your words.
I know I imagine them into being, there
being nothing else I can imagine.
In photographs taken of me before we met
I see only the impending joy in my face.
5) Joyelle McSweeney, “Death Styles” / In another 2024 collection I’m only now catching up with, McSweeney contemplates love, loss and decay through a daily liturgy of poetics. These pieces both examine our human form and excavate all that’s around and beneath.