1) The Smile, “You Will Never Work in Television Again” / The debut track from this new-but-not-so-new band, featuring Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood along with Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner, is more than enough to get me excited about a side project—which isn’t always easy to do. Pitchfork compared it to “The Bends”-era Radiohead, and I see that, but there’s more wildness in the guitars and roaming in Yorke’s voice than that period afforded. This track is a meal for anyone who loves the band’s guitar rock, but wants to see it met by the glorious strangeness Yorke, Greenwood and Co. have cloaked themselves in since.
2) Hanif Abdurraqib, “All the TV Shows Are About Cops” for Protean / Pound-for-pound, Abdurraqib may be our best modern writer. As an essayist, critic and poet, he understands art, romance, nostalgia and the power of memory at an almost cellular level. Here, in his latest poem, he manages to sift spirituality, American civil religion and more in a staggering examination of what we believe. In the first days of 2022, could there be a more American verse than this:
maybe there is no devil &
just a hundred different
ways
to be the
wrong kind
of god.
3) Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These / After finishing an ambitious statement novel (The Overstory, which I adored), I needed a change of pace. Keegan’s humbly-titled novel, at less than 130 pages, came to me at just the right time. A humble work about a humble man navigating the Christmas season in 1985 Ireland doubles both as a wonderfully ordinary character piece and a backdoor look at the way religion has historically marginalized those it should console. Keegan’s Bill Furlong, a blue-collar father, literally walks into a moment of quiet reckoning; and his response, threaded through the everyday, informs our own perspective on injustice.
4) Sarah Sloat, “Forgetting is Forgiveness Enough” for Diagram / The visually-oriented poetry of Sarah Sloat never ceases to move me (I wrote about her collection Hotel Almighty a while back). This piece offers up one statement, enough to consider for an entire lifetime. And this is the way with Sloat—a prompting, a prodding, an urge to meditate on the ways we shape language and language can shape us.
5) Nathaniel Ian Miller, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven / The first book I finished in 2022 is a gently immersive novel about a wild, wild place. Take the depth of detail and biographical arc of A Gentleman in Moscow, move it outside among trappers, sojourners and other misfits, and you have Miller’s novel. A read perfect to accompany the cold drifts of winter.