1) Nick Cave, “Seven Psalms” / I need more time to fully plumb the 23 minutes of spoken word and synth beds that make up Cave’s latest. But since a year might not be enough, let me say this: As a person who has said, time and again, that the Psalms saved my faith, I hear myself in this record and recognize deep, deep resonances between Cave’s confessions and the Psalmists’ entreaties. There is life, death, blood, angels, demons and the assurance of a divine audience here, and I want to stay close enough to keep reveling in it.
2) Steve Lacy, “Gemini Rights” / Lacy, the Internet’s guitarist and a high-roller in the world of collaboration (Kendrick Lamar, Blood Orange, Mac Miller), makes edge-of-your-seat soul music on “Gemini Rights.” These arrangements recall the daring of ‘70s trailblazers such as Stevie Wonder, chasing both gospel-influenced peaks and more esoteric means of exhilaration.
3) Willi Carlisle, “Peculiar, Missouri” / The Ozarks troubadour creates the perfect balance between tradition and iconoclasm, pronouncing the idioms of folk, country and Mexican music with pitch-perfect accuracy while flipping their conventional lyrical scripts. The result is delightful and often staggering.
4) Dana Levin, “Now Do You Know Where You Are” / The recent book from this St. Louis poet possesses rare wisdom and earthy humor. Much within these pages commends the whole; two of my favorite moments actually take place within neighboring poems.
“How to Hold the Heavy Weight of Now” is a beautifully embodied poem ending in an offering; while “For the Poets” winningly places the demands on modern poets within a wider lineage:
“Who if I cried out would hear me amongst the angelic orders is the common condition, if only three people like a tweet does anything you offer sound in the forest?”
5) Han VanderHart, “The Body is Water and Water Has Origins” for Psaltery and Lyre / Few of today’s poets speak to my spirit—about what we carry and let go, beseeching me to consider the forces which shape us outside-in and how we respond inside-out—like Han VanderHart. Their work draws from deep wells of self-knowledge, and this poem quite literally wades into that water:
my mother’s family dammed the river and trapped the fish so often
it became their name
wet feet and boots and nets of fish became them
and my grandfather lived on the lip of the bay until death