1) Andrew Bird, “Inside Problems” / The ridiculously talented Bird’s music often wages a war between head and heart; then somehow, using peerless tactics, he brokers 11th-hour peace between the two. Once again, his latest is intellectually satisfying and emotionally stimulating, carried along by some of his strongest melodies yet.
2) Caracara, “New Preoccupations” / The Philadelphia band offers needed catharsis through melodic sweetness on its latest, perhaps one of the strongest pure rock records of the year. The core of these songs is immediate and ragged, but Caracara also adds small, soulful touches which free their melodies to burrow even deeper.
3) Good Looks, “Bummer Year” / I’m often on the side of rock critic Steven Hyden, who introduced me both to Caracara and this Texas band. And I am again, when he cites their track “Almost Automatic” as one of the best cuts of the year so far, calling it “precisely the sort of small town-minded heartland rock I am comically predisposed to loving.” Such a memorable song, it anchors a really thoughtful, winsome record.
4) Mary Karr, “O” for the New Yorker / The luminous Mary Karr will steal your breath with this gorgeous ode to sexual entanglement. The poem affirms that lust is lust, and desire is desire, even when you’re “pushing seventy,” as the opening line notes.
The sublime and carnal twist up in each other’s bodies here, in ways that will have every sense on notice:
The doorbell rang, guests whose raincoats
I shook off. That was it, the start of it, ending.
On my deathbed, I’ll exhale his name:
O, here is my mouth.
5) Casie Dodd, “After a Mardi Gras Day” for Small Orange / I love how little separation there is between the physical and metaphysical, spiritual and sensory in this poem.
When starlight fades to ashes on our heads
Left over from the Mass in Jackson Square
As locals take the Host and cross themselves,
You’ll catch a whiff of morning chicory steam.
In Dodd’s verses, an entire city is free to become a cathedral, and this is how I want the whole world to feel:
I hope that when you hear a lone horn scream
Along the alley strewn with paper saints,
After the Mass is ended—or begun—
You’ll take a holy card and pray for me.