1) Yumi Zouma, “No Love Lost to Kindness” / Somehow balancing New Wave, alt-country, shoegaze and just perfect pop influences, this New Zealand band delivers one of the most complete albums of the young year. Dreamy, dreamy, dreamy.
2) Cut Worms, “Transmitter” / Working alongside producer Jeff Tweedy, songwriter Max Clarke creates a tranquil but textured album that nods to, frankly, early Wilco and shared heroes like Harry Nilsson. These songs contain multitudes.
3) John Koenig, “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” / Koenig’s bestselling book reuses fragments of language we have to create the language which escapes us, creating words for feelings both universal and remarkably personal. This is a reference book I’ll return to, to create the poetics of living and to understand myself.
4) Deborah Landau, “Skeletons” / Too long after Landau’s collection “Soft Targets” rearranged my thinking and feeling, I caught up with this 2023 text, a set which again proves Landau the modern poet of our bodies, discussing them in the abstract and actual terms that help us understand our feelings about walking, running, sleeping, kissing, fucking, shrinking and otherwise moving through the world.
5) Erica Dawson, “When Rap Spoke Straight to God” / Dawson’s 2018 book-length poem always qualifies as a force of nature: sometimes a whirlwind, sometimes a cooling breeze, the work sweeps up the music and mysticism its title suggests as well as issues and ideas of politics, Blackness and how we live as neighbors with one another.