Our Contributors’ Favorite Books of 2019
Our contributors, from across our quarterly print issues and our website, read as widely and wildly as they write. Here, they tell us about the books that moved them most in the final year of this decade.
2019 closes with the news that the President’s son killed an endangered sheep this summer. The dull son once again erased in the dark what was majestic and rare. The sheep was an argali sheep. His horns and gentle face resembled the shape of the female reproductive system. These sheep are killed for their horns. The dull son also killed a red deer. I don’t pray, but all year I’ve been carrying around Vi Khi Nao’s Sheep Machine in much the same way my great aunt Rosa carries around the Tehillim (the Book of Psalms). Sheep Machine is a two minute and fifty-two second frame by frame of sheep grazing on a mountainside, but really it’s a spell against apathy and greed. Almost each second is a page, and each page is a poem, and each poem is a story, and each story is a pasture, and each pasture is a hunger, and each hunger is a sheep. Vi Khi Nao has invented a new form that stills the tick before the tock flies like a bullet through the air.
This year my favorite books have been the ones that collect around rogue forms. Motherish forms with the belly of a story and the eyes of a poem. Hybrids that swell then go frail, grow wooly, and then grow smooth. Forms that leave the door open for dry leaves and ghosts and a sheep so lost she has forgotten what a sheep even looks like. Kate Zambreno’s , Brenda Shaughnessy’s , Tina Chang’s , Anne Boyer’s , and Rachel Zucker’s all completely reimagine what it means to be a book with an earthly shape. Each one is a miracle. They are my fantasy coven. I have no doubt each could draw down the moon. —
