{If you have any interest in contemporary poetry, you should know of Nightboat Books. Even better, head over there and donate. They’re worth supporting. And, as a supporter, you can get a copy of all of their publications each year. Go now.}
{Also, this was written a very long time ago, but slipped through the cracks in terms of getting scheduled for publication. So.}
I will be moving through Nightboat’s 2025 publications a few at a time, sprinkling them in with the more standard Reading Wells.
The first dive into them includes Local Woman by Jzl Jmz, Fuel by Rosie Stockton, and Memories that Smell Like Gasoline by David Wojnarowicz.
I don’t read a lot of poetry–I did many decades ago, but my exposure to contemporary poetry is pretty spare. And that is what struck me most about both Local Woman and Fuel, their contemporary voice, their concern with the mundane and the profound of the 21st century and its post-digital world.
I preferred Local Woman, but I am also more familiar with Jzl Jmz’ lineage, which clearly draws from Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde and dozens of other African American writers trying to find a way through a world that is often deployed against their very existence. Jmz’ poems are, like theirs, more personal than political, which makes their impact all the greater. Note I am not down-playing the political, it is rather the use of the personal–the body, the affairs of the heart, the daily world–as the lens through which the political is revealed, grounded, explored.
Fuel caught my attention most often in how it embedded contemporary life into traditional poetic concern: a scene in nature with the presence of a tablet; a meditation on love with a concern for social media.
And then we have Memories that Smell Like Gasoline. This is a new edition of Wojnarowicz’ 1992 publication, complete with a foreword by Ocean Vuong. Part fiction, part memoir, your reaction to Wojnarowicz’ work will largely revolve around how comfortable or intrigued you are by sexually explicit drawings and what your relationship is to the HIV/AIDS pandemic of last two decades of the 20th century.
The book is also intensely personal, and offers glimpses into the barely imaginable difficulties of Wojnarowicz’ youth, which landed him in New York City as a young teen with few options outside of trading on his sexuality for his survival. Other professions came later–writer, artist, activist.
With his line drawings sprinkled throughout, Wojnarowicz is writing from a time of unimaginable grief, rage, and frustration: grief at the constant parade of funerals for those around him, rage at the utter unfairness of it all, and frustration (well, and a lot of the rage) at the unwillingness of those who could help at scale (mostly governmental agencies, local through national) to even admit there was a problem, let alone provide care.
It’s a powerful read, and deserves more of a general audience than it has had–this is an important book, and worth the effort to encounter past your discomfort, if such exists.