We asked Catherine Abbey Hodges, winner of the 2015 Spacks Prize for her book Instead of Sadness and author of the forthcoming Raft of Days, what books she’s enjoying now:
The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, Marie Howe (W.W. Norton, 2009)
I think of Marie Howe as a modern mystic, and her unpretentious poems as lenses on the numinous. (Can’t wait to get my hands on her latest, Magdalene.)
Bright Dead Things, Ada Limón (Milkweed Editions, 2015)
These poems are full of brave leaps and linguistic inventiveness.
The Ghost of César Chávez, David Dominguez (C&R, 2010)
These wonderfully accomplished and accessible poems move me on so many levels; I read them with my poetry students at Porterville College this semester and fell in love with them all over again.
Angels at Bus Stops, Jon Veinberg (Lynx House Press, 2014)
We lost Jon Veinberg earlier this year; this is his most recent collection, shimmering, gritty, astonishing in its reach.
Listening Long and Late, Peter Everwine (Pitt Poetry Series, 2013)
I can’t imagine my life without the impossibly beautiful poems of Peter Everwine. This is his most recent full length collection.
The Dream of the Marsh Wren: Writing as Reciprocal Creation, Pattiann Rogers (Milkweed Editions, 1999)
This beautiful book—prose with poems threading through—is one I returned to recently as I prepared to lead a workshop on revision. It articulates my experience: as I work at making poems, they’re at work too, making me.