100 books like Life on Mars

It’s a beautiful book, from the cover to the notes. It’s a neo-slave narrative that follows various enslaved, then freed people. Through this book, I learned how poetry collections can be explorations of history based on fact.

Like any good collection, reading one poem compels you forward, but each poem can stand on its own. She is a master of form. For instance, her persona poetry is powerful. The first poem in the book, “The Trapper’s Boast,” devoid of empathy, shows the business of slavery from an undesirable point of view. 

But what is moving is the ability to fall in love and to care even in the worst conditions, as well as the will to live and strive towards freedom in spite of any threats.

I started writing neo-slave narrative poems about a woman escaping slavery. I imagined that the poems I was writing, like Suck on the Marrow… show more.

This is a biography of Mother Ann Lee, the woman who brought the Shaker Religion to Colonial America. Extensively researched and beautifully rendered, these poems grab you and bring you into eighteenth-century England and New England. It is also a celebration of motherhood, love, death, and grief, as well as of an early American woman in leadership. Sometimes deceptively soft, the movement and violence of Colonial America will snap the reader forward, inviting us to question our past.

I revisited Ross’ book when writing about historical figures, mostly real. In my book, I looked at some historical figures, including Tituba and Harriet Tubman, and found reading Seedlip and Sweet Apple a good primer in writing historical poetry.

Physically, a beautiful book. There are these drawings made with scratchboard illustrations and actual lace from a factory in Scranton, PA. The poems are gorgeous, whimsical pieces about a young woman in particular, but working women in general who produced lace. 

Though historical, the factory did not close until 2002, and the building still stands. The book, however, is set in the past, in the 1930s, and follows a lesbian who works in the factory. I love the way that both Douaihy and Hermanson play with negative space, the white, and the dark of letters or lace. 

Of course, I looked to this book for the historicity of it, and how Douaihy handled one character over time.

These poems—most of every poem that Lee writes, really—do more than paint a picture. These poems appeal to every one of your senses. They are rich in description and you want to savor each one, sit with it, and let the poem envelop you. 

I heard or read somewhere that Li-Young Lee is a slow writer, not producing a lot of work but always producing good work. I don’t know if this is true, and except for my greed of wanting to consume more of his words asap, I don’t mind that his poems are slower coming. I like to spend time with them.

I share Rose because Lee teaches me—and my students—that writers depend too much on visual imagery and fear spreading out into the other senses.

This is an exciting and important poetry anthology.

Spanning the history of black poetry in America, the editor Camille T. Dungy has collected one hundred and eighty poems by ninety-three poets. Her introduction radically enlarges the realm of eco-poetry as she considers the exclusion of African-American poets from the nature poetry genre while also exploring the complexity of their relationship with the land that witnessed or abetted centuries of racist subjugation.

Thought-provoking essays by Alice Walker, Marilyn Nelson, and others, introduce each of the ten sections in which I found a treasure trove of poets I’ve long admired, such as Rita Dove and Ross Gay, and poets I’ve never come across before, such as Kamilah Aisha Moon.

Aberrations in Black is not the only important early queer of color intervention in queer theory, but I find it the most rewarding.

Showing how signal works in the African-American literary tradition pose important challenges to social norms and to the sociological discourse of their times, Ferguson advances an intersectional critique that forefronts race and also attends to gender, sexuality, and class.

The book’s brilliant close readings, such as the reading Toni Morrison’s Sula in the context of The Moynihan Report particularly stand out. The book is a corrective to the apparent colorblindness of much of early queer theory.

In this anthology, twenty-one Black women writers, including Jesmyn Ward, Gabourey Sidibe, Lynn Nottage, and Tayari Jones, write about the first time they saw themselves reflected in literature. This moving collection of essays is at once a love letter to books and an exploration of the intersection of race, gender, and the written word.    

When a bookseller handed Jordan Peele’s anthology to me, I smiled and said: “I’ll take it!” Perhaps best known for his hit film, Get Out, I trusted Peele’s sense of horror. And I was not disappointed.

This collection brings together 19 tales by some of our best Black horror writers. It begins with a hilarious and grim story by the great N. K. Jemisin about a Black cop who abuses his power with the help of supernatural visions that assist him in targeting his next victim.

The horror hits just keep coming as we read frightening tales by the likes of Lesley Nneka Arimah, Violet Allen, and L. D. Lewis. I would not be shocked if this anthology gets adapted as a television series.

If you think that literary societies have nothing to do with African American community activism, then this book will make you think again. African Americans were excluded from schools, libraries, and most of the usual publishing outlets—but they still developed a vibrant culture that produced newspapers, pamphlets, and books, and they developed libraries and literary societies committed to reading these and other productions. McHenry expertly guides us through this relatively unknown but central culture of reading, tracing the rise of African American literary societies, the work of the Black Press, and the vital connection between reading, writing, and social reform efforts. These efforts were supported by broader African American organizational efforts, the creation of churches and mutual aid societies that provided refuge for readers and forums for writers, and McHenry explores the social and intellectual networks that developed from these efforts, as African Americans read their way to new visions… show more.

John Edgar Wideman is the first African-American writer I can clearly point to who took microfiction seriously enough to write an entire collection. His stories are filtered through the lens of Blackness, but that is not the major reason why I like this book. Wideman does things with language that force me to completely step back and rethink things. I find myself reading his words aloud, simply because they feel as though they transcend the page. If it were not for Wideman, I would not feel as comfortable revealing the authenticity of my experience in my work.