What’s Dagne Forrest Reading?

I’m always deep into poetry, and this fall two new collections have been a real focus: “The Widow’s Crayon Box” by Molly Peacock, and “Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire” by Jason Schneiderman. Molly is an author I originally knew through her nonfiction writing (I’m a huge fan of both The Paper Garden and Flower Diary), but I’ve come to her poetry more recently and love her vivid style and interpretation of form. She’s quite fearless.

To my mind Jason’s work is some of the most compelling poetry being written today. He interrogates big questions throughout his work and demands close attention, yet he’s also funny, tender and endlessly inventive. He’s also a ferociously smart essayist on poetry, but I really want to draw attention to his latest poetry collection here. (As a taster, go and read Clickbait on Verse Daily!) I’m lucky to count him as a friend and colleague in my work as an editor with Painted Bride Quarterly, and seeing his mind in motion is a wonderful thing.

In my wide reading of poetry journals, largely online these days, I’m always just trying to discover new voices and catch up with ones I feel I should have already known.

After taking a bit of a break from reading fiction recently I was rewarded by picking up Kaveh Akbar’s “Martyr!”, which was such a ride (and Akbar is a poet first, of course!). The book has several modes, including some hilarious pages in the beginning as we’re introduced to Cyrus Shams, but it’s also dark, sad, and strange. I found it a wonderfully engaging read, though it definitely strays well outside of conventional novel territory.

I’m currently re-reading “Housekeeping” by Marilynne Robinson, because it’s just such an astonishing novel, and I’m playing with some ideas in my poetry in response to it. There is a stack of scholarship on the novel and its influence is wide, but I’m trying to focus on the themes that are resonating with me. A whole novel devoted to women who choose to step outside of society’s expected roles for them and to embrace the precarity of transience is an exceptional thing, but that it was also done so gorgeously and with such deep layers is truly extraordinary. It’s a book that invites reappraisal on a very deep level.

The reading stack is tall and precarious, and full of so many other authors and titles, but this a pretty accurate snapshot in time.