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This list won’t be a screed against the MFA. Other than this one sentence, I won’t write “MFA industrial complex.” Almost a century old, a master’s degree in creative writing now seems inescapable—to be a writer, you need one. While I don’t find that logic persuasive, most modern writers emerge from or eventually become entangled with the fine arts degree. But what happens when writers create without these institutional pressures?
In the world of prose, I think of Fran Ross’s Oreo, so original, hilarious, and ecstatic—a formally ingenious book. And what about Annie Dillard’s wild inventions in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek or Holy the Firm? She ended up with a university teaching post, but I can’t imagine either of these works emerging as a master’s thesis. Outside the United States, J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine comes to mind, too, evoking a totalizing fascination with falcons in diaristic prose that is unbearably beautiful. Each of these books is sui generis, authored by singular minds transfiguring literary and cultural history without heeding predominant tastes or trends.
In the world of poetry, I’ve especially struggled to locate writers without MFAs, with a few exceptions like Louise Glück and Danez Smith, different generations but both luminaries to me. It’s taken years—some posting on social media and scouring author bios—but I’ve found a few MFA-less contemporary poets whose expansive imaginations have produced exciting, inventive books. While each writer is distinct, their taste, sensibility, and allegiances are manifold. No one advises them where to go, so they go everywhere.
Whitman. Cannonball. Puebla. by Rodrigo Toscano
This book has a theatrical sweep, its poems reading like monologues and dialogues that think and revise and name and trouble naming itself. Toscano talks through economy, empire, and the multifarious registers of language, laboring—this being a special focus of his—to include and undermine theoretical jargon that can ally and alienate. Toscano’s mind is exciting and expansive. But where his poetry most impresses and surprises is at the hyper-local level of words, specifically the interjections like um, yeah, ugh, oh, etc. that juxtapose the book’s philosophical rigor, creating funny, insightful, and tonally rich poems.
Common Disaster by M. Cynthia Cheung
Some of Cheung’s most compelling poems are ghazals, and the collection itself begins to resemble a radif, a word repeating at the end of lines. “Exile” is one such word, accruing conflicting meanings. Exile is place, body, history. Nothing is one thing. The poet herself is physician, dreamer, historian, mother, wife. The self, like the radif, repeats—altered slightly each time. Common Disaster is the perfect title then. Disaster may be common—in more than one sense of the word—but as the collection demonstrates, it is not endured equally. Cheung is a musician: often brutal subjects cast in lucid lines, beauty rendered without consolation. The pandemic, hospital rooms, the Silk Road—each becomes a site where history and intimacy converge. If a person is a crossing of multiple histories, few poets trace that crossing with such immediacy and tenderness.
My Heresies by Alina Stefanescu
I don’t think you’ll find a more provocative cover. Bring it with you to your local coffee shop, DMV, or even to church. Really, it will provoke. Her poems traverse so many subjects, histories, obsessions, questions, antecedents, epigraphs, forms, and more—we have cameos from Homer to László Földényi to Maximus the Confessor. These poems are like a strange heretical religion: They don’t just focus on the unattended moment, which poetry can be so good at, but they also create assemblages that mystify. I love these poems. You are dreaming with a poet who seems limitless in her imagination.
Frame Inside a Frame by Daniel Lassell
Lassell builds an architecture wherein poems work individually and astonish as a collection. The poet works and reworks what a frame can signify. Sometimes, frames include and exclude the past, and a subject in one poem will be transfigured in another, a frame inside a frame. Lassell thinks through so many spatial possibilities in a world disordered and overwhelmed by information and content. However, the poet doesn’t sentimentalize unity. The synecdochal texts question wholeness and stability, especially through a series of erasure poems, “The Temple of Salt,” that reimagine linguistic and theological possibilities in Genesis. These erasures are some of the finest poems I’ve read this year.
Animal Unfit by Megan Nichols
Sometimes, as they say, art does aspire to the condition of music. Here is such a book. These poems are marvels of the everyday in the Ozarks. The project is living, attending to the vicissitudes of motherhood and the fraught pleasures of desire. A careful, devoted observer, Nichols writes poems filled with unruly questions that forego tempting and easy resolutions. For her child, whose father is no longer around, she offers to “be your trellis, at best.” These are poems about wildness—the feral exterior and volatile interior.
Natural History by Brandon Kilbourne
No exhibit is a neutral representation of knowledge. In natural history museums, for instance, dioramas can occlude the vexed entanglement between science and empire. Kilbourne, a longtime research biologist, complicates the historical production and transfer of knowledge—history isn’t partitioned with great and noble scientific inquiry on one side and racist colonial plundering on the other. Natural History makes clear that what we know cannot be divested from how we have come to know. Intricate in design and sonorous, the poems startle both in erudition and cadence. Whether he writes about himself or a recipe, Kilbourne situates the subject—the poems often open with periodic sentences so that the subject doesn’t appear neutral or unburdened by history. The effect Kilbourne achieves could only arise through this unexpected but necessary reciprocity of science and poetry.
Transit by David Baker
Some say if you write long enough, you keep writing and rewriting the same poem. Nature poets, in particular, can vanish into the landscape, protected by flora and fauna nomenclature. However, Baker writes inimitably beautiful poems about the natural world that make me rethink what the “natural world” even is. What fascinates me is how he thinks through subjects, with heterogeneous methodologies and vocabularies and histories. In one poem, “Oikos,” the poet ruminates his way through vexed conceptions of home and hospitality, of ethics, the form of the poem restive: spacious in some sections, controlled and hymnal in others. The language is conversational, full of puns, but also learned, melodic—the poet attempts to make a dwelling for his beloveds while remaining aware of the terrors inextricable to that process.
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