This year’s Best of Indie list, as always, delivers an impressive array of subjects and styles, from a picture book about lacrosse that highlights the sport’s indigenous history to a supernatural thriller that speculates on the existence of life after death to the biography of a fighter in the Dutch resistance during World War II. But what stood out most in 2024 were poetry collections that consider crises of all kinds: war, AIDS, grief, gentrification, and more. A recent New York Times article talked about how, in the wake of multiple hurricanes, the many first-person disaster videos on TikTok, Instagram, etc., brought us closer and closer to the front lines. Each of the below starred collections takes a catastrophe and distills it through the poet’s perspective, rendering not only the details but a sense of the impact on the observer.
Syrian American poet Seif-Eldeine writes about the effects of the Syrian civil war in Voices From a Forgotten Letter.“In his Syria, neither death nor life has any dignity; bodies full of bullets expel excrement when retrieved, marriages buckle into isolation and abuse, and children are sold to pay for food and shelter,” says our reviewer. “But Seif-Eldeine is most harrowing when he uses small moments and details to convey the true scale of suffering in an ongoing conflict, as when a woman paints in a blurry Van Gogh–like style because she lost her glasses in a bombing, or a farmer harvesting his crops remarks on his ‘watermelons larger than decapitated heads.’ A record of a country and people in crisis rendered in fearless, anguishing detail.”
In Brother Nervosa, Ronald Palmer catalogs cultural shifts and historical events in the Bay Area, writing about the AIDS crisis and the consequences of the tech explosion and big pharma’s ethical lapses, as well as romance, personal culpability, the body, and paranoia. Kirkus’ reviewer notes, “Palmer’s knack for inventive imagery makes even the most despondent poems feel alive as he blends the landscapes of Northern California, Snapchat, anthropomorphic ‘furries,’ and the rapper Future. These are queasy, graphic poems full of lines like ‘a chameleon the length of an erection’ and ‘gravity is porous / and thinks / like a virus.’ As a whole, it’s a memorable, visceral collection.” (Read an interview with Palmer on p. TK.)
In Now You Are a Missing Person, Susan Hayden uses poetry and prose to articulate her take onsex, parenting, grief, and art. The crux of the collection, however, is death—particularly the kind of sudden, unexpected death that upends survivors’ lives. Hayden’s husband died in a skiing accident, leaving her to raise their young son as a single mom. Here she writes about mourning, both her own and others’: “This has always been / a ‘Quest’ story / with its circuitous route, / its point and its shoot, / its natural disasters / Still running to the men / who were once / boys without fathers.” Our review notes, “As readers roam through accounts of joys and tragedies in Hayden’s life, a solid narrative begins to take shape—one that inspires even as it plumbs the depths of anguish.”
Chaya Schechner is the president of Kirkus Indie.
