Over the last several months, we’ve admired the creative ways in which colleagues across disciplines have preserved a spirit of community and collaboration in virtual classrooms, at-home offices, the “halls” of online conferences, and elsewhere. In anticipation of attending this week’s virtual MLA conference, HUP Editors Emily Silk and Joseph Pomp decided to put together a virtual collaboration of their own.

Missing the opportunity to swap reading recommendations with friends and colleagues in person at MLA, they invited several HUP authors of recent and forthcoming books to contribute to a “poetry playlist” for 2021. In thoughtful responses gathered below, some spoke of long-time favorites, others of recent discoveries, still others of poems that felt particularly resonant in this new year. Amidst the bustle of Zoom conferencing, we hope that you may find a few recommendations that speak to you, too; where possible, we have included a link to a publicly available text or audio recording of each poem.
“I was introduced to Brenda Shaughnessy’s work at a reading a few years ago and was drawn to the openness and warmth of her humor. When I tracked down her books—the most recent ones are So Much Synth and The Octopus Museum—I was struck by how the humor mixes with feelings of fury and helplessness and self-recrimination. That tonal range and her wild range of subjects have stuck with me; they seem right for 2021.”
—Calista McRae, coeditor of The Selected Letters of John Berryman
“Since March 2020, when the poem was read at the end of a televised news report on the unfolding pandemic by the national broadcaster in Ireland (RTE), Derek Mahon’s poem ‘Everything Is Going to be All Right’ has been widely quoted in the Irish and international media. As with all great poems, even if readers already know it, the poem is worth reading again, and especially as we begin the New Year 2021. Mahon passed away in October 2020, leaving behind an amazing body of work that includes some of the best poems written in the English language over the last half century, including ‘In Carrowdore Churchyard’ and ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford.’ Often complex in their philosophical and cultural allusiveness and depth, his poems can also be mischievous and fun. Mahon is willing to record all that can be seen by the ‘watchful heart’ but his poems also celebrate ‘the hidden source’ that is the basis for all great art.” (Listen to Derek Mahon read “Everything Is Going to be All Right.")
—Philip Coleman, coeditor of The Selected Letters of John Berryman
“Arguably one of the most luminous, Black feminist affirmations of survival and euphoric resistance in contemporary poetry, Lucille Clifton’s ‘won’t you celebrate with me’ is a wondrous work of conviction and resolute determination. We all want to be with her on that ‘bridge between starshine and clay’ looking out across the vista of what’s ahead in 2021 and drinking up Clifton’s insistence on recognizing the miracle of her pure existence. Anything from Tracy K. Smith’s remarkable Life on Mars would seemingly be suitable for this moment in which we find ourselves, but ‘Everything That Ever Was’ especially sums up the feeling of cosmic enormity that remains especially palpable right now. In the whirlwind of catastrophic loss and urgent, necessary, everyday hope, Smith’s declaration that ‘…everything / That ever was still is, somewhere, / Floating near the surface, nursing / Its hunger for you and me…’ is a powerful reminder of the forces and the debris of life that constitute who we are, ‘the largeness we can’t see,’ as she puts it in the title of another one of her poems. Heavy words that capture the bigness of this universe, they encourage humility and reverence for the universe that we inhabit. Having just watched Sylvie’s Love, Eugene Ashe’s gorgeous African American homage to the golden age of cinematic melodrama, I’ve been drawn back to repeat listenings of Nancy Wilson and Cannonball Adderly’s classic 1962 album. Wilson was a masterful song stylist, one of the very best of the modern era, and her stirring, sophisticated, and intelligent love songs with alto saxophonist Adderly are some of the best sonic articulations of epic and exquisitely realized intimacy, the ability for romance to be all-encompassing, sweeping, immersive. What could be more necessary now than our ability to get swept up with one another as we face an uncertain future?”
—Daphne A. Brooks, author of Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (forthcoming, February 2021)
“The contemporary volume of poetry that I recommend most strongly is The Red List by my colleague Stephen Cushman. The Red List is a long poem that runs the length of a volume. The trigger for this magnificent work is the mental illness of the poet’s dear son. Cushman charts his and his boy’s sorrows and sufferings and their hopes for renovation and renewal in memorable, sometimes soul-piercing lines. It’s also a calendrical poem and explores the turnings of the season with exemplary grace. It’s a real achievement and deserves the widest audience.
—Mark Edmundson, author of Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy (forthcoming, April 2021)
“I have two recommendations that speak to our historical moment beautifully. First, if readers have not already read it, I would recommend Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. As an allegory against totalitarianism, it is one of the most moving and beautifully crafted books of poetry I have read in years. The second is Alice Quinn’s anthology, Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic. Taking its title from Pablo Neruda’s ‘Keeping Quiet,’ the book gathers a diverse group of poets and forms that speak to our isolation and our almost unbearable yearning for human connection. The great variety of responses to the pandemic not only salves the pain we are collectively feeling but also reveals the breath of imaginative ingenuity in American poetry.”
—Robert Bernard Hass, coeditor of The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3: 1929-1936 (forthcoming, April 2021)
“As a momentary stay against our current confusions, I recommend reading a poem by Robert Frost called ‘The Onset.’ How often in 2020 have we found ourselves where the first stanza leaves us, alone and despairing. But as the calendar turns, so may our fortunes, if we—like Frost—hold to a belief that a better community and world is always possible.”
—Donald Sheehy, coeditor of The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3: 1929-1936 (forthcoming, April 2021)
“Seventeenth-century India saw the revival of an ancient genre—collections of 700 poems on love and other themes linking this world and eternity. The Hindi poet Biharilal (born c. 1600) composed one of the best known of these collections. In my new translation for the Murty Classical Library of India, his pithy, often aphoristic couplets overflow into three lines. Though subjected to many a long commentary, these short poems require little work on the part of an English reader with a taste for delicately poised sentiment and economy of wording. ‘Leaving me, he bears my joys away; / to summer days and winter nights / his parting gives long leases on my heart.’”
—Rupert Snell, translator of Biharilal’s Poems from the Satsai
“H. Leivick (born Leivick Halpern, 1888–1962) was an American Yiddish poet whose sensitivity to sound and language equaled his belief in repairing a fractured world. Born in the Belarusian shtetl of Igumen, Leivick was sentenced to a tsarist labor camp in Siberia for revolutionary activity, escaped to the US, and made his living there as a wallpaper hanger while becoming one of the world’s most respected Yiddish modernists. Over the course of his life, he wrote about topics ranging from Sacco and Vanzetti to the possibility of forgiveness. His knowledge of Jewish texts found its way into his avowedly secular verse, helping him to seek meaning in a particularly dark time.”
—Amelia Glaser, author of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine
(Listen to Glaser read and discuss Leivick's poem ‘Mem Haamekim’ on Hevruta: A Podcast from the San Diego Jewish Academy.)
“Thomas Hood’s terrifying ‘Dream of Eugene Aram’ left traces on Oscar Wilde’s late poem ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol.’ But it’s another narrative poem by Hood, his comical ‘Miss Kilmansegg and her Precious Leg,’ that we ought to be reading in the dog days of the Trump regime, as the first family packs its Gucci bags and heads to Mar-A-Lago. The hilarious story of the spoilt daughter of a property tycoon, who, following an alarming accident, insists on being fitted with a solid gold prosthetic limb, Hood’s poem is a biting satire of the corrupt moneyed elite of his day. First published in 1840, five years before Hood’s death, it is best read alongside Thomas Seccombe’s witty—and oft-reproduced—illustrations of 1870.”
—Nicholas Frankel, editor of The Short Stories of Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Selection

“In his newest collection, Topsy-Turvy, Charles Bernstein includes a translation of Virgil’s Eclogues, III, the poetry match between Damoetas and Menalcas. The poem is titled ‘Echologs’ and pitches a wonderful homology between the Latin and American dialects aimed at a new turn, one that not just keeps the poetry fresh, but lets history remade freshen our own responses and habits of reading. What we thought we knew becomes new and what we had forgotten or not known gets worked into our responses and imaginations. The Arts and Letters pamphlet by Bernstein and Richard Tuttle, also called Echologs, includes following the translation a palimpsest of previous translations from the Loeb edition to David Ferry.
—Paul A. Bové, author of Love’s Shadow
(Listen to a 2015 recording at Bowery Poetry of Charles Bernstein introducing and reading “Echologs” on PennSound.)