Best Books 2024: Publishers Weekly Publishers Weekly

Bluff

Danez Smith (Graywolf)

This insightful and powerful collection captures the ongoing racial violence, mass protest, and political division in the United States, and the artist’s tenuous place at the center. A critical self-awareness pervades the volume as Smith urgently draws attention to the calamities of the moment, expressing growing skepticism toward poetry that performs its politics or fails to engage with reality.

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The Invention of the Darling

Li-Young Lee (Norton)

Lee’s mystical, exhilarating book evokes the sacred through the wonder of human bonds and the roles each person plays across a lifetime. In beautiful reflections, Lee pays tribute to his own roles as father and son, parental devotion, and poetry itself as he reveals where the spiritual and the material intersect.

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Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space

Catherine Barnett (Graywolf)

These stunning poems sketch out a witty and philosophical approach to life’s probing, existential questions. Barnett’s elegiac musings offer both witness and remembrance, while a series of “Studies on Loneliness” proves to be a remarkably perceptive exploration of the subject, mining solitude’s overlooked value.

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Wrong Norma

Anne Carson (New Directions)

The master of genre-bending presents a brilliant, time-splicing mythology comprised largely of prose poems. Blending ancient and modern sources, Carson revisits classical myth while alluding to Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, and other unexpected sources of inspiration. The result is an alert, surprising, and innovative book.

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A Year of Last Things

Michael Ondaatje (Knopf)

Ondaatje’s literary gifts and expansive imagination are on display in these dazzling poems that reflect on memory, history, and art. Photographs spark a playful retrospective, allowing Ondaatje to craft lyric narratives that leap from a Sri Lankan boarding school to tender memories of landscapes and friends.

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