I read about 100 less books this year than last. Perhaps because I finally got out of my home, perhaps because I spent more time working on my own writing, or perhaps because I discovered Shark Tank and was burned out from work. Either way, I still read 79 books (a rare 1:1 movie to book ratio for 2023) and found many authors that weren’t previously on my radar. Avoiding chapbooks, here’s my fractured, jagged list of poetry collections and novellas and short stories, more or less in the order that I read them, with about 300 other books in my to-be-read pile.

Jon Boisvert

Born [2017]

Egocides [2018]

Born is a poetry collection full of lines I wish I would have written. Surrealist prose poems with a tender and signature voice. There's an unsaid through-line that is so lucid and seamless. I didn't find out about Boisvert and his 2017 debut collection until this year (thanks to the poet William Erickson) but it's right up my alley. Strange, heartbreaking, violent, dreamy, unusual, and brief. One of the best best prose poetry collections I've ever read. To top it off (and to hold us over until whatever Boisvert does next), above/ground press released Boisvert’s chapbook Egocides the following year.

Sawako Nakayasu

The Ants [2014]

I love a good through-line, love a good project book, love a good bug study. Here, Nakayasu zooms in on ants for a series of surrealist essays or microfables or oddball prose poems. While spending time with every entry, I felt myself imagining ants in my mouth, ants in my pillow, ants in a long line, waiting patiently, slowly making their way to the moon. As it should be, this book was highly recommended by Mathias Svalina during one of his Zoom workshops.

John Maradik

Surprises and Pleasures [2023]

[interview]

I’ve been waiting for this debut poetry collection for quite some time. John Maradik took me by surprise when I first encountered his work in the Bennington Review, which led me down a wormhole of pieces in jubilat, blush lit, NY Tyrant, a chapbook with Scram Press (a subsidiary of Factory Hollow), and now a full-length with the same press. This is a hysterical, surreal, playful, funny as hell book from Maradik. The poems can be as small as a 3 line poem (“I am the king”) or as lengthy as a 40 line poem (“They Found the Python”). He does not disappoint.

Collin Callahan

Thunderbird Inn [2022]

I'm constantly seeking a kind of tilted, red-eyed narrative upon opening a new book of poems. Twisted rhythms slipstreaming sideways. This collection, Callahan’s first, is a jam-packed neon-fueled bender. A Floridian episode of a Hunter S. Thompson saga. Denis Johnson with a lava lamp. The Florida Project if it was told through a twenty-something’s mescaline mouth.

Parker Young

Cheap Therapist Says You’re Insane [2023]

Jesse Ball referencing Russell Edson in his blurb for Parker Young’s debut collection of short stories couldn't be more fitting. These domestic fever dreams blew me away. With each story, Young somehow manages to lie through his teeth while sincerely convincing you he's telling the truth. Unreliable and entertaining as hell, it's the most honest book of lies I've ever read. Or the most lying book of truths I've ever read? You get it. Out now with Future Tense Books.

Barton Smock

The Tornado That Lost Our Emptiness [2023]

Wasp, gasp [2023]

[interview]

Prolific writer Barton Smock sent me his 753 page book of collected poems from 2020-2023 and it quickly became a favorite in my collection. I often don’t include authors if they’ve been featured in past years, but after reading 1-5 Smock poems a day for the majority of this calendar year (as well as the steady supply of new poems on his website and his new book) I’d be remiss to leave out his work. Read everything you can find.

My blurb for Wasp, gasp: “To read Barton Smock is to unlock a sliver of a Midwestern surrealist's (frog-less) dream. Here, God is often in the other room, consumed by the death of childhood and the stylings of the continual family, where famine and loneliness and love all succumb to the image-driven line. To the sideways divine. Grief as a sting. Most of Smock's poems (of which, he has thousands) are often a couple dozen words. Rarely more than a paragraph. A snippet. A breath. A postcard to bury in the ground, its flowers to be shaped like ancient ghosts. Barton Smock's newest ode is his collection Wasp, Gasp, a lyrical visit through childhood handstands and Ohio backlands and lackluster devils expelling hunger in a drunk stomach discovered in someone else's coat. To tackle the line is to fine-tune the prayer-in-hiatus, the blessed text of sleep. This book is the drink. This train is the king.”

Sophie Klahr & Corey Zeller

There is Only One Ghost in the World [2023]

If you asked me the genre of this book, I’m not sure I could give you a concrete answer. It seems unable to be boxed in, despite the blocked prose poetry. These collaborative page-long pieces are semi-autobiographical, magical, dipping into daydreams, worrying about the world, traveling back in time, reflecting and forgetting and rebuilding and growing. Not memoir, not a novel, not a poetry collection. The same body is occupied despite the two writers, who both seem to be channeling something larger than themselves. Like two minds inside of a solo ghost, floating around the globe, one fractured catastrophe at a time.

Gerardo Sámano Córdova

Monstrilio [2023]

Grief and loss takes on the form of a molding and growing monster in this debut novel, one that was required reading during a Sabrina Orah Mark workshop. Here, a creature replaces that which is no longer with us. From rib to Eve, from lung to beast. This was a moving book from Gerardo Samano Cordova, and a unique take on the monster novel. One to be added to the canon within the ongoing movement of the new queer weird. It’d be foolish if Hollywood hasn’t already scooped up the rights to this one.

Kristin Bock

Glass Bikini [2021]

Prose poems and origin myths that cannonball into the surreal and never depart. I loved Kristin Bock’s debut Cloisters (2008), but this follow-up seems more chiseled, more crystalline, more...glass. "All night, the doll waltzes through the corn until dawn erases her face. Blades sprout from her neck and she ascends into the cracked clouds." Last year, I took a generative course on surrealism with Bock that led to chimera poems and snow globe poems and monster poems. 10/10 would recommend. If you want a sample of Glass Bikini, be sure to check out her recent feature over at Mercurius Mag.

Joe Wenderoth

Disfortune (1995)

Letters to Wendy's (2000)

No Real Light (2007)

If I Don’t Breathe, How Do I Sleep? (2014)

I can't think of another book comparable to Wenderoth’s epistolary novel Letters to Wendy’s. Fragmented and mad and disgusting and candid and out of control. I'm glad I read three of his poetry collections before opening his "opus", as I only knew him through his prose (is it prose?) but I really enjoyed both styles equally. Here’s an example of a poem.

EARLY CAPITALISM

they are perfecting the pillow

with which

you are being suffocated

now it sings to you

and shows you pictures

I’m also a sucker for debut poetry collections and Wenderoth’s did not disappoint. I’ll leave you with the tiniest poem in his debut collection, featured below, for good measure:

PRAYER

fix me, a blast

Stanley G Crawford

Log of the SS The Mrs Unguentine [1972]

Hell yes. Think Waterworld (1995) meets Piranesi (2020). The sweeping (and expanding) log of Mrs. Unguentine, perpetually on a vessel with her husband, who is both there and not there, around the corner and beneath a board, up in a tree or drifting at sea. I’ve said too much. This was a beautiful, surprisingly moving, and strange novella.

T. Kingfisher

What Moves the Dead [2022]

I started reading this at the same time as I started watching The Last of Us, and the fungus connection freaked me out. Having never read the original Poe tale, this one chilled me to the core. With a near perfect pacing, this is a novella full of slow haunts that build with each chapter. My first time reading Kingfisher's work, but certainly not my last. What Feasts at Night, the follow-up (both part of her Sworn Soldier series) is out February 2024 and it looks incredible.

Jake Bauer

Tracey Emin’s Tent [2022]

The day instantly becomes a good day when poet Mikko Harvey, unannounced, mails you a book. The book at hand was Jake Bauer's debut full-length poetry collection, out with 42 Miles Press, and one that I read in one sitting. Then, again, the very next day. Absurdist and delicate and lost in time, it's a book in direct conversation with art and artists. Ekphrastic and imaginative (complete with a Russell Edson cameo), it feels like sifting through a cloud and finding a series of tiny objects, all with their own madcap stories.

S. Yarberry

A Boy in the City [2022]

S. Yarberry’s debut poetry collection is a cohesive, ambient, and atmospheric journey through a metropolitan landscape. Feeling like a hazy voyage, this Deep Vellum release is reflective, cerebral, and image-driven. “we try to crawl inside each other’s bodies. / We sit like this until one of us disappears.” Start to finish, this one reads like music.

Marosa di Giorgio

I Remember Nightfall [2017]

I adore fragmented prose poems, especially if there's a touch of surrealism underneath a woodland and/or folkloric setting. Uruguayan author Marosa di Giorgio’s I Remember Nightfall fits all of that criteria. A few years ago, I read her other prose poetry collection, The History of Violets (which is also worth your while), but this particular collection caught my attention thanks to Jose Hernandez Diaz, who taught some of Giorgio’s work in one of his recent prose poetry courses. The whole class agreed: Marosa Di Giorgio is a treasure.

Sean Singer

Today in the Taxi [2022]

One of the my favorite reads of the year. With a strong through-line and a cohesive collection from beginning to end. Every page starts with a new standalone taxi episode, weaving jazz and customer service and reflections and insights. Beautiful slices-of-life intertwined with minute nightmares. It's a metropolitan musical joy ride packed with every emotion available in New York City.

Mike Kleine & Dan Hoy

Where the Sky Meets the Ocean and the Air Tastes Like Metal and the Birds Don't Make a Sound [2021]

Mike Kleine and Dan Hoy have created a back-and-forth collaborative apocalyptic fever dream of a detective novel. Sparse and speedy and wild every step of the way. Evenson’s description of “detective novel on acid” is pretty spot on. I’ll build off his blurb and say it’s like if Brautigan rewrote Blade Runner 2049, or if Hunter S. Thompson rewrote Sin City. Since all parties mentioned are dead, this book will have to do. Out now with Trnsfr Books.

Giada Scodellaro

Some of Them Will Carry Me [2022]

I loved the sparseness of Scodellaro’s debut collection Some of Them Will Carry Me. The tiny stories interspersed with even tinier stories. Dorothy Project can do no wrong and Scodellaro is quickly becoming a surrealist force. Maybe because I was ingesting/digesting both at the same time, but I see this book in kindred spirit with Liam Bailey’s Enfant Terrible (my favorite album of the year). This book also felt like the more fractured metropolitan counterpart / sibling to Jen George's The Babysitter at Rest, another favorite.

Luke Wortley

Shared Blood (2023)

[interview coming soon]

Blurb provided for the book: Luke Wortley's Shared Blood is a cohesive and connected collection of prose poems that see-saw between becoming a father while dealing with an estranged father of your own. Blending dream logic with the achingly real, Shared Blood presents Midwestern family life with a surrealist tilt of reality where everything is slightly sideways. In a world where staircases are made of hands and milk pours out of eyes, this is a book of lips and teeth and bones and bourbon. Ghosts and confessions and love and grief. Gutting, heart-wrenching paragraphs packed with absence. A city in a stomach, a sunflower sprouting out of a phone.

Jonathan Cardew

A World Beyond Cardboard [2022]

A masterclass in flash, or a master of flash, Jonathan Cardew’s short and sweet book features a handful of tiny stories, all at once tender and heartbreaking and absurd and strange. They’re funny, they off the wall, and they’re usually featuring an element of loss or domestic nostalgia. It’s all so real and yet so very off. My favorite kind of prose.

billy woods

A is for Anarchist [2023]

woods is one of the greats. With two of the best rap albums of the year, the prolific artist also managed to release a book accessible for adults and kids alike. This is an abecedarian for the underground hip-hop heads. A picture book for kids who collect vinyl and make beats. It’s a treat. And the vivid illustrations from M. Musgrove are just as strong as the text.

Armin Tolentino

We Meant to Bring it Home Alive [2019]

Armin Tolentino’s debut poetry collection We Meant to Bring it Home Alive (great title) is a deep-dive into the realm of fantasy and fiction and imagination. A jam-packed first release, this one is full of whimsical ideas and bedtime stories, faraway fables and mystical myths, some of which I could see becoming YA novels.

Jack Handey

Deep Thoughts [1992]

These tiny stories made me really laugh as a kid when they were on SNL (my first taste of flash?), but now, reading them 20+ years later, I'm enamored by the strangenesses and the absurdism and the surrealism found throughout. Handey can damn near pack more magic and humor in 50 words than some of the best flash fiction/microfiction writers out there. I also bought the follow up, Deeper Thoughts, to be reread in 2024.

Gabrielle Bates

Judas Goat [2023]

Gabrielle Bates’ debut poetry collection, Judas Goat, is full of an atmospheric folklore. An ambient calm. Striking snapshots packed with a melancholic daydream quality. I found out about her work through her highly recommended poetry podcast, The Poet Salon, where she (alongside Dujie Tahat and Luther Hughes) interviews writers like Ross Gay, Rick Barot, Taneum Bambrick, and many others. In Bates’ debut, she gathers her life experiences alongside her poetic inspirations and her close-eyed view of craft in order to make crystalline a woodland collection. Like covering moss over a patch of glass. These poems feel animalistic yet tranquil, violent yet tender. Earlier, I misspelled Judas Goat as Judas Ghost and I think that’s fine, too.

Cassandra Khaw

The Salt Grows Heavy [2023]

“A mermaid and a plague doctor walk into a bar.” Not quite, no, but not far off either. This horror novella by Cassandra Khaw charts a brutal vision quest into the depths of hell. Violent and hallucinatory. Folkloric and poetic and dense. Like Brian Evenson spending the weekend with a tarot deck. Like a Lapvona side quest through the lens of the witch. I loved every page. I loved every plague. Yes, I'd watch this mini-series. Khaw’s other (more well-known) book, Nothing But Blackened Teeth, is next on my list.

Joseph Bienvenu

Atom Parlor [2010]

I met Joseph Bienvenu earlier this year and he was kind enough to gift me his book. A friend of Nathan Hoks (is a friend of mine), they both attended one of my Chicago readings and we talked shop over cold beer and good music. Returning home, I enjoyed Bienvenu’s 2010 collection, Atom Parlor. Strange and lyrical and willing to take risks, it reminded me of Canadian writer Gary Barwin. “Touch the belly like a broken temple / so that nothing may remain.” I hear Bienvenu and Hoks have a few collaborative poems in the works. Again, I’ve said too much…

Shannon Burns

Oosh Boosh [2016]

I don’t know where or if I’m remembering correctly, but I believe I first found out about this collection after Mark Leidner shouted it out. Was it for having some of the best surprise lines he’s ever read? Probably. Was it for having some of the strongest ‘humor’ poems he’s ever seen? Most definitely. Oosh Boosh is full of some all-timers. Like “This Explains Everything” and “Apology #1” and so many more. I see she has another book from 2020 called In God’s Hair on Goodreads, but I can’t manage to track down a copy. Any leads would be greatly appreciated. As I type this, Let’s hope Burns is hard at work on a sophomore collection.

Caleb Bouchard

The Satirist [2023]

Very American, very strange, very weird, very vivid. All good things in my eyes when it comes to prose poetry. This is a great offering from Caleb Bouchard (his first collection of prose poems) who properly blends humor with surrealism and the mundanity of daily life. James Tate and Russell Edson seem to be smiling throughout this collection, in spirit and companionship.

Jesi Bender

Kinderkrankenhaus [2021]

Open this book and find yourself locked away in an orphanage or a boarding school or a hospital or a psych ward or a mental facility of the timeless mind. Telling the story like a fractured fable set atop a wobbly stage, this is a play that reads like an extended Russell Edson poem (he wrote plays, too) or perhaps a Leonora Carrington daydream. See also: fever dream. Or maybe this is a side story to Aglaja Veteranyi’s Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta. Either way, this play is a literary treat for vocabulary and imagination enthusiasts alike.

Kate Durbin

Hoarders [2021]

Depending on your level of hoarding capabilities, if you need material to defend yourself when it comes to leaving some shirts on the floor or some tchotchkes on your desk, read this book as a testament to what humans (see also: Americans) are capable of achieving. Durbin’s collection feels like a grotesque real estate walkthrough, a reality show of obsessions and disgust and itemized lifestyles. You can visualize it all. You can smell it. You can’t look away.

S.E. Smith

I Live in a Hut [2012]

I was reading old interviews by Rebecca Wadlinger and she shouted out this collection. Winner of the 2011 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize, selected by Matthea Harvey, this is a lively and animated debut offering. Divided into three sections ("Parties," "Beauty," and "Devastation”), it’s energized, nonchalant, and over the top. “Too Bad” might be my favorite final poem to any collection, ever.

honorable mentions read in 2023 (previously featured in past lists)