It’s been almost 8 months since my last blog post here. I’m afraid a lot of my plans for this space escaped me as the year rushed by. Probably the biggest reason for this is because of the role I accepted as an editor for EastOver Press and EOP’s literary journal Cutleaf. In our first year, we published 23 bi-weekly issues of the journal. We also published 4 wonderful books of poetry that I’m really proud of. (See the links below to purchase EOP books and others!) This new position as an editor requires a lot of reading, and so my list of published books I read last year (2021) isn’t quite as robust as I’d like. But I love seeing other people’s what-I’ve-read lists, so here’s mine.
- Julia Cameron – Finding Water
- Haruki Murakami – What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
- Wesley Browne – Spoon (manuscript)
- Jennifer Stewart Miller – Thief
- Haruki Murakami – After Dark
- Jay McCoy – The Occupation
- Britton Shurley – Spinning the Vast Fantastic
- Matthew Landrum – Berlin Poems
- Katrin Ottarsdóttir – Are There Copper Pipes in Heaven
- Chaelee Dalton – Mother Tongue
- Frank Jamison – Marginal Notes
- Daniel Corrie – For the Future
- Jesse Donaldson – On Homesickness
- Matt Urmy – The Rain in the Bell
- Liz Ahl – Beginning Ballroom Dance
- Cathryn Hankla – Galaxies
- Erica Anderson-Senter – Midwestern Poet’s Incomplete Guide to Symbolism
- Ralph Sneeden – Surface Fugue
- Rosemary Royston – Second Sight
- John Davis, Jr. – The Places That Hold
- Marie Parsons – An Echo in the Wind
- Katherine Hauswirth – The Book of Noticing
- Larry Pike – Even in the Slums of Providence
- A.E. Hines – Any Dumb Animal
- Tarn Wilson – In Praise of Inadequate Gifts
- Ross Gay – The Book of Delights
- Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse
- Megan Culhane Galbraith – The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book
- Sylvia Woods – What We Take With Us
- Lauren Davis – The Missing Ones
- Ralph Sneeden – Evidence of the Journey
- Shawna Kay Rodenberg – Kin: A Memoir
I’d like to think that my list for next year will be at least twice this long. And maybe it will be. But it really doesn’t matter. These days, I’m trying to be more comfortable with the idea of slowing down the process. What this means to me is sometimes reading fewer books, but giving more time to think about and engage with each one.
If you’ve posted your own 2021 list or have recommendations for what to read in 2022, please post links and ideas in the comments section. I’d love to hear from you. Happy New Year!
Denton Loving 