92Y's Read By

"How savage our moments of live, how sacred." A special re-issue for the end of 2020. We'll be back on Jan. 10! 

Luis Alberto Urrea on his selection:

Annie Dillard’s books came to me in one of those writerly seasons of transition. I could dip into any of her first volumes and get lost. It’s the way she conflates what some people call “nature writing” with philosophical depths at play, with sudden bursts of homespun vernacular and finally what can only be a kind of theological verve. She is one of the masters who pushes me into a new way of seeing.

In "Living Like Weasels," Annie Dillard is telling us how savage and sacred our moments of life, how fleeting. She is reminding us to live all of our moments ferociously. I think that is the perfect message for all of us right now.

This episode was first released on May 18, 2020.

Teaching a Stone to Talk at Bookshop.org

"Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Joseph O’Neill on his selection:

I chose to read from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Pnin, a book I turn to very often when I need a tonic.

Pnin at Bookshop.org 

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Alice Oswald on her selection:

John Clare's Northborough Sonnets (written between 1832 and 1837) are designed as astonishments rather than thoughts... Fourteen lines, ordered into separable couplets, each couplet containing a different moment - these poems are like portable fresh air and I have been reading them every day since moving to the city.

Northborough Sonnets at Bookshop.org

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Hanif Abdurraqib on his selection:

This poem is an interesting choice for me, as someone who is always too anxious to engage in the act of singing at any karaoke night, but there is something I love about being present during a karaoke night. And what I think I love about seeing the kind of excitement that fans through a room or that fans through one of my friends when they’re on stage, singing a song that they know they know, is that karaoke is in some ways the height of the communal exercise of enjoying music. There is no real hierarchy; the person who is singing on the stage is not the profession who wrote the song; it almost in someways does not matter if they sing the song well. What matters is that they sing the song with a kind of unbridled enthusiasm that can tremor through a crowd and get that crowd to also tilt towards a type of ecstasy, knowing that they know a song too. It is this really, to me, fascinating mold of music and music enjoyment. So watching a friend of mine transform into someone entirely different onstage, and through that transformation, this grand excitement—it allows me to hear a song differently. And I think this poem encompasses that. And I think this poem celebrates a moment of loving music in a way that feels familiar to me—the interior love of a song—where a song becomes more what we need it to be, more than what it might have been.

All Heathens at Bookshop.org

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Alan Hollinghurst on his selection:

I read “September 1, 1939,” the date being that of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, which marks the start of the Second World War. It’s a poem Auden himself was dissatisfied with, he cut it, changed some important wording, and later refused to reprint it, feeling it was intellectually dishonest. Nonetheless, in its magnificent rhetoric and its address to issues which continue to press upon us, it retains a power to move, to frighten and to reassure. It’s a poem which comes often to my mind these days, as so many things around us get worse and worse, faster and faster, and the good things that happen take on an ever greater freight of hope.

“September 1, 1939” at Poets.org

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Miller Wolf Oberman on his selection:

I will not try to introduce Anne Carson here. If you are one of the several people who do not know the work of this poet, essayist, and classicist, I will just say I envy you your impending discovery. One of the great joys, for me, of her work is that I am never certain what I’ll find. A scholarly translation of an ancient Greek play? A collaborative reinvention of an ancient text into a graphic novel? A poetry collection? A combination of these things that pours out of a box in a literal accordion, connecting a single, brief lament in Latin to contemporary grief, because what is time? In Carson’s “The Life of Towns,” which comprises one section of her 1995 collection of poems and essays, Plainwater, each line is end stopped, disrupting the sentence as a unit entirely, and interrupting our desire to see a sentence as something whole.

Plainwater at Bookshop.org

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Ricardo Alberto Maldonado on his selections: What could we say to them, those we love, those we’ve lost, our beloveds, now eight months into a pandemic? What kind of vow could make ourselves legible to them and therefore to ourselves? It's been 229 days since I left the Upper East Side and opened shop in Brooklyn, where I spend most of my days at work. These three poems, I feel, make me believe that we can find a way to make the world bearable for each other—the strength and power we desperately need comes from new contract for life and for each other.

The Carrying by Ada Limón at Bookshop.org

The Pink Box by Yesenia Montilla at Bookshop.org

Ceremonies by Essex Hemphill at Thriftbooks.com

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Juan Gabriel Vásquez on his selection:

My choice is one of my favorite passages in Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, the book that we Spanish speakers think of as the place where the novel was born. Along with Shakespeare and Montaigne, Cervantes, with this book, invented the modern man; and, as I intend to prove or suggest, he also anticipated the modern woman. In this passage, written sometime around the turn of the seventeenth century, a young man by the name Grisóstomo has killed himself after being rejected by the beautiful shepherdess Marcela. His friends, who blame Marcela for his suicide, are out to bury him when she suddenly appears. One of the friends asks her if she has come to see if with her presence blood spurts from the wounds of the dead man, or to gloat over the cruelties of her nature, or to tread on this unfortunate corpse. This is her answer, which I will read first in Edith Grossman’s great translation, and then in the Spanish original.

Don Quixote trans. Edith Grossman at Bookshop.org

Don Quijote de la Mancha at Bookshop.org

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Dunya Mikhail on her selection:

My translation of this poem by Louise Glück, the 2020 Nobel Laureate in Literature, is part of my continuous work to translate contemporary American poetry into Arabic. Like the rest of Louise Glück’s poetry, “Winter Recipes from the Collective” makes us contemplate how a personal narrative informs a universal truth. 

This poem was originally published in the Winter 2020 issue of The American Scholar.

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Tina Chang on her selection:

I chose to read "Things I Didn't Know I Loved," by Nâzım Hikmet and translated from the Turkish by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, from the collection, Poems of Nâzım Hikmet. Hikmet is one of Turkey's most foremost poets and recognized as one of the world's most influential poets of the twentieth century. Born in 1902, he was a prolific writer and wrote plays, poems, novels, and collaborated on librettos. He spent thirteen years in jail as a political prisoner for his "radical acts." "Things I Didn't Know I Loved" was written by Hikmet after being released from prison and, in it, I recognize the almost childlike appreciation for sky, earth, and the cosmos, after spending a long time in solitude. During the pandemic, I am deeply comforted by the appreciation of simple things. When I walk outside, I breathe in and am grateful that all I remembered is still intact. During this most complex year, this poem has been my constant companion.

Poems of Nâzım Hikmet at Persea Books

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0