Stephanie Bolster's Reading Recommendations

I've had a great run of poetry reading this summer; having just begun a long-anticipated sabbatical, I'm finally getting to books that have been on my list for a long time: Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Renee Sarojini Saklikar's Children of Air India, Soraya Peerbaye's Tell. These books have heightened my growing feeling that the best contemporary poetry engages with larger issues, generally difficult ones. (That is, larger than the issue of how to write a good poem. Which is already large.) I've also savoured Geoff Dyer's White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World (the depth of the best insights makes it worth the read, even though the speaker of the essays is not always a laudable character) and — years late — Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. I finished it some time ago and it has indeed not let me go.

Stephanie Bolster is the author of four books of poetry. Her first, White Stone: The Alice Poems, won the Governor General’s and the Gerald Lampert Awards in 1998. Her most recent book, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth (Brick Books, 2011), was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award.