Earlier this year, I resolved to take a closer look at the graphic novels and poetry collections accumulating on my library “saved lists” and my digital TBR “shelves”. Those lists have lengthened rather than shortened, but there’s been plenty of good reading along the way.

In Just So Happens by Fumio Obata (2014), Yumiko is a graphic novelist working in London UK, who returns to Japan after receiving some family news. Through the ritual of Noh drama, she comes to some realisations about love and loss. Obata lectures in illustration and in this interview discusses the use of colour and the influence of French comic culture in his use of larger panels which forced him to create consistently complex scenes. When Fumio Obata discusses the distinction between the commercial-art sector of manga and high art, and how much notice creators receive in each sector, it reminded me of debates here over the terms ‘comics’ and ‘graphic novels’.

This year, I also finished Masami Tsuda’s lengthy manga series, Kare Kano, which is about a young woman named Yukino and her soulmate Soichiro, who meet when they’re teenagers and grow closer over time. Some volumes are dedicated more to her story, some to his. With each “chapter” in a volume, there are a couple of panels in which the author talks about her life and her creative process. Sometimes she draws little pictures of all her favourite things, like lotions or teas, and other times she talks about how she decided to change part of a story, or in this case, how she felt about nearing the end of her time with these characters. There are reading and listening suggestions and she reminisces about her own favourite anime (one was based on Anne of Green Gables).

In Kamau Brathwaite’s Born to Slow Horses (2005), there is an excerpt of correspondence with Cyril Dabydeem, which also looks back to literary ancestors. “I like Wole Soyinka’s idea too: ‘I am [a] writer and therefore an explorer. My immediate tribe remains the tribe of explorers.’” This volume of his writing did not include the kind of supplementary material that I have found helpful to appreciate his view of the world, so I just let it wash over me, which is probably not quite what he means with his concept of tideologies, but maybe it’s not too far off either!

In one of my favourite reads last year, How the Word Is Passed (2021), Clint Smith writes about his own creative process: “I spent hours poring over both the voice and the form of my poems, revising, rearranging, adding, and deleting, until there were dozens of iterations of every stanza, every line. I thought of how seriously I took the craft. I thought of how all my work, even in response to violence, stemmed from a place of love—a love of my community, a love of my family, a love of my partner, a love of those hoping to build a better world than the one we live in.”

Was it Clint Smith’s book or Fred D’Aguiar’s memoir, Year of Plagues (2021) that brought Grace Nichols into my stack? One of those introduced me to I Is a Long Memoried Woman (1983). The poems remind me of Olive Senior (for their quintessential Caribbean flavour) and Langston Hughes (for their shape and something kind of dreamy). What stands out about the specific copy of the book, however, is the enthusiastic marginalia: someone discovered this collection and loved it HARD (in term of their affections and the density of their pencil lead).

In The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984), Nichols writes about resistance and language, but includes a poem about wandering the supermarket aisles paralyzed by choice. Asana and the Animals: A Book of Pet Poems (1997) turned out to be a children’s book (well, yes, I might have guessed) illustrated in warm, bright drawings by Sarah Adams. At first, when it arrived, I tucked it into a corner near the other library books, where its larger format could lean against the wall, and I expected it would stay there, untouched, until I returned it with the others to the library. A few weeks later, I chuckled over a few of the poems, and then read a few each night for awhile, when the news was sorrow-soaked and I couldn’t concentrate on other printed pages.

Ironically, that was also the correct mood to enjoy Britteney Black Rose Kapri’s Black Queer Hoe (2018). These are poems to imagine being performed: it’s all about her voice. The opening piece serves as an introduction, and feels like a prose poem, there are some innovative forms (one which is mostly a strikethrough that provokes questions about how anger is subsumed to construct a point for a particular listener), even a haiku. There’s also an enthusiastic  blurb by Samantha Irby! “…all these poems is my sons. i create space for marginalized youth to counter the narrative being forced upon them. i also punt toddlers for crying on airplanes.”

Speaking of airplanes, I was very excited to read James Hannaham’s Pilot Imposter (2021) because I absolutely LOVED his novel Delicious Foods. But it turns out, that’s like loving Téju Cole’s Open City (and I did love it, too!) and then discovering that none of his other books are quite like that: the thing to love about these writers is the way their minds hum, because it’s hard to predict what they’ll publish next.

Pilot Imposter is a mixed narrative that I bounced off repeatedly, until I started thinking about it as poetry, even though it looks like a glossy-paged, photograph-dotted, collection of short stories. Sometimes a segment left me pensive and slightly melancholic: “How much of a chance does this piece of writing have to last? How long will any piece of writing last? Will the desire to keep writing alive ever fuel the desire to keep each other alive?” Other times I felt moved and comforted: “Instead we discovered, to our delight, that we had always been near to each other without knowing, possibly making our way toward each other, maybe subconsciously. In either of our histories, I can’t think of a more significant irrelevance.”

Hannaham has some observations about poetry that made me smile, given my efforts to read more poetry this year. “We take the worst, least serious poet seriously if he tries hard enough. We honor him for even bothering.” This year, I have been taking time with short works, allowing them to sink in, while I sit quietly with a cup of tea and focus on a single page rather than turning pages.

After a year of abundant page-turning in 2021, this is something of a relief and a balm. But it turns out, poetry might have more concrete applications than I realised: “Maybe someone has written a poem that can wash your dishes. […] Assuming that a poet could write verse that performs household chores, and could see his words for that purpose, why would he do anything else?”

What plans did you make for reading this year that you’re reconsidering now that the year is drawing to a close?