Best of 2020 reading list

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Written By Banshee Lit
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As is now our annual tradition, we’ve asked our contributors and editors to share their favourite shorter reads of the year - poetry, essays, and stories from a variety of sources. Enjoy!

Bebe Ashley (Gold Light Shining)

A poem: on poetry & history by Aracelis Girmay from The Black Maria (BOA Editions).

An essay: When the World Is on Fire, Write by Alexander Chee, an excerpt from How to Write An Autobiographical Novel which has been one of my absolute favourite reads.

Laura Cassidy (editor)

In this surreal year, the following brought inspiration and comfort: 

Emily S. Cooper (non-fiction, issue #10)

I have been thinking and writing about grief a lot recently. I hope that the rest of the years’ picks are a bit more cheerful because I’m going to hit you with three pieces about people dying that moved me during 2020. (I’ve also noticed that these are all by men, which contradicts the announcement I made to a (male) poet in Paris recently that I don’t read men. We all contain multitudes.)

Death And The Family in The Winter Papers by John Patrick McHugh is a beautifully tender exploration into the near misses and quiet solitudes of grief. It never reads as sentimental or grasping, a credit to McHugh who has a collection coming out with New Island Press in Spring 2021.

The Changing Mountain in Poetry London by Stephen Sexton is an education in the elegiac form itself. The prose is careful and gentle, as you might expect from Sexton, who has form in writing about death with a touch that appears light but belies great depth. It also features Mount Errigal and the Poisoned Glen, a landscape close to my heart.

I watched Bad News in the Stinging Fly Galway Issue by Dean Fee [full disclosure – we live together] being written over the year and have a soft spot for the main character, Marianne. She dies on the first page so this isn’t a spoiler. She’s bad tempered and rude and I love her. The whole issue is glorious, a real treat when the days of sitting outside Neachtain’s nursing a pint seem so far away.

Conor Crummey (fiction, issue #9.5)

‘Hold Your Fire’ by Chloe Wilson, from Granta 151

‘While waiting for his faecal transplant, my husband wasn’t as fun as he used to be.’ This black-hearted story had me rolling in the aisles. A woman spends her day engineering missiles, a job that gives her far more satisfaction than her family life. She feels a sort of wearied pity for her husband, who is single-minded in his pursuit of an experimental enema treatment. She experiences affection for her primary school aged son only when she realises that he might harbour a malicious streak. Very few stories have ever made me empathise with cruelty and disregard the way this one did. I felt like I was being let in on a mean-spirited but hilarious joke. I couldn’t help but snigger from behind my hand.

‘The Chair’ by Cathy Sweeney, from The Stinging Fly Issue 41 Volume 2 (and in Modern Times, Stinging Fly Books)

This is a two-page story about a world in which couples use a special chair to willingly administer electric shocks to each other. As with many of Sweeney’s stories, the experience is disorientating. It’s rather like walking into a room full of people doing something deeply weird. You are fascinated to know more and wish you were brave enough to stay, but are undeniably relieved when you back out slowly and close the door. Her collection, Modern Times, is absolutely marvellous.

‘Clementine, Carmelita, Dog’ by David Means, from Granta 152

Sometimes a story comes along at just the right time in your life. Sometimes that means something high-minded about the power of literature to reveal parts of yourself of which you were previously unaware. Other times it means that you just got a dog and then read a short story about a dog. That was the situation I found myself with David Means’s latest in Granta’s summer edition. The brilliance of the story lies in how vividly it draws out a non-human form of perception while making clear that something is lost in the telling:

‘Dog memory isn’t constructed along temporal lines, gridded out along a distorted timeline, but rather in an overlapping and, of course, deeply olfactory manner, like a fanned-out deck of cards, perhaps, except that the overlapping areas aren’t hidden but are instead more intense, so that the quick flash of a squirrel in the corner of the yard, or the crisp sound of a bag of kibble being shaken, can overlap with the single recognizable bark of a schnauzer from a few blocks away on a moonlit night.’

Jaydn DeWald (poetry, issue #10)

Here are my 3:

Emma Flynn (fiction, issue #10)

1. The Curious Creation of Anna Kavan by Leo Robson in The New Yorker, March 2020

2. This Brand is Late Capitalism by Rachel Connolly on The Baffler, February 2020

3. On Politics and a Liberal Platitude by Alicia Kennedy, Substack, July 2020

Claire Hennessy (editor)

  • Flash fiction: ‘Outside’ by Caelainn Bradley, in The Dublin Review, No. 80

  • Journalism: ‘Ireland’s Abandoned Babies’ by Rosita Boland, in The Irish Times, 11 Jan 2020

  • Poem: ‘That’s quite a trick if you can pull it off’ by Ciara MacLaverty, in Staying Human (Bloodaxe)

Sneha Subramanian Kanta (poetry, issue #10)

Here are my recommendations, in no particular order:

1) I'll be gone in the dark, Chelsea Dingman, Glass Poetry

2) Banjara, Rajiv Mohabir, Poetry magazine

3) garba, or womb... , Raena Shirali, VQR

Wes Lee (poetry, issue #10)

Marty Goddard's extraordinary and forgotten life is reclaimed in The New York Times article by Pagan Kennedy: 'The Rape Kit's Secret History'. Goddard was an activist and advocate for women, and the inventor of the rape kit (her original idea was claimed by a man). The article documents Kennedy's search for Goddard, revealing how the lives of women so often sink into obscurity.

The powerful visions in Fiona Benson's 'Vertigo & Ghost' left me breathless. A highlight for me was '[translations from the annals: Ganymede]', a ground-shaking, spleen-busting poem filled with ancient wonder, terror and awe. From the maximalism of '[transformation: Callisto]', to the minimalism of 'Haruspex', I celebrate the head-spinning fury unleashed in Vertigo & Ghost. These poems have become part of my cells.  

And last but far from least, my fellow New Zealander, Hera Lindsay Bird. Her pamphlet 'Pamper Me to Hell & Back'. So playful, so brave, so funny, so talented. I can't wait to see what she does next.

Katie McDermott (fiction, issue #10)

My picks are 'Drive' by Elaine Garvey, The Dublin Review 79, ' Fan Fiction #3' by Louise Nealon, The Stinging Fly Issue 42 (Both short stories), and a poem by Kathryn Hummel '37 excuses for why I failed @ Bumble' (it's become a rallying cry for my single friends and family) in Banshee #10.

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan (flash, issue #10)

- ’My Name is’, a poem by Polina Cosgrave, in her debut collection My Name Is, published by Dedalus Press this year. I first read Polina’s poems in Writing Home: The ’New Irish’ Poets, and it’s amazing to see her have her own gorgeous collection out now. She did a reading of this poem on the RTÉ Poetry Show and it just kicked me in the lungs I loved it.

- ‘Hallelujah, Family!’ by Ludmilla Petrushevsyaka, translated by Anna Summers, in There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories, published in 2013 by Penguin. I picked one story, but this entire collection is deliciously claustrophobic, brutal, and brimming with bitter humour. I loved it so much.

I am starting to suspect I have a masochistic relationship with writing by Russian women and honestly I am ok with this.

- ’Sweet or Salty?’ a flash by Sue Divin, in Splonk Issue 1. In lockdown I did a flash fiction workshop with Sue and she shared her flash with us. I love how terrifying and tender it is at the same time, I genuinely got teenage butterflies reading this.

Maureen Ott (non-fiction, issue #9.5)

A short story that has stayed with me this year is “How to Teach the Ghost in Your House to Sing” by Noa Covo, which appeared in jmwwblog in July 8, 2020. The story somehow sticks with me and I find myself looking around my place for my own “possible ghost.”

Billy Ramsell (poetry, issue #9.5)

I have chosen three poems, by Irish poets, that graced the august pages of Poetry magazine over the past twelve months:

Rachel Sargent (fiction, issue #9.5)

Here are my picks:

Though it was released last year, I keep returning to Julia Armfield's 'Longshore Drift' from Granta 148. It's a vivid and mesmerizing exploration of girlhood love and friendship, and the messy ways they can mix. The relationship between the two girls is warm and familiar, like an old sweatshirt from high school, but ultimately it's Armfield's sweeping sentences and sharp imagery that make this story soar for me. The final image of the basking sharks and the girls bobbing above them will be stuck in my brain for a long time.

In 'The Arrival Fallacy' published by The Cardiff Review, Kate Smyth describes a sudden sense of loss and aimlessness after finishing her PhD. Finding herself at the National Gallery one day, Smyth discovers Alice Neel and is taken with her piece, 'Cityscape'. In investigating the life and art of Neel, Smyth delivers an excellent interrogation on creativity, success, and producing art within the constraints of capitalism.

Rosamund Taylor (poetry, issue #10)

Some top pics:

1. Self Portrait as the Changeling by Halee Kirkwood took my breath away. It works as a beautiful exploration of the self and the body, full of lush imagery and carefully controlled emotion. But if you're a nerd, you begin to notice something oddly familiar about the images, and you realise that it's also a tribute to the character Odo from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and you jump for joy.

2. The Sheer Velocity and Ephemerality of Cy Twombly by Anne Carson is another gem. I'm always excited to read new work by Carson, and this essay is a complex mixture of the literary and the artistic, bringing paintings and poetry alive together.

3. I Lost My Innocence in a Hospital Room and No One Handed It In by Hannah Hodgson is a brave, passionate poem that travels through a range of emotional registers and holds a huge amount of tension in its onslaught of words. I'm amazed by Hodgson's control over her subject, and the poem's political and emotional depth.

David Toms (poetry, issue #9.5)

One of my favourite reads in 2020 has been the issues of online magazine bath magg and one of my favourite poems across this year's issues was 'Family Planning' by Victoria Kennefick in bath magg issue 3.

A book-length essay which I spent a lot of time with this year and really enjoyed (& think is a really important intervention) was Robert Kiely's Incomparable Poetry: An Essay on the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 and Irish Literature which can be downloaded as a free pdf from punctum books.

No writer or writing has given me as much life this year as Ellen Dillon's. Her project on the history of butter in Ireland told as a poem defies easy categorisation but deserves a wide readership. It is AMAZING. Some extracts from the project are available on Junction Box.

Tom Vowler (fiction, issue #9.5)

Not published in 2020 but I found them this year...

Mark Ward (poetry, issue #10)

Here's my three picks:

Hilary White (fiction, issue #10)

Three favourite pieces I read in 2020:


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