Best of 2021 reading list
Welcome to another year of our ‘best of’ list focusing on short forms (there are enough ‘best books’ lists out there!). 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 (essay, issue #12)
In a year of a declining attention span, I am very grateful for the following short works --
A poem: Stephen Sexton's 'Humour' from Cheryl's Destinies is an absolute classic of a poem. I like to read it whenever I want a burger, or whenever I want to cry.
An essay: 'Wilkommen: Cabaret' from Emily Garside's Love That Journey for Me: The Queer Revolution of Schitt's Creek. I loved this for the way it brings together multiple threads in pop culture and for doing some of the work in explaining why the Cabaret episode of Schitt's Creek is my favourite, and the one I rewatch most often.
An unquantifiable: Possibly my favourite read of the year, in form and with an innate ability in language, is 'Part One: Righteous Migrants' from Musa Okwonga's In the end, it was all about love. These short flashes of prose were so brilliant I have nothing else to say but that everyone should read it.
Clíodhna Bhreathnach (poetry, issue #12)
1. Poetry: I am compelled to choose The Last Consultation, by Dean Browne, which won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize this year. A febrile patient makes a surreal confession full of mistakes, reversals, excess and scarcity, their baroque litany oddly moving, as for me too, words can sometimes be too much and not enough. My parrot's clearly microwaved.
2. Short Story: In July I fell in love with Peter and Jane by Niamh Prior in the Stinging Fly. Prior wrote this using only the 300 words that are the most common in the English language as according to the British Ladybird Keywords series of the 1960s, and so unfolds an uncanny tale of a brother and sister in Thatcherite Britain, the childish register evoking a kitchen sink drama as if drawn by crayons. Beautiful, melancholy, and like nothing else.
3. Essay: Poetry Ireland Review performed a public service in their August edition this year by including Tríona Ní Shíocháin's essay, Foremothers, a remarkable history of women's oral poetic traditions in Ireland. Ní Shíocháin's account not only teaches us of the great women poet-composers such as Sápphó na Mumhan, but also of the vibrant culture of the masses of anonymous women who composed, narrated, and re-created poems as they laboured. The account of women's protest poetry is particularly electric, as are the quoted surviving poems. Songs to sing while churning butter and ending empires.
Dylan Brennan (poetry, issues #11 and #12)
I really loved reading ‘Ming’ by Jane Lovell. It’s the best poem I’ve read about a bivalve mollusc in ages. Little Ming was alive in the ocean before King Henry VIII took the throne. But we wanted to know more and so killed it. This poem won the Gingko prize and you can read it here.
Ada Limón’s poem ‘Privacy’ is really up my alley: ‘The crows seem enormous but only because / I am watching them too closely. They do not / care to be seen as symbols’. We want nature to mean something always in relation to us. But these crows are having none of it. The first line and the last line (‘On the black wet branches of the linden’) are the same except they’re not. Beautiful stuff.
William Keohane’s essay ‘Cratloe Wood Lake’, published in Banshee #12, is gorgeous. Read it.
Alvy Carragher (poetry, issue #12)
A piece which I found extraordinary was Özgecan Kesici's hybrid work titled: “Ana-Apalar: The Kazakh for Forbearance”. This is a poem/prose collage type thing that speaks to the next generation with such stunning clarity of both the present and the past. To quote one piece or explain why it matters would be to do a disservice to the text, and I just recommend that people read what begins in Dublin and then orbits outwards in incredible ways.
Alicia Byrne Keane's Surface Audience appeared in the Oyster River Pages and is a lovely piece about a type of anxiety--that desire and inability to prepare yourself to step forward onto a moving surface (I mean I am not going to unpack that metaphor, but we've all been there). The last lines are just so intensely wonderful, but perhaps my favourite thing about this poem is that it moves us from such an ordinary, humorous place (do seals have ears?) and we end up in that unexpected territory of epiphany, which for me is always the sign of a good poem.
Ever since I first heard her read Sisters, I've deeply loved Annemarie Ní Churreáin's work. Her recent book is no exception, and just recently she was Irish Times poem of the week with "Sowthistle", which continues some of those themes of sisterhood, girlhood. What it was/is to be a girl in Ireland, what it is to preserve those stories of the women that walked before us. In this gorgeous and haunting poem, she asks the eternal question "Who knows the earth more than a girl?"
Laura Cassidy (editor)
This year I especially enjoyed The Lobster Waltz by Laura-Blaise McDowell (second place in the Costa Short Story Award 2020) and the stunning essay Glitch City by Padraig Regan (PN Review 260 - July/August 21).
I’ve also admired the work selected by astute editor Sophie Furlong Tighe for Trinity’s student literary magazine Icarus — particularly Cerberus by Jessica Allen (Icarus Vol. 71 No. 1).
May Chong (poetry, issue #12)
Ode, P.H. Low, Strange Horizons (Southeast Asia Poetry Special)
Bride, Knife, Flaming Horse, M.L. Krishnan, Apparition Lit
Blood in the Thread, Cheri Kamei, Tor.com
Bernie Crawford (poetry, issue #11)
Below are just some of the amazing poems that have carried me through another surreal year.
Up Late by Nick Laird, published in the online edition of Granta, issue 156
Morola by Amlanjyoti Goswami, published in Skylight 47, issue 14
And full disclosure here I'm a co-editor of Skylight 47 but would encourage people to look out for the work of Amlan Goswami, a poet from India. Amlan read his poem at the zoom launch of issue 14 while his city, Delhi, was collapsing under COVID last May.
Telescope by Louise Gluck from her collection Averno, published by Carcanet
In our poetry reading group earlier this year we looked at the work of Louise Gluck. I love her work but this particular poem left me breathless.
And to add that Vicki Feaver's collection I Want! I Want! fought hard to be among my first three but I couldn't choose which one of the marvelous poems in the collection to name.
Jayden DeWald (poetry, issue #11)
Here are three knock-out pieces I’ve read this year:
Zoe Brigley’s “The Woman Who Loved a Bear”
Pen America’s Interview with Truong Tran
Marie Gethins (flash, issue #11)
Fragmented -- possibly the best description I can give for 2021. A year full of stops and starts, muted gains and painful losses. While dystopian, pandemic themes were abundant, these three pieces provide fresh views on loss and hope through fragmentation. Karen Jones provided a bevy of incredible flash this year, but a favourite, and my privilege to award first in the TSS Cambridge Flash Fiction Prize, 'Anatomy of the Aftermath' is a sparse, surreal exploration of grief which enriches upon multiple readings. Marne Liftin's 'Build-A-Bear' in Smokelong Quarterly considers the magic of childhood, regrets its loss, yet treasures its optimism. In CNF, 'After' by Sophie Scolnik-Brower in Hippocampus explores how past love never quite leaves and while reflections are found in new relationships, a delicate balance of past and present may be achieved.
Aimee Godfrey (poetry, issue #12)
Flirtations - Katie O Sullivan, The Milk House
Aphonic - Katelyn O Neill, The Stinging Fly (Issue 44)
Rebecca Goss (essay, issue #12)
'Mr Octopus for preemies' by Anita Pati, The Poetry Review, Summer issue, 2021
Poems from 'The Conversation' by Jo Burns and Emily Cooper, Wild Court, April 2021
'Bike' by Rachel Long, The Adroit Journal, Issue Thirty-Eight
Kevin Graham (poetry, issue #11)
In a heavy year, these 3 poems floated up without effort:
Up Late – Nick Laird, Granta
Wood – Emily Cooper, Banshee
Linkage – Vona Groake, The Poetry Review
Joanne Hayden (flash, issue #11)
Three pieces I enjoyed and admired in 2021 - a personal history, a flash and a poem:
Reset by Jessica Traynor, the Dublin Review Spring 2021
What Butch Says by Tania Hershman, Janus Literary
Kaepernick by Sasha Debevec-McKenney, The New Yorker
Claire Hennessy (editor)
‘The Depletion Prompts’ by David Means (The New Yorker) is all the things - love the topic, love the form, love it when it all works.
‘Normal Sheeple’ by Kevin Power (The Stinging Fly) is a review-essay about Paul Howard’s Ross O’Carroll-Kelly books and their relationship to Dublin that is spot-on in so many ways.
‘Creed’ by Annemarie Ní Churreáin (The Poison Glen) is one of many brilliantly furious poems in a collection that explores Ireland’s history of institutional abuse and neglect, devastating but still landing on the side of ‘art’ rather than ‘polemic’.
Nick Holdstock (fiction, issue #12)
Jo Lloyd, 'The Invisible', from her collection The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies
Keith Ridgway, 'The Party', The New Yorker
Ben Pester, 'Orientation', Granta
Alicia Byrne Keane (poetry, issue #11)
'Middle of a cloud, no telescope. (sentimental)' | Kelly Hoffer | The Chicago Review
Sara Keating (fiction, issue #12)
Poetry: Up Late by Nick Laird. Granta 156, 29 July 2021.
This confessional poem about the death of his father is both of the moment and timeless. Particularly effective is the way he draws attention to the depersonalization of ritual throughout the pandemic, before whirling outwards to encompass the universality of grief, "the new dark" that surrounds us when a planet like a parent dies.
Prose: A Critic At Large by Maggie Armstrong. Dublin Review Spring 2021
When I was reading this bracing piece by Maggie Armstrong, I wasn't sure if it was a short story or a personal essay. Either way, it exposes the mechanics of abusive relationships with brutal candor, how fear becomes complicity. Google subsequently told me it is a short story, but the story's form for me is less important than its truth.
William Keohane (essay, issue #12)
Seán Hewitt's poem St John's Wort from Tongues of Fire (2020). I was visiting a brother in hospital on the day that I read this poem for the first time. Hewitt's book had just arrived in the post, and before I left home, I took a moment to make some coffee and to read for a little while. Strange, how the right poem sometimes comes exactly when you need it to.
Amy Liptrot's essay Swimming Away from My Baby in Antlers of Water: Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland (2020). All of the contributions in Antlers of Water are uniquely beautiful, but Liptrot's essay is the last in the collection, and, in my opinion, it is a perfect ending.
Cameron Awkward-Rich's Meditations in an Emergency (2020). After I came across this poem, I listened to a recording of the poet reading it, and was moved by the cadence of his voice; that unique, transmasculine lilt. I love it, but I do not hear it all that often. To me, it sounds like music.
Beth Kilkenny (essay, issue #12)
Maggie Armstrong, 'Trouble' in Stinging Fly Summer 2021 Issue
David Means, 'The Depletion Prompts' in The New Yorker October 2021
This year I also discovered the poetry of Jameson Fitzpatrick, in particular 'Poem in Which Nothing Bad Ever Happens to Me.'
Tim MacGabhann (poetry, issue #11)
I'm terrible: I rarely read anything until it's about a year or two old. Otherwise I feel like I'm responding to a marketing campaign or ambient buzz rather than the text itself. I am even worse for recalling shorter pieces, because I tend to leave journals and mags lying around for a while to see what leaps out at me, same as with books etc, but probably on a longer time-scale: that way it's the strange stuff that never becomes a tendency even in the author's own writing — still less in wider currents — that's then able to survive under my attention. This year I reread some old favourites: Munich Airport by Greg Baxter is still my favourite novel of recent times, and I don't think books since have properly reckoned with its possible legacies. Nevertheless, going back on what I said at the start there, because it's not out till next spring, but We Were Young by Niamh Campbell was sensational. I sacked off work for the day and did nothing else but wallow in it when I got my hands on the proof. That decision is going to be one of my favourite memories of this recent trip home. I also went back to Actress by Anne Enright, and I loved every page. I don't know how she does what she does. I don't need to say more, because we all know how good she is.
Elizabeth McGeown (poetry, issue #12)
I read the short story 'Cat Person' in The New Yorker back when everyone was reading it. I enjoyed it well enough. But this year it came back into sharp focus again as this article was published in Slate: Cat Person and Me by Alexis Nowicki which explores autofiction and what happens when the 'auto' isn't your own.
Right up my dyed-black-hair street is 'Becoming Catwoman' by Jessica Traynor from The Bridport Prize anthology 2021. If you like it, she's writing a series of poems about Tim Burton movies and their characters.
I don't know many short stories but having started an MA in Creative Writing in September I've had a crash course in them. One that really stood out to me is the title story from 'Separate Kingdoms' by Valerie Laken. It's not from this year, but that's when I discovered it and discovered that you were allowed to play with form in short stories, that you didn't have to be a poet to be permitted to experiment.
Sue Rainsford (fiction, issue #11)
What A House Can Hold by Laura Gill in The Los Angeles Review.
Michael Naghten Shanks (poetry, issue #11)
A Song About Singularities — Jack Underwood — Granta
The Pineapple Massage — Dean Browne — bath magg
Now & Ever Shall Be — James Conor Patterson — Banshee
Tara Skurtu (poetry, issue #12)
Essay: "The Professor" by Irina Dumitrescu (@irinibus), Longreads
Poem: "twelve minutes a slave" by Matthew E. Henry (@MehPoeting), Ploughshares
Poem: "Jenny Perowski is Ahead of Me in the Grocery Store Line" by Julie Danho (@DanhoJulie), New Ohio Review
Gerard Smyth (poetry, issue #12)
1. This year I finally got around to reading the magisterial biography of John Stanislaus Joyce by John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello and published almost 25 years ago (John Stanislaus Joyce: The Voluminous Life and Genius of James Joyce’s Father). This fascinatingly detailed and engaging account of the extraordinary life and fall from grace of the older Joyce and his family sheds much light on the work of the son and certainly confirms that hardly anything in the Joycean canon was fictional.
2. The Russian poet Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory (translated by Sasha Dugdale ) is a magnificent combination of family lore, Russian history, remembrance and meditation. The whirling sweep of Stepanova’s imagination and narrative power is in the great tradition of Russian literature but is here renewed for the 21st century.
3. The poet Patricia McCarthy’s sequence of pandemic poems, Whose hand would you like to hold, was among the first of what, no doubt, will be many poetic responses to the recent and ongoing crisis caused by the Covid virus. In its calm, elegiac forms, lit up by McCarthy’s lyrical voice and driven by her visionary imagination, the sequence brings together both the personal and the universal, looking to past moments when the world was in the grip of earlier pandemics as well as to current anxieties.
Deirdre Sullivan (I Want To Know That I Will Be Okay)
Jessica Traynor's 'Trouble With Childbirth' from the Spring 2021 edition of the Dublin Review, Sarah Maria Griffin's Tarotscopes for Rogue, and ‘Kintsugi’ by Claire Hennessy in The Lonely Crowd all spoke to me in different ways this year.
Mark Ward (poetry, issue #11)
All poems, just because:
1. Stuart Buck - To the Ants (from Blue The Green Sky)
2. Victoria Kennefick - (M)EAT (from Eat or We Both Starve)
3. Peter Scalpello - Kindness (from the double pamphlet Acting Out/chem & other poems)
