'Seeing The Body' by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

'Make Me Rain' by Nikki Giovanni

I have family members and friends whose eyes glaze over, politely, when I mention that I read poetry and love interviewing poets. They’re still stuck in fourth grade with “I think that I shall never see,”  and the impenetrable pages of long-dead Romantics.

Nikki Giovanni’s poems are the antidote to all of that. She writes and rambles and rhymes joyfully about goldfish ponds, blues music and sugar on juicy summer blackberries. She loves to eat and sing and love, and it shows in her work. Her new collection is titled “Make Me Rain.”

My second must-read is a collection by poet and photographer Rachel Eliza Griffiths called “Seeing the Body.”

The poems radiate with the power of witness and a long grief in the wake of her mother’s death. Griffiths began writing and photographing in 2015 following the death of her mother in 2014.  

Listen to what she told Publishers Weekly about those long years:  “Losing my mother forced me into the most difficult transformation of my life.  Each poem drew me further into something I didn’t want to accept, which was that my mother was dead.”

Finally, if you missed my Talking Volumes interview with Claudia Rankine this fall, spend an hour over the holidays with this remarkable thinker and poet.

Her new book, “Just Us: An American Conversation” is deeply personal and refreshingly political, without being polemical. 

She writes about race-freighted interactions at an airport and a friendship endangered by careless privilege.

“White is living within brick and mortar,” she writes, “walling off all others’ loss, exhaustion, aggrieved exposure, dispossessed despair….”

My three must-read collections of poems for 2020 are: Claudia Rankine’s “Just Us,” Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ “Seeing the Body,” and Nikki Giovanni’s “Make Me Rain.”