I didn’t understand much from this collection. Though I enjoyed “To My Mother’s Father.” McCrae’s writing requires slow reading and re-reading. I tend to just read through them to find something I can share on my blog.

A sensual, emotional collection, Ama Codjoe’s Bluest Nude delves into sex, grief, and beauty. Her writing is descriptive, provocative, and yet accessible. I understand and love quite a few pieces in here.

Another collection from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author I couldn’t understand. I was just reading words and couldn’t make sense of the poems. My poetry reading is not improving. I love the typesetting though.

Reading Jorie Graham’s collection is like pouring water on a duck’s head. Nothing stuck. Graham is a professor at Harvard University and winner of the Pulitzer Prize; therefore, not understanding her work is my own fault.

Read it but didn’t get it. The collection was hard for me to understand with the exception of “Still Life with SARS-CoV-2”:

and then what
and then
what, what
then

I love her opening poem titled “I Was Minor” and I thought I was in for a treat. Unfortunately, I didn’t get many of her poems from this collection. It’s my own fault—not the author. I am still learning to read poetry.

Leave your phone and your digital devices inside. Pick up John Freeman’s Wind, Tree and head outside. Through the force and beauty of nature, Freeman writes about life, loss, and love through narrative lyric and meditative pulse. My favorite pieces include “Nothing to Declare,” “Windward,” “Icicle,” and “Still.”

In the first part of The Writing of an Hour, Coultas shares her writing process, which is fascinating. I didn’t catch everything in the remaining parts of the collection; therefore, I can’t honestly say much about her work other than I had read through it.

Last year, when Ms. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai announced her forthcoming novel, Dust Child, I immediately pre-ordered it. Having read and loved her debut novel, The Mountains Sing, I expected her new book, in which she spent seven years writing, to be excellent.

Dust Child arrived in my mailbox last Tuesday and I read it every chance I had. The book lived up to my expectations. Ms. Nguyễn is a gifted writer with an ear for language and a heart for humanity. In her stories, she puts the suffering of her characters over the conflicts from all sides. She sheds light on the dust of lives of Amerasians, dark-skinned children in particular, who had to face hatred and discrimination. Although her characters are fictional, I heard similar heartbreaking stories growing up in Việt Nam.

In addition to the devastating consequences, Ms. Nguyễn weaves together the sweet, erotic romance and the cultural references. As what she had done in The Mountains Sings, Ms. Nguyễn incorporated Vietnamese proverbs with her excellent translations in Dust Child. I appreciate both her clear writing style as well as her level-headed approach to the war—all sides are responsible for the human loss and suffering. It’s an engaging, eye-opening, heart-rending read.

Richard Blanco’s How to Love a Country is poetic, poignant, and patriotic. Whether writing about his own history as an immigrant, his own gender identity as gay, his own grief on gun violence, Blanco’s poems are all about America as a work in progress. After reading this collection, I could see why Obama selected Blanco as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet.