This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from BTBA judge and Greenlight Bookstore bookseller Jarrod Annis. 

Dark, ethereal, and sensuous, Marosa di Giorgio’s prose poems echo the haunted, half-forgotten landscapes of youth. Part meditation, part hallucinatory vision, the poems included in I Remember Nightfall are imbued with a distant strangeness that pulls the reader closer to them, beckoning through their own mystery. This is a book of dim fantasias, where the forgotten and remembered converge, where nature is alive with spirits that play with time to induce a phantasmagoric botany of memory for both the poet and reader.

The entry below is by Jarrod Annis of in Brooklyn, NY.

by Szilárd Borbély, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet (Hungary, New York Review Books)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 54%

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 14%

This was the last collection of poetry completed by Hungarian poet Szilárd Borbély before his untimely death in 2014. Part confession, part correspondence, part phantasmagorical travelogue through scenes of collective cultural trauma, Borbély’s poetry is haunting, melancholic, and tender. These poems reach outward, involving the reader both directly and indirectly in an interior journey that jostles between memory, reflection, correspondence and time.

A sense of ending recurs throughout Berlin – Hamlet—the arrival at an end of all things, the inevitability which pervades Borbély’s poems and lives with the reader long after the book has been closed. It is a space created within the reader that Borbély refers to:

Yes, I could express it simply by saying
that our conversation left in me
a vacant space. Since then, every
day contains this space.

Borbély draws readers through his poems in an unwavering trajectory, yet when we reach the other side, we realize that it was merely a phantom hand guiding us, and we miss it.

The entry below is by Jarrod Annis of in Brooklyn, NY.

by Pierre Reverdy, translated from the French by Ian Seed (France, Wakefield Press)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 77%

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 27%

I will read any book that was written at the behest of a dare from Max Jacob, especially a novel-in-verse by a prose poetry heavyweight like Pierre Reverdy. He seems as mysterious as his poetry. He is there, and he’s not. Reverdy’s is a poetry of absence; someone once said of (I think it was Kenneth Koch), that he wrote about small things, like the shadow of a pin on an apple. That’s true as ever in the novel-length poem that comprises The Thief of Talant, which follows the Thief from his arrival in Paris though his navigation of the avant-garde art circles he frequents, as well as the city itself.

For those accustomed to the heady, image-laden paragraphs of Reverdy’s prose poems, The Thief of Talant comes as something of a surprise. Reverdy was a master of playing with space and language, simultaneously using one to alter the other—a quality that has garnered him a reputation for being notoriously difficult to translate. That capability is on full display throughout The Thief of Talant in Ian Seed’s taut and lonely translation. Reverdy’s language is both dense and minimal, to the point to being abstruse, drifting in aphoristic clusters across the pages, pulling the reader through the space like the titular Thief wandering the endless back streets of Cubist Paris.

The Thief of Talant is a deeply intriguing work bringing to mind a time when the possibilities for merging narrative and verse were open and endless, with Pierre Reverdy pointing steadily ahead.