These days, I’m finding a lot of solace in the poems of Larry Levis. I don’t actually own any copies of his books (which is lame because I should and will eventually), save for a collection of selected poems titled The Selected Levis. I recently returned from a trip to Fresno, CA where I joined my family in a sacred rite (Tso Plig) to witness the releasing of my late mother’s spirit. After six months of grieving her sudden and tragic loss, we bade her spirit one final farewell so that she may finally join our ancestors. It is a strange time in my life right now. Grief has taken me all over the place in terms of literary solace. I have returned to Ocean Vuong’s gorgeous debut Night Sky with Exit Wounds for further perspective on how to handle the continued grief of both the intergenerational trauma in my life and the loss of my mother. 
I’ve clung to the landscapes in Kenji Liu’s Map of an Onion (“…the way we ate the last world. // …Even our dreams can’t go back.”) and to the elegies of Li-Young Lee’s The City in Which I Love You. I recently started Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib’s debut The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, and in light of recent events in America, reading (and having had the pleasure of seeing him read recently) Willis-Abdurraqib’s work couldn’t be more urgent and necessary; here is a poet who is raising both the living and the dead from the comforts and shadows of the city, from the corners of our bedrooms and living rooms, and from the bodies America owns/has never owned/is always owning. What a time to live and rage and to celebrate some of America’s finest and promising voices.