In describing the complex and thought-provoking readings of the SAAG Masthead in 2024, Associate Editor of the South Asian Avant-Garde Iman Iftikhar writes, “Reading in 2024 often felt like fumbling for grounding amidst relentless upheaval. At times, it offered escape and solace. At others, it demanded grappling, interrogation, and a necessary confrontation. Whether through poetry, history, fiction, or essays, our reading this year insisted on engagement: on seeing, feeling, and remembering to live, even when it felt unbearable.
“These reflections do not aim to present a neat list of 2024’s ‘best; books or ‘essential reads.’ Instead, they are fragments of what stayed with us: works that lingered and called us back. Our favorites include a novel set in Baltimore tracing the lives of the Palestinian diaspora, texts that provide much needed clarity on revolutionary politics, a quiet yet searing study of sound and space, some comfort reads, and much more. These books held mirrors to the year and world we lived through, compelling us to look even closer when we could not look away. Here, in the voices of those who read and felt with these works, we share not only our most loved reads of the year but the struggles they opened up for us, allowing us to see anew.”
And of her selected readings in 2024, SAAG Editor Rita Banerjee writes:
“This year, every book I read felt like a knock-out including: Animal by Dorothea Lasky, Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, Letters to a Writer of Color edited by Deepa Anappara and Taymour Soomro, Fling Diction by Frances Canon, Riambel by Priya Hein, Dumb Luck and Other Poems by Christine Kitano, Letter to the Father by Franz Kafka, Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace, Cloud Missives by Kenzie Allen, A Fish Growing Lungs by Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn, and The Psychology of Supremacy by Dwight Turner, among many others. Each book I read challenged and changed my approach to creative writing craft, human psychology, how we process social trauma, and what we can learn from community, as well as demanding systemic change.
One poetry collection that showed me how form could explode on the page, and how polyvocality and the acknowledgement of our ancestors could be conveyed, was JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies. The collection plays with the idea of “Master of Ceremonies” as someone who both entertains and has authority over the stage. With his stutter, Ellis has difficulty pronouncing ‘master’ (which then becomes ‘aster’ in his work). Throughout the collection, Ellis interrogates the notion of master, both as the figurehead who controls the lives of others, often under authoritarian or tyrannical rule, and as a symbol of accomplishment and the mastery of craft.”
Check out the South Asian Avant-Garde‘s 2024 in Reading here.
Rita Banerjee 