Flood Bloom

“This is not about being rescued,” Cabrera begins in her debut, an elegant collection that “imagines our life in miniature,” where, like dominos, “buildings teeter/ each time someone lets go a deep sigh.” Like the staged worlds of dioramas, reality for Cabrera is at once quaint and suspect, tender and full of doubt: “Hello, love, this is a diorama/ and I’m making a salad like all of the others.” This voice is delightfully varied while of a piece “We’re all rattling around/ in our own bone box.” Cabrera is confident and humble, distinctly postmodern in her hyperawareness—poking fun at Eliot, she writes, “A fog set in before breakfast, nothing like a cat”—but her voice is tinged with the metaphysical (“spots brighten in me to contradict/ a brightness in the fruit”) and even the romantic (“I don’t care how out of fashion/ the moon/ becomes”). She writes that “the real danger is in losing/ sight of ourselves,” but, with a keen and humorous eye, Cabrera doesn’t let us—or herself—get away with losing sight. “I worry sometimes that I’m going too far,” she writes, “but then I always bring you along like a safety net.” (Feb.)