Uncertain Grace

While often enacting inner dialogues for straw men like ""intellectualism,"" ""empiricism,"" ""estheticism"" and ""humanism,"" Rebecca Wee's debut, Uncertain Grace, is often more concerned with how arguments get pieced together and what the emotional consequences of forms can be than with their actual terms. ""Intarsia,"" whose title is a type of Italian mosaic, collages images from around the world, including Rome, Jerusalem and Thailand, ending with an image of a beggar wearing a shirt of lace that ""sparkles where it's held together with bits of wire, tiny pins."" Another montage poem, ""Graffiti Under Memorial Bridge"" combines slivers of narrative and conversations as means to meditate on the relationship between actions and results. While there is some humor, particularly in the poems ""A Few Words on Penis Envy"" and ""A Conversation,"" the tone here is fairly rarefied, with dramatic sentence fragments gesturing toward the unsayable. ( May 1)