Wishbone

Share’s third book is primarily about language—its ridges and textures, its tendency to propel the mind forward on its own sound-making. “Please God,” begins one stanza, “no ketchup, catsup, get your hands/ up for only mooseturds, mustards stanky and sweet,/ yaller, suppurating for supper.” In one way, this focus creates a trickster-like subversiveness: many lines comically upend persistent stock phrases in apparent discomfort with inherited speech (“what part/ Of Mañana don’t you understand”). Share also maintains a wide range of reference, with mentions of Jethro Tull and Grand Theft Auto, and indulges in coyly irreverent scatology (“pooping” and “shitting” appear in two opening stanzas). There are highbrow allusions, too (Heidegger, Descartes, Paul Blackburn, Dante, etc.), and certainly some rapturous lyrical gestures—”To an Eye Infection” ends with the doctor’s cure, “a tiny phial/ which I uncap to release/ tiny prescription tears”—yet some poems feel scattershot and glib. One reason is the play with linguistic and poetic history mentioned above—“About suffering he was never wrong, Joe the Plumber”—which is smart when successful, pat when overused. Yet at their best, these poems achieve a moving sense of cosmic desperation, like the book’s title poem, which picks a quarrel with the universe, or the magnificent, elegiac “On Thanksgiving.” (June)