Lying In

In her searching second collection, Metzger (The Spirit Papers) investigates the unknowable mystery of what it means to be alive, even when life is filled with questions that seem to have no answer. “All my life all I’ve wanted was to be myself/ and someone else,” she writes. That sense of doubleness pervades these pages, which are about selfhood and motherhood, and the responsibility individuals have for their own lives and the lives of those they love, as in the poem “Lying In”: “Before I knew I was in danger/ I did not get up. After,/ when I say how long I lay down/ how can I make you understand it was an order?” These pieces make clear the author’s “sapling doubt” in this “one-room world” as Metzger beautifully, critically, and tenderly weaves life, loss, and love into one, revealing their inextricability in the “voluntary nature of staying alive.” Reminding readers that the “wasted life still carries a self through it,” these honest poems of witness reckon with confusion and heartache. (Mar.)