Verisimilitude

""Like omelets/ nations fold,"" writes Tu in this spare and careful debut, as he takes discourses of all sorts--the personal, the lyrical, the global, the doctrinaire, the funny and the earnest--and turns them to reveal their relatedness and competing degrees of relevance. Each of the seven medium-length sequences of this book display different facets of Tu's project. The title section matches the public spectacle of gentrification with the private critique of a disaffected misfit: ""with the installation of cameras/ epistemology is really moot/ ...this push cart your kingdom/ this counter your moat/ the action-hero genre/ and juice bar explosion/ power is frost and tasty/ no one forgot 19 whatever/ but everyone tried."" ""Uneven Development, Uneven Poetics (Simon & Simon)"" takes local, class-based concerns to an international scale, wrapping several complex strands of thought in democratic, almost haiku-like simplicities: ""China Embraces Liberalism!/ consequences live in neighborhoods/ but since this is literature/ I'm interested in the term FOB."" Tu seems to have mastered the very short political poem, subordinating it here to larger structures, and taking cues from the crushed and compressed social codes of writers like Bruce Andrews and Jeff Derksen. But Tu's often lyrical tone of simultaneous disaffection and responsibility is closest to Rodrigo Toscano's exhortative, exasperated Partisans. Both books point the way to a poetics of engagement that embraces as much as it rejects, and cajole readers into picking up the slack. (Nov.)