Blue Hanuman

Larkin's first full-length collection since her Audre Lourde Award-winning My Body: New and Selected Poems radiates with control and brevity. Larkin's attractive, enigmatic poems hover near a precipice, electrically charged with nascent tension, a "mute globe of held breath" delicately suspended. Divided into four sections, the poems are short, ekphrastic, or riddle-like explorations of the natural world. "Legs Tipped with Small Claws," the title poem of her 2012 chapbook (Argos Books), describes a fishing spider: dangerous, sexy, and undoubtedly feminine. "Sometimes it's her mate/ she liquefies to drink him inside out,/ then cleans each of her velvet legs." Larkin doesn't rest at mere beauty, she digs deeper, probing at disturbances; the "movement-in-stillness" of an old photograph, or the "lush rage-orange" of a Francis Bacon painting. As for Hanuman, the collections eponymous monkey god: "his blueblack tail flicks upward,/ its dark tip a paintbrush loaded blue." Themes of motherhood are threaded throughout, muddying the boundaries between animal and human concepts of nurture and climaxing in the book's final section of the book. Larkin's haunting lines encapsulate the feeling of reading this collection: "You are inside me now, as inside you/ your mother: your shame-belly born from hers,/ my grief-lungs from yours, eyes of no mercy." (Aug.)