Material Girl

“Who’ll return New/ York City to its humanity,” asks this spiky, terse, winning debut, and the answer may be Jaramillo herself: in the first half of this two-part book, short, witty poems split the difference between the Brooklyn hipster and the avant-garde, as if Rae Armantrout hailed from the Girls generation: “What There Is To Say About Reality That Has Not Already Been Said” reads (after an epigraph), “It’s totally not that much/ like art.” Other poems almost as brief end up subtler, but no less quotable, riding briefly aloft on their urbane images, then puncturing themselves and their social milieus like lost balloons: “My heart is a cat wearing a Hello/ Kitty costume… I am too dim in/ my own being/ to be present.” The choppy music of these lines stays off-balance, but never sounds forced. In the long title poem, the poet looks from the Rockaways to the Andes and to North Carolina, from “the ancestors’ immaterial substance” to “the off-season/ carnival in the parking lot”; what these parts lack in shape they make up in tone and energy. Fans of Eileen Myles, or of Ariana Reines, will want to take note. Jaramillo’s cool augments her intelligence: she is a skeptic, and a social critic, and a figure for her distressful time, “here without/ the fiction that I is anyone.” (June)