The Bosses

This cerebral third collection from Agudelo (Each Chartered Street) aims, with varying results, to document how authority functions from the top down. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, who critique systematic power through the lens of the ultra-personal, Agudelo approaches authority primarily via “the mess of history.” The opening poem, for example, runs through the Roman Republic and John Eliot’s missions among American Indians on the way to defining the anglicized Wampanoag word mugwump, an overzealous middle-manager. There are intimate moments too, though they retain a highbrow sheen, as when Agudelo watches an Amy Winehouse video with his daughter: “My eight year old is not listening/ the baroque high-sass, its gobby fiorituras.” In “The Daddy Poem,” he forgoes Plath and instead details his patriarchal position through invocations of Lacan and King Lear. But this collection’s great strength is also its weakness: Agudelo’s erudition lends his poems a distinct perspective and flow, but it can bog them down in didactic turns. The poems that radiate are those where his acute eye for history meets a wry critique of the present: “Kids,/ up to mischief, I’m sure, the dreadlocky// white boys on a skateboard/ culture jamming here, yarn bombing/ elsewhere.” Despite its slower academic moments, Agudelo’s work is an astute poetic engagement with power. (Nov.)