Fear of Description

A winner of the National Poetry Series, the lively second collection from Poppick (The Police) uses randomized lyrics and haibun-inspired prose pieces to tell a coming-of-age story—from graduate school in Iowa City, to the poet’s 30s in Brooklyn. Poppick’s writing is filled to the brim with “the décor of the actual world, which,” the poet emphasizes, “I take great pains not to call ‘the real.’” The book’s three haibun- inspired works chart journeys both physical (to a poetry festival, through an eerie, abandoned property) and emotional (navigating the deaths of acquaintances) and, in doing so, ruminate on topics from the semiotics of Lisa Frank imagery to communion with the dead. Poppick’s penchant for syntactical disorder and oddity creates a giddy state of confusion as the poet’s psycho-emotional state turns and breaks with each line: “The spruce are full of a magnetic, marshal song,” he writes. “Rage is in season.” Perhaps most memorable are the long, multi-section poem “Aries” and the short title poem, wherein “mute life plays, rising to the skin/ To dream this concrete/ Shape we’re in.” Poppick’s sage, anthemic collection memorably explores the journey of millennials. (Oct.)