Queen in Blue

Hemsell’s startling and ecstatic debut situates American citizenship and domestic life in the shifting “whole unknowable cosmos,” rendering marriage, motherhood, and home maintenance in electric, sensory detail. In these 46 lyrical, mostly first-person poems, Hemsell bridges the underworld with the natural world, such that mothers after childbirth “find in our ears the somber phonetics/ of cold black stars and black ripe berries.” Yet, for these speakers, maternal life is a basis for larger, more troubling considerations of the military industrial complex and relative privilege. “Passport” observes how “some bones are/ revealed by ultrasound/ others by sonic/ boom”—and confesses, “All my dreams of war/ involve children./ All my dreams/ of motherhood/ involve war.” In one of four sections, Hemsell pushes Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland into new psychological territory; the title poem finds the Queen of Hearts emerging into reality and “finger[ing] the undergrowth,/ raspberry bushes thorny and/ infinitely wilder than her own/ roses, so cultivated, so restrained.” Hemsell’s highly musical style is at its best in restrained slant rhymes (“See the fragile and freckled egg, the symbiosis of wasp and fig”). Even when grappling with forms of violence, Hemsell’s speakers leave the reader feeling “dead sure/ of the weird beauty,/ planetary and human.” (Mar.)