So Where Are We? Poems

Poet and attorney Joseph continues where 2007’s Into It left off, observing from inside the bubble a nation at war with itself and with others. “So where are we? The fiery/ avalanche headed right at us—falling,// flailing bodies in midair,” he writes, trying to take stock of the post-9/11 landscape. “What year? Which Southwest Asian war?/ Smoke from infants’ brains// on fire from the phosphorus/ hours after they’re killed, killers// reveling in the horror.” With lawyerly intelligence, Joseph dissects a litany of contemporary horrors related to war, the police state, and economic precarity. His tight, dense, formally consistent, and affectless lyrics state the facts without revealing a subjective stance or emotional involvement: “the question in this Third/ Industrial Revolution is who owns and controls/ the data. That’s what we’re looking at, labor cheap,/ replaceable, self-replicating, marginal, contracted out/ into smaller and smaller units.” For some readers, “to call out fact” won’t be enough, and Joseph’s repeated allusions to a privileged downtown life and love will remind them of the author’s relative inoculation against the worst of the book’s subjects. But for others, the collection’s extraordinary power will lie in bearing witness to the “switchblades then gunshots, police in riot gear,/ media coverage, front page headlines.” (Aug.)