Bridled

In her debut collection, Meng attempts to render inner experience by gesturing at the tangible objects of her environment. The work is grounded in concrete imagery—a “mailbox,” “sour cans,” a “rotted bulb of light”—while also being marked by an apparent absence of conflict. The result of the intense focus on interiority is a self bereft of the other, an imaginative landscape where very little stands to be lost or gained. For example, when Meng writes “Lately I’ve longed/ for forest with every/ table leg I see,” she sketches a relationship between interior and exterior, but the larger work does not carry this gesture far enough. The poems often elide what seem to be the heart of the matter: the interactions, relationships, and disappointments that imbue these various bits of material culture and ephemera with substantive meaning. Meng writes, “A final loose lasso of geese flies:/ south, southeast.// Someone sleeps in the next room,/ his breath curt stutters.// Inside I look at a book of mosaics:/ shattered bones recomposed.” Readers glimpse the other’s presence, yet the poem moves quickly back to the speaker’s sprawling emotional topography. This piece seems characteristic of the work as a whole: Meng’s alluring language constitutes a reverie waiting to be “twisted open// into real time.” (Feb.)