The Late Parade

Busy, ornate and elaborate, evasive in their sense, yet charged with emotion, the poems of Fitzgerald’s debut could get quick attention: “If my markings were a liberal-minded act/ in this splooge of too-mobled monuments,/ they’d first have to convene at a hospital amphitheatre,” he announces in a poem with a provocative opening: “I didn’t always have this douchebag haircut.” The hyper-contemporary language may seem to ride in Michael Robbins’s tailwind, and yet Fitzgerald’s other modes come off less ironic than erotic, urgent, crowded with declarations, anxious for love, intensely aware of poetry’s past. “Quatrains, peaches and rivers had once/ been the clock of his invariable hours,” one quatrain begins, and even a poem with the unpromising title “Nigerian Spammer” pauses for unlikely welcomes: “Come, friend, zoomorphic as you are,/ Kind to ruins, casually enclosed in space.” Fitzgerald tries almost too hard to remain in and of his own time, and yet his gestures point back to such earlier urban Romantics as Hart Crane (indeed, Fitzgerald runs the @HartCrane Twitter feed). Detractors may wonder how much new substance there is behind Fitzgerald’s surfaces; partisans—who may compare him to Crane, or even to David Foster Wallace—will accept his invitations: “Creep through this room in a dirty gondola// with chimes under level-headed clouds:/ that’s enough, facetiousness aside.” (June)