The 40 poems in this strong, Juniper Prize–winning debut are obsessed with, and at the same time refuse to acknowledge, dislocation—from history, literature, love, place, yearning and speech itself—with a barrage of verbal explosives. Reimagining such figures as Pol Pot, Mayakovsky, García Márquez and Joseph Cornell, and traveling between places as far-flung as Long Island, Vietnam and West Des Moines, Dumanis, coeditor of the controversial poetry anthology Legitimate Dangers
, restlessly submerges the reader in his perceptions. He buries the soon-to-be-buried in the tumbling inventory of “Today, on the Obituary Channel” (“The self-proclaimed Sultan of Cockfighting / Heir to the throne of Qatar/ Later an interview with his betrothed/ Now stay tuned for a tour of the Providence morgue”). The book is also lush with political conflict and eros: “Swore I knew nothing of/ the Schlieffen Plan, the Bay of Pigs... as she turned to me and ran/ her satin hands over my eyelids, toward my lips./ Knowing the war would never end, we kissed,” In rare moments, sonic tics and play overshadow the matter of the poems, but mostly Dumanis overwhelms with intelligence and emotion. He is certainly a poet to watch. (May)
