cover image GRAFT

GRAFT

Brian Henry, . . New Issues, $14 (63pp) ISBN 978-1-930974-32-6

Verse magazine and Verse press co-editor enry's two previous books, Astronaut and American Incident , appeared in the U.S. in 2002; each flaunted his skill with verbal disjunction and whimsical cut-up tales. This new book is a departure, having a single subject and a rigorously unified tone. The subject is sex, and the tone is dry, self-punishing and removed. The volume's first half offers a decidedly male perspective on heterosexual sex, from the heat of a first encounter to a long-renewed, occasionally embittered passion. "Your legs will not spread wide enough/ to allow for the loosening," Henry says of one scene; another finds "No part of her not shedding in my mouth." Self-abasement, disgust and highly conflicted poems about sex between men come to the fore in Part II. Though many stanzas can be direct, others inspire a bracing abstraction; sexual encounters and memories occur amid a riverine, chilly landscape, marked by oil drums, "suffering" and "real snow." The most discursive poems suggest the productive influence of Donald Revell; more lyrical segments, such as "Another Cross," combine that influence with C.D. Wright. The last, perhaps best, poems move from "thoughts uncertain of the effect/ they seek" to "the pain/ of skin against skin." Henry asks elsewhere if writing about sex "requires a constant/ violence against specifics/ as desire takes over the mind of the task?" It is a question this volume seems designed to provoke. (Oct.)