This Is the Homeland

This concise and focused debut from Hickman envisions people as spiritual yet corporeally driven by bodies for which one can find few words. Her sometimes choppy sequences, slim lines, and brief verse-prose hybrids modulate among bird, animal, and insect alter egos. "Every living thing is a hinge," Hickman writes, "and, at the heart of this, our analogy." Hickman sounds up to date with her omissions, her playfulness, and even her adults-only scenes and lines: "William Who Lives" sees a lover as an arthropod or a dreamt monster, "his thousand/ hands grown from his ribbed-for-my-/ pleasure side": "William named my garden New York City. Then shoved me on my knees." Undercurrents, and some titles (such as "Joseph and Mary"), give the characters religious and literary parallels. Hickman's spirits, both low and high, are always listening for their own parallels in the nonhuman world, and most of her best lines come when she finds them: "Your name is strange: Lapwing. You flew./ Seabedabbled lapwing, because you know." Hickman's sentences possess both the vivid mystery and the sometimes bedeviling curtness of Saskia Hamilton or even Jean Valentine. Passages shine, but the strength lies in the program of the whole: "I want to dream/ just this just/ a private rising/ towards an otherwise/ animal refrain." (May)