These Days of Candy

López (The Yearning Feed), a sort of psychedelic stenographer, writes what feels like a puckish manifesto from inside a dream in this shape-shifting collection. “To avoid bad luck hum the first verse of the greatest poem of all time,” he writes, “though use discretion, because many will disagree with your choice and attempt to cut you.” Most of López’s cross-genre work displays a storytelling quality, recalling jokes and anti-jokes, parables and anti-parables. Whether López is working through lyric poetry or playlist-fueled verse dramas (which comprise the majority of this volume) or prose experiments, each piece remains stealthily comic, with biting turns and bursts of imagination that recall such figures as Leonora Carrington and Gabriel García Márquez. Each piece slides on a fabulist tilt: a person comes to grips with possibly being a Muppet, a boy with an apple on his head dies of hunger, and “the angel of Marlboro Smoke Road” emerges from “its coral reef like a small, ornate necktie.” The greatest act of prestidigitation that López achieves is maintaining a big heart throughout his work: “You’re a real imagination. That’s what your grandmother always said, a real imagination, mijito. Now keep stenographing your big heart away because the world needs to change with beauty in mind.” López’s absorbing hybrid forms are full of humor, ingenuity, and sly politics. (Nov.)