The Hungriest Stars

The complex and skillful third outing from Salerno (Tributary) features intricate poems tracking the devastating effects of endometriosis. Throughout, Salerno draws gorgeous and bracing parallels between the human and nonhuman worlds: “like the lowly orchid leaving the butterflies and bees out of its own replication entirely,/ my understory stripped clean.” Dandelions provide a way to imagine internal processes (“how gorgeous /and sharp within you the tendrils leeching, the radiant and bitter blooms”), tulips evoke the cervix (“their flushed double ruby cups unfurl”), and the patient movingly admits they “could only watch what was happening to me happen to me.” In counterpoint to these corporeal poems, the collection’s prose poems launch the reader into interstellar orbits and astrophysical musings (“a lustral rippling, extraterrestrial”). The overriding theme of the book may be loss—of organs and tissues, female reproductive capacity, autonomy, essence and possibility—but the poems themselves refuse elegy. Energetic language presses forward through long lines, redacted documentary evidence, and sustained images as if traditional lyric forms could neither contain nor adequately express the poet’s rage toward the medical establishment and received ideas about art and beauty: “They’re// all I can see./ Fucking daffodils./ Fucking daffodils.” Readers will find this unflinching and affecting collection tough to shake. (Oct.)