Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best

The title of Zwart’s ruminative debut refers to epitaphs carved on gravestones. Fittingly, the impulse for unlikely pairings (“odd” and “sad”) pulses throughout these poems, from “the pocks Christmas lights burn/ into a porch rail’s ruff of snow” to the mylar cemetery balloon described as “a silver pita... bleeding helium molecules.” Even joyful metaphors (“every peach,/ a geode”) give way to the underlying tragedy that runs through the collection: the childhood death of the poet’s younger brother. At the heart of the volume is a single powerful image: “my brother’s baldness,/ adding wattage to his eyes.” It becomes clear, as the book progresses, that calamity is inextricably tied to the oddness of the ordinary: “for forty years I have remembered the first night// of Adam’s sickness more than any other thing:/ the strange sauce on my Grandma’s pasta.” While fear of death is never far from these poems, the struggle against it is somewhat relieved by time, the poet’s clean biopsy results, and her love of her children and their creations: “Is it nexterday?/ one used to ask, meaning tomorrow.” Though a few of Zwart’s imaginative leaps feel strained, readers will find these searching and spiritual poems linguistically textured and appealingly direct. (Feb.)